The Good Campaign Guide:

Winning planning consents in an era of localism bears more than a passing resemblance to a political campaign…

Ten years ago PR consultants were lucky to be invited to a project team meeting, and if they did they might appear at the bottom of the agenda, somewhere below Drainage and Foul Water issues. These days most team meetings, and the focus of most clients, are dominated by the politics of a site and the views of local residents and their representatives, rather than planners or planning policy. PR and engagement has quite literally been creeping up the agenda.

Again, ten years ago one of the great challenges for firms like MPC was to persuade clients to avoid public meetings, a forum where they could only come off badly. These days we try to encourage clients to engage communities far beyond holding public exhibitions. 

As those able to come to a public exhibition are self-selecting and rarely representative of the community at large, the challenge for everyone involved in development is how to find and engage local people who will support development.  This could include: First time buyers, those seeking to move out of accommodation, local businesses as well as stakeholders who could gain via community benefits associated with development.

We see increasingly effective opposition campaigns focusing on negative and emotional issues – supermarkets ‘tearing the heart’ out of local communities, new housing ‘destroying our green spaces’. In response we have to campaign more effectively, being positive, but highlighting the emotional reasons why we want development – ‘homes’ not ‘units’, ‘parks for local people’ not ‘green buffer zones’. We should go further by engaging those who want to see development through proper campaigns designed to show politicians, the media and the wider community their strength of feeling. 

In May, Meeting Place Communications is launching its own Good Campaign Guide. 

This is designed to show a range of ways in which effective campaign techniques can be applied to the planning process. Using the experiences of a range of political and single issue campaigners, we have brought together a series of approaches that provide those of us in favour of change the tools to support our projects.

In the era of localism, hands in the air, shows of community strength, the number of phone calls to a local councillor or the number of letters on a council website will count as much as any planning policy that applies to your site.

Whatever our professional backgrounds, we all need to be campaigners now. 

For more information about the upcoming launch events or for an invitation please call Ruth on 01225 422243