Launch a Local Campaign

If you are interested in opening up specific contracts or demanding that your government to demonstrate their commitment to open contracting by endorsing the open contracting principles and/or passing legislation, we invite you to join our community of open contracting campaigners fighting to open up government contracts all over the world. Find out how you can launch a local or national Stop Secret Contracts Campaign below!

Step 1: Find a Target for your Campaign

The first step to launching a successful local campaign is to find an appropriate target.
Work with your local community to determine whether you want to open a specific contract or lobby your government to endorse the Open Contracting Global Principles and make a commitment to open up all public contracts.
Start a discussion with your local community to decide who is the most appropriate target for your campaign – the mayor, the prime minister, or your local representative?

Step 2: Launch Your Campaign

Work with the community to write the campaign teaser and launch the campaign on change.org. Your campaign description should answer the following questions:

• What has been the negative impact of secret contacts in your country, city or region?
• How will local citizens benefit from open contracting?
• What is the clear ask and who is the target of the campaign?

Step 3: Join the Stop Secret Contracts Mailing List

Join our Stop Secret Contracts mailing list to discuss campaign strategies and open contracting with other local campaigners.

Step 4: Submit Your Local Campaign to Stop Secret Contracts

Win your Local Campaign

Step 1: Promote Campaign

Once you have launched the campaign, it is essential to develop a social media strategy in order to promote the campaign beyond your network. Here are a few suggestions of ways that you can promote your campaign:

• Talk to local Change.org chapter to promote campaign on the front page and in e-mail footers
  Invite Facebook friends and twitter followers to Share campaign
• Create a local campaign team (10-20 people that are involved very much and help to promote) and schedule regular calls to discuss campaign updates and opportunities for engagement.
• Create an event on Facebook and invite everyone to join
• Post regular updates about the campaign progress on various local and international mailing lists
• Produce shareable images with overlaying text about both the campaign and the negative impact of secret contracting.
• Produce both blog posts and articles for local news outlets about the secret contracting and the campaign.

Step 2: Engagement Experiments

Experiment with innovative ways to increase engagement:

• Produce Images with Overlaying Text Challenge – Pictures are worth 1,000 words and on social media pictures have been proven to greatly increase the rate or likes, shares and retweets. Produce images with overlaying
• Freedom of Information Requests. Challenge your campaign supports to each submit on freedom of information request for a contract you are trying to open up and have them subsequently share their responses online.