PROPOSAL FOR THE UPCOMING DUTCH PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION
Prepared for chairman Frederiksen, the GreenRight Party
19 October 2019
HIGHLY PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Introduction
Dear chairman Frederiksen,
First and foremost, our team would like to thank you for giving us the honour of being involved in the GreenRight Party’s campaign. We have collated our proposed campaign plan and hope that the party and yourself find it inspiring.
Our campaign plan is robust, aggressive and most of all, guaranteed to provide streamline campaigning and effective use of your resources. We have separated the campaign plan into core areas of strategy;
· Fundraising
· Development and deployment of media strategy
· Management and response of crises
· Management of the opposition
· Training candidates and campaign team
· Multi-channel voter reach
· Integrated social media approach
The campaign plan has been devised based on our research into how small populist parties have parachuted into parliaments across Europe with little to no traditional methods. As seen in your own country, Geert Wilders has a sizeable stronghold in the Dutch parliament, all on the back of a ten-point manifesto and cunning campaign plan.
We have extracted the most successful tactics from populist campaigns to give your party the edge it needs over the traditional political parties. You may even beat Wilders at his own game.
This plan is entirely flexible, our dedicated team will be on hand to tailor this campaign plan to your party’s personal taste. We are more than ready to help you utilise these tactics to take on the Dutch political system. Our campaign team can train your party to be the fresh, dynamic party we know it to be, so let us showcase that to the Dutch electorate.
Yours sincerely,
The Campaign Team
Fundraising
Fundraising will occur through three crucial elements.
- Approaching your supporters
- Appealing to the big-leagues
Obtaining support from online
Approaching your supporters
A core principle at our company is – If you do not ask, you do not get. The simplicity of campaigning is to ask your supporters for donations. Some supporters simply need that encouraging nod towards the party coffers. Our research has indicated that some supporters did not realise they could support their party financially. The strategy will consist of;
Ø Gaining more commitment from existing members – locking in monthly donations for the price of (insert item here).
Ø Establish and organise donation collection from a dedicated committee within the party.
Ø Appeals to new supporters through canvassing at organised events e.g. target students at university events. Professionals at conferences or work expositions.
Appealing to the big-leagues
Appealing to the more traditional in the party, the input of big donors is still key to party finance. We need to find a core group of individuals, maybe you already have them, who can provide some stable income of donations to the party. It is imperative that they are kept engaged, motivated and inspired by your campaign. Nothing in life comes for free!
Ø We will provide these members with exclusive access to the party.
Ø They shall be kept involved in every stage of the campaign, should they wish to be included.
Ø Emulating a crowdfunding framework, we will give incentives for large one-time donations from members. The bigger the donation, the bigger the incentive. E.g. tickets to party conference or audience with party leader.
Ø Canvassing these powerful, wealthy individuals requires thorough research and strategy. We must respect these donors enough to adopt a personal approach, acknowledge their business or motivation in supporting us and thank them but the fight for a green, free market does not come cheap and therefore we need their help.
Attaining Support from Online
Campaign Operations
1. Preparing the media team
We really need to make a positive media coverage, because this is going to make the biggest impact on the voters. This is making more impact than rallies, more than billboards, more than posters, more than the adds we going to use on radio or television or actually more than any other part of the campaign. Keep in mind that GreenRight still needs to do all those things, because it also adds up to a positive media coverage. It is important that media coverage is the main focus of the campaign operations. It’s important that the campaign and the campaign team learn how to best take advantage of all the free media at use.
To help accomplish this goal, for the campaign we will set up a what we call an official “war room”. This war room is going to be a singular location where all the information flows are centralized. Here the staff will be able to monitor all the input from all different media, oppositions research and the online interactivity. In the war room we need to set up a media coverage system wherein the staff members can track everything what is being said on the television, in newspapers, on the radio and on the internet as well. This system will also alarms the team and the key decision makers in our campaign when there pressing topics. At the moment the media monitoring bring us up to speed with what’s happening, then we can craft a concise and appropriate response in accourde with the “message box”.
The strength of this campaign especially with the “war room” has to be the ability to quickly and effectively anticipate on developing stories in the media and that our own narrative dominates the coverage. This is what we call the “rapid response”. “Rapid response” will happen everyday, day in, day out. This means 24 hours a day, working, analyzing and anticipating on what is happening. In mind we have to keep one basic and fundamental rule: speed kills. We want to answer quick, effective and appropriate but most importantly true to our own beliefs. We don’t want to respond, because responding is important. We want to respond with thought.
We need to train the “war room” staff on how to respond in the most effective way. This can be trough press releases, the direct contact with journalists, press conferences to forcefully state the GreenRight position, or events held on-site where the news is unfolding.
Another important topic is that the chairman always has an advisor at his side, that is going to be one of us. We are there to make sure that you are the person that is always in control of the discussion. Because another one of our fundamental rules is: Whoever controls what the fight is about and controls the terms of the discussion, always wins.
We will also assist the communication teams through the training of spokespersons. At all times there has to be a military discipline within the party’s communicators and candidates, because everybody has state the same message. We of course help you with speech writing and debate and tv interview preparation. This to make sure all the speeches touch upon the main themes from our research and agreed upon strategy.
2. Opposition research
We will guide your team as they compile facts, details, and information that can help us respond to developments in the campaign in an impactful way. Given the fast-moving pace of the news cycle, it is critical to be able to immediately search for any available statistics and competing information so that we can keep up a steady pace of attack. For example, we n
eed to have a full and detailed understanding of how all the establishment parties failed to meet the needs of citizens.
The current political coalition, both conservative right and progressive center keep failing (according to the UN and the Dutch court → associate ourselves and hijack these media buzzes to jump into the public eye ) to reach the required effort to reach the Paris agreement. Not only does this impact your ‘’green’’ electorate but sets the future entrepreneurial climate in danger if foreign innovations and companies gain the competitive advantage due to more favorable environmental entrepreneurial policies. This is the core theme for an attack on the establishment parties. The GreenRight stands for a better climate, a better economy and a brighter future for the Netherlands.
This will be a hotly-contested battle and the war for public opinion will be intense; that’s why we need for the “Opp” team to be able to anticipate attacks against you or your party and provide data to pre-emptively defend your own position.
3. Campaign strategy
Conflict above Consensus:
The recent surge of new political have always run into conflict with the traditional political spectrum, this is not a populist characteristic persé as all political parties arose out of discontent of the the status quo. As such, the GreenRight is ought to choose conflict above consensus. For every topic that is up for discussion, the GreenRight has to have, in case of agreement with other parties, a sharper explanation or expression of their point of view and iterate that only that sense they are in agreement with the statements.
People above the elite – big polluting business:
The GreenRight has to find a scapegoat against which it can distance itself to show the people what it really stands for. Big polluting businesses are putting at risk the livelihoods of good law abiding citizens. Civil liberties and the free market are the cornerstone of a prosperous nation, but the state has the obligation to protect and preserve the people, or else, the future is not guaranteed. By standing against pollution at the cost of our environment the GreenRight stands for human rights and fights for an ecosystem in which profit does not harm the planet and thus our national security.
Leadership:
The Netherlands has been in dyer need of leadership. This is what the GreenRight is supposed to offer to the people. The United nations have stressed that no nation is close to reaching the necessary actions to uphold the paris agreement. Two Dutch courts have ruled against the state in cases where citizens accused the Dutch government of not upholding its promises to fight climate change and reach the necessary CO2 reduction for a safe future. Despite of these rulings the Government is still appealing. The right spectrum in Dutch politics is failing to uphold the responsibilities of the state : serve and protect its citizens by holding on to old beliefs on climate change and economic opportunities. The GreenRight needs to be that voice and profile itself as a leader by associating with these movements to gain momentum and jump in the public eye.
During the whole campaign we need to speak for the people and with the voice of the people. The people have to be spoken to as a homogeneous group with the same interests and ideas, they must be treated as one big community. The people never did anything wrong. They have their opinion and the governments, till now, refused to listen to them. Everybody know what is best for themselves and we know what is best for the people as well. We have to speak for them because nobody else does that.
Dominate instead of debate:
It is important that the discourse in the Netherlands changes to our discourse. People have to stop seeing sustainable and green initiatives as challenging and costly. Instead, we need to change that into that sustainable and green initiatives are investment opportunities and brings changes to be innovative and go above and beyond what we ever thought what was possible. It is also important to show that socialism is not the way to go and that liberalism is. We need to show people that excessive social protection will slow down innovation and sustainable markets, whilst sustaining old polluting businesses and thus present a threat to our futures. Thus stimulating flexible and free markets will create the jobs of the future and innovations that will protect instead of harm our environment. Environmental standards have time and time again proven to stimulate innovation, create jobs and reduce our environmental impact. The GreenRight has to convince the voters that the need for a large scale approach will do just that to the Dutch economy, competitiveness and environment.
4. Social Media
In the “war room” we have one of our most valuable teams at play the “social media experts”. The “social media experts” will obviously be sitting in the “war room” but the “social media experts” have got their own objective, to own the social media on every front at every time of the day. It is necessary to have the social media team in the “War Room” so the teams can intensely interact with each other. It is very important to have the teams all the teams in the same room, because 1. they feel as one big campaign team and 2. at all times the both teams now what the other teams are doing. This is important because we have to stand as one. Our research has shown that the different kinds of social media platforms for populist parties has had a rise and big impact on the elections in the western world. We have seen that populist parties use the social media platform especially in the last couple of years in a effective way. The growth in the role of social media is been seen, trough for example, Trump, Brexit, Italian Five Star Movement, Austrians People’s Party, and so forth. Because of this importance we decided to put a whole team of “social media experts” on this part of the team.
While most social media teams coordinate official media streams, we can help you channel their activities by developing integrated official and officious social media activities, harmonising facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram, etc. and simultaneously build op officious presences, smearing the opposition’s failures and raising the merits of the GreenRight. A key part of our offering is the ability to link social media with overall campaign messaging and using it to influence voters disaffected by traditional media sources.
We are going to use the social media in different ways and with different kinds of strategies. By using social media we show the voters we are there for them, because social media is the voice of the people. Through the whole social media campaign we will attract media attention to sustainability, climate change and the impact for that on our voters. We will make an overkill on info, including fake news, half truths and facts combined to really show what is going on with the world and the Netherlands and that we really need to step up now, because otherwise it is to late.
Videos
Everyday we have to make at least one vlog, which we are going to upload on youtube. This vlog has to be on the “message of the day”. These “messages of the day” obviously appear from the morning headlines and stories. We have to incorporate in this vlog, what what the message of the is and how we see this. These vlogs have to be at maximum 2 minutes. This to keep it interesting for everybody to see. The other vlogs we are going to make are vlogs on what we are doing in the field. Flyering, talking to people etc. Keep the information flowing. We also going to make vlogs on our standpoints and try to explain why the GreenRights themes are so important and telling why other parties are just not right. We use this vlogs, to keep everyone informed of what we think and doing, but also try to at
tract the younger voter.
When there is a press conference, tv interview or a television campaign. We obviously going to take the most appealing parts out of this, edit is into a strong video with a strong message. If possible, in the light of the “message of the day”.
Via Twitter we going to release all our statements. The social media experts come up with statements all day long. We have to keep the information flow going. On Twitter we will release everything we are doing at the moment. We will live tweet at press conferences, live tweet when we are in the field, etcetera. Besides that, we will show in tweets where other parties going wrong, when their saying the wrong things, answer on that in a quick and sometimes humoristic response. With always keeping our own message in minds, we are the liberal voice for sustainability. Trough tweets we will show how much impact climate change can have on economy and on personal lives of citizens. We are going to make world problems, our problems, so people will see the actual things going on in the world as our own responsibility. Voters need to be aware of everything that’s going on in the world and make them feel like they are responsible for it and actually can do something about it. We have to play emotions with facts and more emotions. Our whole strategie is coming together through twitter, the GreenRight revolution starts here. In short we will use twitter to state all that we think and we lay down our themes on twitter, so this can be picked up by original media in this way portray our message.
The official facebook page of the GreenRight party is going to be a bit more sophisticated than the twitter page. Here we will post all the media streams about us, and make a little comment on them. We will release our official statements on here. We will post the videos we made, and post videos concerning sustainability. The facebook platform is also going to be used for open discussions with the voters, always trying to keep it in our message in our way of thinking and convince everyone the progressive liberal way is the way to go and follow. On facebook we will place 2 articles a day, this to keep it clear for everybody to scroll through. Only place more then 2 articles when we really think it’s necessary. We make this big contrast between facebook and twitter, because we want to approach and convince as many people as possible that we are worth trusting an worth voting for.
This is a medium really underestimated by lots of political parties. Why? We don’t know. Facebook is actually on it’s return while instragram is well on it’s way to be the most popular social medium next to youtube. So, of course we are going to use instagram in our campaign. By posting pictures of everything we are doing. We share stories from green initiatives to tell people this is the way to go. We share pictures of what could happen if we are not changing anything. The just keep on feeding the instagram feed and post as much as possible on here. The younger generation uses instagram for their information nowadays, so we have to feed them the information, our information.
Memes
With memes we can above and beyond. We will create memes and post them throughout the campaign. We can most them on our own twitter account, but we can also post theme as response on other posts. With the memes we want to ridicule the opinions of others and to ridicule what they did by humor. It is important to not only be factual about anything, just make humor out of it and people will see for themselves what other parties are doing. With this type of humor we try to show how bizarre the ideas are from other parties. We will also send memes which portray our message. These memes will mostly play on events happening and on emotions. This to bind voters to our cause.
Grassroots organizations
We need to find grassroots organizations in the Netherlands and world wide which are in some way connected to the GreenRights Party’s main themes. There is a need that they feel really connected with our cause. In this way they will vouch for the GreenRight party. Through our really broad themes we try make one way connection with different organizations. It is in our greatest advantage if we have as much organizations that feel an affiliation with our goals. In this way we have a basis of grassroots organizations who will for free advertise for us and make our name known to the people.
Unofficial
The GreenRight needs a “Troll Army”. Together, we need to set up a account like 4chan. From where we can easily attack the sitting government and the opposition. It has to be secretly done, with no connection to the GreenRight party. But it has to be done in the mind of the GreenRight party. Themes that has to be attacked in the current political environment are the social left-wing economic systems, rules rules rules? and of course the right on their no sustainability policy.
5. Building Organisational Capacity
In order for your campaign to succeed, the party will need unity within its ranks. In our experience in similar situations, one of the main contributors to achieving and preserving this unity and cohesion is to standardize the campaign and the party’s official messages centrally.
This means that the leadership of the party must provide the resources to activists that will ensure discipline and consistency throughout the country. We must make sure that all activists are well trained, that candidates and spokespersons are prepared for media appearances, and that messaging is coherent.
To help accomplish this, we will create a schedule that includes weekly themes
(e.g. Climate change, civil liberties, the green economy, free trade, etc.) so that the field activities help to project the message of change that you offer. This requires full integration of the party
functionaries in each region so that the “tour” of the campaign plays a key part in the strategic activity.
As mentioned previously, we advocate the “War Room” structure. This is a single location where the flow of information is centralized, just like in a military operation. But instead of the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Intelligence, and Propaganda, we have the components of the campaign: Media Monitoring, Research, PR, Social Media, Fundraising, Advertising, & Events.
Media Monitoring:
A staff that tracks everything being said on TV, radio, internet, and newspapers
Sends reports 4x/day plus urgent updates.
The is our Reconnaissance – without it, we cannot act strategically.
Opposition Research
A team, usually with experience in government functions, that compiles facts, details, and statistics that add details to campaign themes.
On a daily basis, conducts searches for any available information to make media talking points more sharp.
Anticipates attacks against The GreenRight and provides data to pre-emptively defend our own position and discredit the establishment parties.
PR
The most traditional aspect – communicating directly with journalists
Rule #1: “Speed Kills” – if we respond faster than our opponents, we will crush them
Rule #2: “Whoever controls the fight, wins” – our PR messages must always steer the stories to our own territory and force the others to fight on our terms : if we cannot steer the conversation to our hand we create a new one, most populist parties stick to their main themes and do not go into details when in unfamiliar territories.
Social Media
Create an integrated social media platform, harmonizing facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram, etc.
Link social media with overall campaign messaging
“Officious campaign” – things we cannot say officially to attack opponents.
Events
Create a schedule for the f
inal few weeks of the campaign, covering all regions and issues
Themes, e.g. Climate change, civil liberties, the green economy, free trade, etc.
One key event for each day and a specific media goal
Here is the main advantage: the “War Room” structure will help The GreenRight to gain more control over the media coverage of the campaign. If we have discipline and we create good content for journalists, they will write about us – and that will create the impression that we are a threat and capable of attracting enough disaffected voters from the major parties to win.
At the same time, more media activity means more content for fundraising appeals. If we can show a steady stream of progress in gaining exposure for green liberal ideals, we can attract repeat donors, because people want to be associated with success and feel that their donation enables victory.
For a high-stakes situation like this one, the main area of focus should be strategic messaging through the “War Room”.
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The above are the basic elements of the world-class political advisory and campaign strategy package that we offer. It would be our pleasure to contribute to your succes
Our Team
Didier Rwema served as a critical advisor in the 2018 municipal elections in Amsterdam. He has played a leading role in multiple grassroot campaigns and social media actions during these elections
In addition to his campaign experience he is a public administration and organisation scientist with a track record in European funded Erasmus+ policy research projects for the Amsterdam based Rainbow foundation.
With his vast reaching network and impeccable track record, he is fit to steer a variety of clients at all levels, handling challenges ranging from PR and media to volunteer coordination.
Mr. Rwema has brought these skills to the international arena as well. He has studied and observed political evolutions in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. He has also participated in UN conferences regarding sustainable trade developments, some of which being the UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) of April 2018 in Geneva and the Change the World MUN of March 2017 in the UN headquarters in New York.
Jeroen van Wilpen currently serves as a social media expert for bol.com. Preparing and answering the company’s facebook feeds. Done by humor, but also with clear and decent answers. In preparing the facebook feeds he knows exactly what people like and what triggers them, with never actually going over boundaries, but walking on the fine line never falling over it.
Besides that, mr. Van Wilpen, has worked on strategies for fundraising for bigger and smaller events. This fundraising is done through convincing business, private and corporate, to donate money for the upcoming events and to sell them the story that in the end they are the winners by donating this money. Trough his years of fundraising for different events he has become a expert in raising money.
With his interests for international and local politics, green and liberal views, he is a real asset to our team. He is new at the front of political campaigning, but this man is young, vibrant and full of new ideas which is going to make this campaign a success. He is not only working for the GreenRight, he lives and breathes the GreenRight. With his sustainable,green and liberal views in combination with his expertise on social media, he will be leading the social media team to new heights The Netherlands have never seen.