You Need to Campaign, But Where do You Start?
Ollie Kasper-Hope
Providing affordable and impactful capacity across HE | CEO at Alkhemy | Wellbeing, Advice & Student Engagement | Project Mgmt| Learning & Development | Embed into your team | Interim Support
When we talk about "campaigns," there’s often a bit of confusion about what we mean. Too often, the word is used to describe awareness days, weeks, or even months. While, if ran strategically, these initiatives have can have value; whether for health promotion, education, or sparking conversation - they aren’t true campaigning.
Campaigning, at its heart, is about driving measurable change or halting negative shifts. It’s about influencing decisions, shifting mindsets, and delivering tangible outcomes. So how do we make campaigns that truly change the student experience? Let me introduce you to LUCIE—our campaigning model at Alkhemy.
LUCIE: A Framework for Real Student Change
LUCIE stands for Listen, Understand, Change, Implement, Evaluate. It’s the structure we use to teach and support effective campaigns. It ensures that any effort to improve the student experience is strategic, impactful, and, most importantly, measurable. Let’s break it down.
Listen and Understand: The Foundations of a Campaign
Common sense might suggest that the first step in improving the student experience is understanding it. Yet, time and again, I see aspiring campaigners skip this. They identify an issue, jump into planning, and before long, they’re rolling out a solution. The result? Misguided efforts that often miss the mark.
The key to effective campaigns is in the listening. And to listen well, we need to identify where valuable insights come from—what we call Student Experience Sources (SES).?
These are diverse channels that give us direct access to students’ lived realities. Some SES examples include:
Listening isn’t just about collecting data; it’s about actively seeking out the voices of students who may be overlooked. And it’s essential to gather both quantitative and qualitative data - understanding both how many students are impacted by an issue and how deeply it affects them.
Broad and Strong: Identifying the Campaign Focus
Once we’ve listened, the next step is understanding the breadth and strength of the issue:
By answering these questions, we can identify the real areas for change. These insights help us focus our efforts on the right issues, ensuring we’re addressing the most significant problems within the student body.
When creating an effective campaign, it’s essential to discern between issues that are broadly experienced by the student population and those that are strongly felt by specific groups or individuals. Understanding this distinction helps us allocate resources, time, and energy towards campaigns that have the potential to create meaningful impact.
Broadly Experienced Issues: The Widespread Challenges
Broad issues affect a significant portion of the student body. These are often systemic problems that, while not always deeply personal, are felt by a large number of students. Common examples could include financial pressures like tuition hikes, lack of adequate campus facilities, or long waiting times for mental health services.
To gauge the breadth of an issue, it’s important to examine:
Identifying broad issues involves analysing multiple Student Experience Sources (SES) such as surveys, focus groups, or even organic discussions on social media platforms like university confession pages. Often, these issues will appear across several different sources, making it easier to see that they affect a large number of students. For these campaigns, the challenge often lies in coordinating efforts that meet the needs of a diverse and large student body, making sure that solutions are scalable and universally beneficial.
Strongly Felt Issues: The Deep, Personal Struggles
Strongly felt issues, on the other hand, might only impact a smaller group of students, but the impact is profound. These are the deeply personal challenges that may not be experienced by the wider student body but are crucial to specific communities. For instance, students from marginalised backgrounds may face unique forms of discrimination, or students with disabilities might struggle with inadequate accessibility across campus.
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When assessing how strongly an issue is felt, consider:
The key to addressing strongly felt issues is ensuring that the depth of the concern is recognised, even if it doesn’t appear as frequently in broader sources. This often requires digging deeper into qualitative data—testimonies, detailed case studies, and direct interviews with affected students.
Broad and Strong: The Ideal Campaign Focus
The ideal campaign focuses on issues that are both broadly and strongly experienced. These are the golden opportunities for real change, as they reflect problems that affect a large number of students and have a significant impact on their experience. However, not every issue will meet both criteria, and that’s okay. It’s about prioritising effectively based on the context of your student population.
Prioritising Campaign Issues: A Practical Approach
Once you’ve identified both broad and strong issues, the next step is to prioritise. Not every issue can be tackled simultaneously, so how do you decide where to focus your efforts??
Here’s a simple method to help with this process:
By weighing these factors, you can start to form a clearer picture of which issues deserve your immediate attention and which may require a more long-term strategy.
Broad and Strong for Maximum Impact
The combination of broad and strong factors is what makes a campaign truly powerful. Whether you’re addressing a widespread concern or a deeply felt issue, understanding the scope and intensity of the problem allows you to design campaigns that are both strategic and empathetic. And ultimately, that’s what campaigning is about—making real, measurable change in students’ lives, based on a deep understanding of their experiences
Power Mapping: Understanding Who Influences Change
Once you’ve identified the issue, it’s time to understand the context—who can help you make change happen? Every campaign has key players—individuals or groups who have the power to drive or block change. It’s critical to identify these people and understand their perspectives on the issue. Power mapping is a valuable tool here, helping you to chart out who influences what, and how you can build relationships to advocate for your cause.
Think about the committees, working groups, and organisations that shape decisions. But beyond these entities are the people—the decision-makers who ultimately influence outcomes. Understanding their motivations and concerns will help you shape your campaign to resonate with them.
From Listening to Action
Once we’ve listened, identified the issues, and mapped out the landscape, we can move towards change. This is the heart of any campaign—the moment when all the insights and understanding come together to drive real action. But before we rush into the "doing" phase, it’s essential to have a clear vision of what success looks like. What change are we seeking? And what impact do we want it to have?
“Change” the next step in the LUCIE framework, and it’s where campaigns start to take tangible shape. In our next post, we’ll dive into how to translate your understanding into real change - turning your listening into measurable outcomes.
Effective campaigning isn’t about noise; it’s about understanding. It’s about listening to the right voices, identifying the right issues, and working with the right people to make real change happen. LUCIE helps guide that process, ensuring that every campaign is built on a foundation of listening and understanding, leading to impactful, lasting change.
Are you ready to campaign for change? Let’s listen first.