 This is all about the Ponta de Piedade campaign that we ran with John Silver from February to April 2021. Ponta de Piedade is one of Portugal's natural beauties, the cliffs in Lagos in the south of Portugal, a town of about 30,000 people. Let me show you another picture. This is precisely the issue that John Silver wrote to us about. He said, look, I live in this fantastic place. I used to go walking on these cliffs as a child and I returned to my town after working abroad to find that part of this land had been fenced off by private interests who were seeking to develop it, including public parts of the land, which means blocking access to public visitors. Furthermore, there's only one restaurant in the area. It's got a monopoly. How about we get together and make a sustainable plan for the area and try to push the mayor to develop this area sustainably because it's a bit like the Wild West? The first thing we did after picking this campaign was we simplified and focused the issue and the ultimate goal. With this campaign, it was really important and in fact, with any campaign, this is the critical part. We took the issue and we tried to isolate the part that we could make progress on in four weeks. What is the part where we could actually win something? So we reworked the issue into this, which is basically what I've told you. Lovely area, but now part of the land has been fenced off by private interests, both public and private parts of the land have been fenced off. It would destroy the beauty of the area. And the ultimate goal, what we mean here is the thing that if it happened, you could put your tools down and not think about this anymore. It's very important to be able to say when would we stop the campaign? By doing this, we actually made the whole planning of the campaign much simpler. And then we took this ultimate goal and we broke it down into three objectives, three demands. Hey, Mr. Mayor, remove the fences to ensure safe access to the cliffs, withdraw the development plans that are going to screw up the area, we think, because nobody knew what these development plans were. And three, ask the community what they think about how the area should be developed and factor that in to future development plans for the area. Now you'll notice that these three demands, they all have the same target. That's the municipality. So although John had told us about this restaurant with monopolistic license and private developers, we focused only on what we could ask of the municipality because we've only got four weeks and we don't want to be firing in all directions. We want to have one target, one person or one group of people that if they said yes, we could say, okay, we've met that demand. And that made everything much, much, much simpler. This is a preview of what actually ended up happening as a result of our campaign. The municipality said they would remove the fences. They didn't withdraw the development plans, but they published the plans on their website and they turned out to be not that bad. In fact, something that John and his colleagues could live with. And the last thing the municipality said no to a public consultation so far. But as a result of our intervention with Campaign Accelerator, John's campaign is in a very good shape to actually be able to continue pushing for that if that's what John wants to do. Tactics, how did we achieve that? How did we go from having these three demands to having half of them met basically? Well, there were lots of ways that we could have approached this. Could have been a lobbying campaign, for example, where we could have quietly had meetings with the mayor and designed nice letters that only he would see, or we could have organized a big protest or street march or something. But we started by looking at this. What are the pressure points of those are pressure points, incidentally, reflexology. What are the pressure points of the municipality? Like, what are the things that would actually make them sit up and take notice, make the mayor sit up and take notice? And that's, we concluded their public image, the desire to keep their constituents happy, their voters, and to be seen to be keeping their constituents happy. So therefore, how would we push those pressure points? We thought we could get a headline that looks like this. In the local media that people in Lagos read, there are lots of quite influential people living in Lagos. It's quite a wealthy area. It's quite touristic. There are people with holiday houses. There are lots of expats. So we thought that if there was a kind of wealth of media coverage in local media that said leading citizens of Lagos appeal to the mayor to save these cliffs, then that might make him go, okay, I think I've got to take this seriously because this is my voting base and these are my people that I need to keep happy and be seen to be keeping happy. So how do we get the headline? Well, this is how we were aiming to get it. We'll have a drone video, a video of the area, which tells the story of what we want and what's at stake. We'll have an open letter that we will ask people to sign, hopefully leading citizens as well and reach out to specific influential citizens in the area to see if they would put their name on this. And then we'll have a handover event where we'll go to the mayor and we'll print the open letter with hopefully thousands and thousands of signatures and we'll have a press release around it and we'll do some media pitching. So we'll tell media to be there and this is what's happening. And we'll also do some parallel PR activities to keep momentum going, so pushing things out on social media. So these are all our ideas and hopefully this would lead to this headline. So the drone video, we created this drone video, I won't show you now but it's linked on our site and everything. We created this by going on YouTube, searching for drone footage of the Ponta de Pilar de Cliffs and asking the creators if we could please use it and then we knitted it together into 57 seconds with some subtitles and some emotional music and suddenly we've got something there which actually tells the whole story in video form. We pushed that out through DM's network on social media, we put it on our site, John put that on the Facebook page of the association that he created to have a legal weight with the municipality for this campaign and that became a quick way that people could look at it in one minute to understand what's going on and what's at stake. The open letter on the site of John's association, he created with a platform called Mosello, just a very simple form where we've got the video, we've got this open letter to the mayor which says we're a group of citizens that believe in the natural beauty of Lagos, we're very concerned about these developments and we are asking for these three things, the three demands I showed you earlier and crucially we lowered the friction to fill out the form, we asked them for their name, we asked them for their email and we asked them for an identity document number so that we could prove that these were all legitimate people not just zombie people that we'd added, we asked them for their occupation because we wanted to create the impression that remember leading citizens of Lagos so we were hoping that we'd get some important sounding people and we asked them for a message which turned out to be very beneficial because that gave us quotes to put in the press release and use elsewhere as I'll show you and then with this form we put it out through social media and as I said our team together with John and his team they pitched influential people that they could identify they'd go on instagram see who's putting posts about the cliffs who's tweeted about the cliffs etc which important people are living in the area for example the boxer Conor McGregor he had a holiday house there so we were trying to reach out to him celebrities are all on twitter and instagram then supporting PR activities to keep the ball rolling with the campaign and to keep interest in it and to create material so that after campaign accelerated team was no longer working with the campaign it would have material to further the campaign goals so there were three main things there was an interview with John Nadia who was able to go down to interview John right there in front of the cliffs there's John speaking and it was a 10 minute video but John was able to give his personal story so it was very authentic and an interesting look at why is this guy doing this campaign then there was an article on our website that John wrote and we edited which has a link to the open letter to the video everything was in there as well so there was some written content and then John took these quotes which i thought was a really nice idea took these quotes that people giving us through the form and put them as graphics you can see and that provided content to update the facebook page of the association the facebook page of the campaign so that made it look like there were things going on and it showed people that were following hey there's community interest in this and then there was the handover events John would go to Lagos town hall handover a printed copy to the mayor of the letters we wrote the press release Nadia pitched it to local regional and national media which was fantastic but she had really good contacts there already there and invited them to the action and of course we asked local dm25 members to the event and that's it so what happened what was the result well i'll tell you about the results of the tactics first more than 500 people signed the open letter including portuguese celebrities that's Rita Blanco she's a well known actress from the area Dino de Santiago who is a national fame but from the area again these were the results of the team approaching these people directly they gave us quotes that we could also use in the press release which made it look like hey big people are calling for this to actually happen so you better listen up mr mayor and most of the other signatories these 500 signatories were living in Lagos the list included nice sounding occupations lawyers business executives teachers university professors even retired members of Lagos city council actually signed the letter so that gave substance to the word leading in the headline of the press release we've got 20 pieces of positive coverage in regional media and two in national media the regional hits are very significant because this is a local campaign and those were the outlets that were most likely to speak to the constituents of the mayor and most of the coverage used this all important headline leading citizens of Lagos appeal to the mayor to save the cliffs john spoke with several of the journalists directly i think there were four interviews and his personal story came through as well so we were able to push the angle of citizen activism which is very important for stimulating activism generally a week before the handover event the mayor invited john to a meeting and the municipality gave the campaign a preliminary response which was that they were open to removing the fences and so we were able to update the press release to say that we'd already had a kind of early victory with the campaign and this helped it to generate traction at the handover event the mayor attended in person you saw his photo with john earlier in fact the municipality took the event so seriously that they put out their own press release trying co-opt our our event our action from our side 15 people attended no media attended but it was enough and also we got to raise the profile of the m25 in portugal we positioned john in the media as an example of good local activism and we helped the campaign to be in good shape for the future with lots of quotes video material media coverage etc but most importantly it's those things it's the fact that the original campaign goals the original three objectives roughly half of them were met because all these tactics we always talk about tactics but that's just sort of heat and light in order to generate something and most importantly the mayor committed he gave a date to say look we're going to remove these fences from the public part of the clips he made a public commitment so now the campaign has something to push for he published on the website of the municipality the plans and the public learned what the plans were and that they were not that damaging in fact that the municipality intended to create board walks around the area and there was some private development but it was the kind of private development that john on the campaign could live with it wasn't some horrendous resort or something the public consultation they didn't bite yet on that but the campaign is well positioned to push for that in the future if it needs to so what worked and why about this and i'm nearly done here because i know i've been talking for ages what worked i think the critical thing with this is that the plan that we made made sense and that john and the team executed it really well what we did in the beginning by slimming it down and focusing on only this part we could actually win and by designing a headline and working to achieve that headline everything became very simple everything we were doing was in service of this one goal of getting that headline and that was what really nailed it but also of course john lived in the area he was there some other people that applied for that same campaign accelerate around they were applying to do things where they were not physically present so it would have been all online and that made a big difference he was able to build a connection with the municipality and hand over the open lector in person and he did have the the time and the means to see this through but again i don't think that is the critical factor here because anyone with that plan and executing it to the plan would have been able to get the same result just it may have taken longer on our side it was great that we had two portuguese speakers david castro our colleague was fantastic at putting the video together he's portuguese and nadio obviously was there physically in person which made a big difference the fact that she had media skills was very important so anyone interested in doing local campaigns brush up on your media skills the critical thing though is working to generate a headline and ensuring that all our tactics were in service of those goals that we'd agreed upfront what didn't work our open letter did not get a very high number of signatures we were hoping for thousands we'd pushed it out through dm25's network and people didn't sign it basically i think probably because dm25 is a transnational organization this is a local issue it seems like small potatoes for the kinds of things that dm25 is wrestling with also the movement doesn't have a very good presence in portugal but i think it could now that we've actually done something important in portugal another thing that didn't work was that the handover event could have been better attended i mean 15 people wasn't bad for a town the size of lagos but it could have been better the weather also wasn't very good covid was a factor and lastly we were pitching for international media coverage which would have been nice because of the expats and would have given the campaign perhaps some coverage to show this was a serious weighty campaign but we failed totally to get international media coverage i think because of our own internal organization so closing thoughts i'm personally very proud of this i think it shows that campaign accelerator works we've only done two cycles of campaign accelerator so far and already it's making a difference we've created a template for future actions and i think that's that's really valuable and certainly we've learned a lot from it we did get lucky that the plan developments were not as bad as we'd actually feared and the headline that we were aiming for which was save ponte de piedade that became hyperbolic in the end it was not a question of saving the cliffs it was a question of making sure that there was transparency on behalf of the mayor and that is it so it was a fantastic experience any of you guys are interested in in doing your own campaigns i think you could get some ideas and inspiration from this and please do apply for the next campaign accelerator cycle if grassroots actions are your thing because i think this has revolutionary capability it sounds like a small thing like just doing something local but if it succeeds we could scale it up we could do it in multiple cities whatever it is and it could be seriously impactful