On Friday December 2nd there was a conference call between all of the provincial Green Party Leaders, Johan Hamels the GPC Executive Director, and MP Elizabeth May, the national Leader.
The purpose of the call was to establish a framework for cooperation on a national basis and a sharing of both information and resources in light of the financial crunch affecting all of the parties.
All provinces, with the sole exception of Newfoundland, and the Yukon Territories have registered parties. Alberta is in the throes of re-establishing itself after a dormancy of two years, and Newfoundland is in its infancy stage of coming together.
Interestingly, all leaders spoke of identical issues and the top three boil down to what I have been calling the 3M campaign: Membership, Money and Media. All three are symbiotic; if you have any one you get the other two. The trick is to discover which one to start with to get the best results in the shortest amount of time.
Most of us will pick Media every time. It is the most attractive and at the same time excruciatingly inaccessible, and for small organizations, difficult to control the message. Consequently the public message about us is repeatedly delivered by our opponents and we are characterized as commie-hippie-tree huggers trying to save some species of fruit fly nobody has ever heard about. The mainstream media (MSM) only call us when there is an environmental story. They do not print our press releases and they continually frame us as a single issue fringe party.
So for the most part we ignore the MSM and work the online social media circuit, with some varying degrees of success. The problem here is that we are most often preaching to the converted and not broadening our base of support.
So…how do we work around this quandary? We, as party leaders, have agreed to a national information and resource sharing network. It will start off slowly, as all things do, but hopefully will pick up momentum.
Here are some ideas that we threw around and will hopefully come to fruition with some effort on our part.
· Members to be seen as members of all levels of the Green Party within Canada (research legal privacy issues involved). This is done in most other jurisdictions.
· Share platforms, share press/communications for multi-level issues
· BGM – should be a joint statement from all Canadian Green Parties
· Share Grimes database provincially and municipally
· Share phone canvassers with all levels
· Mobilize members through website communications with multi-levels
· Build our lists, share our lists better – lists are everything
· Press release templates sent out by GPC for use by others, as in during the federal election
· Link all provincial and national websites and cross-post.
Most of this sounds like common sense stuff and should have been done for several years. Well, part of the maturing process is learning from one’s mistakes. I will personally push for the implementation of these ideas and I will update on our success.
Our next conference call will be in mid-January and we will be making this a monthly meeting.
