Seriousness and urgency - reflections from nine years leading @EndLonelinessUK

I leave my role as the founding Director of the Campaign to End Loneliness at the end of July 2019, and this is the first of a series of blogs that reflects on my nine years here.

Campaigns expert, @MartinBrookes, recently posed three questions that all charities should ask themselves (based on Extinction Rebellion’s work so far - in his own blog):

1. Is the problem you are addressing serious and urgent?
2. Is the response of society inadequate, allowing the problem to persist and perhaps get worse?
3. Is your response to this problem adequate and likely to lead to sufficient change quickly enough?

Before we launched, loneliness was not seen as serious or urgent for policy makers, the media or most of the places that it could have been supported. Back then, our long-term aims were:

• Make loneliness and isolation more visible
• Share designing and evaluation of services to show the positive impact that working to end loneliness has
• Enthuse members of the public to take small steps to help others and themselves to end loneliness
• Create an aspirational vision alongside practical new actions with a wide range of partners working together to end loneliness

All with one member of staff and a budget of about ￡20,000 (for the first year – our head count didn’t rise above 3 FTE for our first 6 years).

I was studying an MBA with the Open University at the time, and it helped to stand aside, reflect and draw on a number of touchstones of strategic thinking, including:

1. We needed to link our strategy to our situation – we were a start-up (as Michael Watkins has said in his book First 90 Days) yet we could already build on a positional advantage we had gathered from all of our founding stakeholders: four passionate, dedicated and ambitious CEOs (@JanetMorrisonUK, @paullewiscann1, @StephenBBurke, @LynneBerry1) some from household name charities - who were already working on loneliness but were more determined than ever to do more for the millions of lonely older people across the UK; a cohort of thumpingly significant social researchers; and a heavy sprinkling of visionary yet flexible funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
2. Stakeholder analysis helped me come up to speed with this new set of contacts and negotiate some of the barriers we had to overcome including bringing relatively conservative older-age charities and very conservative researchers into a “serious and urgent” mind-set. They knew loneliness was serious of course, but qualified the reasons and arguments. Which is not necessarily the way to inspire broader awareness, action, or urgency. And we knew we needed to snowball our supporters - isolation and loneliness were already being acted upon by a wide range of not for profit organisations, mostly working at the front line and primarily (but not solely) small and local. We needed to be seen to add value to what they were already doing and bring them with us - the Campaign to End Loneliness already had a potential cohort of supporters. Yet their view on how to attract attention to this issue differed vastly from other close stakeholders. Most people thought government was the last place to expect action from following the new coalition government at Westminster while some older people’s groups were openly appalled at the prospect of working alongside government.
3. We also needed to have “a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and a set of coherent actions” as Brookes quoted in his blog from Richard Rumelt’s book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. Our ego-less founding partners were inspired by a clarion call to action in a 2007 Guardian article by Rabbi Julia Neuberger, exhorting the ageing sector to "get our heads together to make a difference". This coupled with our small team and budget propelled us to work in radical collaboration – collaborating for the issue not for the furtherance of our organisation itself. This led to creating a lot of space for the issue by pioneering and agitating for others to fill with their own solutions, and letting a thousand flowers bloom out there on this issue – championing the work of others. Another of our guiding policies was to be our evidence-based – and our strong links with academics have continued. The set of coherent actions was to come later…
4. We needed to shift the focus, the language, understanding and the positioning of the issue of loneliness. We needed to reframe the issue, as described in Chris Rose’s website Campaign Strategy. A major barrier en-route to a recognition of seriousness: Loneliness was a subject that people derided and set aside. My first stint on Woman’s Hour with Jenni Murray led to her laughing at my suggestion that loneliness harmed our health. She wasn’t alone back in 2011. Ensuring there is the right framing for your issue and solution is a classic “setting sail” task for anyone aiming to create social change. “What you need to do is link loneliness with early death” – was the advice I went with, from a trusted communications advisor about two months into the job. Now the health links of loneliness are widely understood and are being built upon by wider and more nuanced framings for the issue.

Reframing and stakeholder management is a constant balancing act. This last approach risked pushing most of our original supporters away. But reframing loneliness as a health threat did sow the seed for increased awareness of the seriousness of the issue. It didn’t though provide the nation-wide urgency – which was to come much, much later for loneliness.

So, what we did back at our launch was very much just the beginning and it took us a good six months just to start to address only half of the first question posed by Martin Brookes above. As one of my management group wrote in his celebration card to me after the Campaign’s launch on 1 February 2011, “now the hard work really begins”. And as @Sue_Tibballs, CEO of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation said in a recent tweet: “declaring an emergency is a strategy that can only be used sparsely. Loses force fast. And of course has to be backed with detail. It’s an exhortation designed to generate heat. But need the more detailed plan once issue is bubbling”.

We hadn’t yet proposed a detailed plan or set of coherent actions – and were nowhere near the issue bubbling. Working to reframe the issue back in 2011 was just the start of a marathon which is not yet complete.