How do you allocate roles effectively if you have a team of 20 campaigners for a year-long, transnational, multilingual campaign? Or, how do you design roles for maximum impact with just a few campaigners? Constructing and organizing a European citizens' initiative campaign team is a challenging task that many Initiatives struggle with. In a recent ECI Forum webinar, the organisers of My Voice My Choice and PsychedeliCare initiatives shared their successful strategies and demonstrated the vital roles national teams, communication tools, feedback loops, and advocacy leads play in realizing organizational goals.
Watch the webinar on ECI Campaign Success: Structures, Strategies & Tips
ECI team dynamics: national, regional, and EU levels
ECI campaigns often divide their staff into national teams and further sub-teams. These groups/sub-teams can have different functions. National teams tailor the campaign to a particular country. They monitor political developments in that country and adapt the campaign to the national or regional context. In practice, this means identifying local potential supporters, funders or social media influencers worth collaborating with. National teams can also contribute to more technical and managerial duties, including translation work and tailoring campaign messages at national, regional, or local levels.
A frequently overlooked task at both national and EU levels is the use of an expert group to provide scientific or legal arguments to justify the initiative. Alternatively, a group may organise volunteers internationally by putting volunteers from different countries into the same group, creating a sense of cross-border solidarity.
How teams are organised: centralised, networked, or hybrid approaches
How are ECI teams usually organised? Some teams operate with a central office in one country, while others distribute leadership and coordination across multiple locations, allowing for more flexibility. Team structures can be highly dependent on the scale and strategy of the campaign. Some ECIs rely on a core team that oversees strategy and communication, while national teams operate semi-independently, adapting campaign efforts to their specific context. Others function as coalitions, bringing together multiple organisations under a shared vision, each contributing resources and networks while maintaining some autonomy. Regardless of structure, all ECI campaigns require strong coordination between national and EU-level teams to ensure strategic alignment and efficiency.
How messaging tools keep teams on track
Having online meetings is not enough to manage a team, as not everyone can always attend them, especially in an international project spanning more than one time zone. To address this issue, ECI teams often use a messaging tool, such as WhatsApp, to create digital spaces and communities for specific discussions that members and volunteers can follow flexibly. These communities naturally reflect the campaign’s internal structure, making roles, responsibilities, and tasks clearer for team members. Even members from different countries can understand the division of labour and communicate quickly with distant partners. Perhaps more useful is the ability to break down tasks by national teams within communities, for example, a group for action day coordination in Belgium and another for efforts in Spain. Those with managerial duties can follow the real-time functioning of teams and provide timely guidance.
The structure of a WhatsApp (or another messaging tool) community is formed based on specific communication needs. PsychedeliCare has one national coordinator per national team, all in a single messaging group for European-level coordination. My Voice My Choice extensively relies on digital volunteers who are organised into messaging groups. These groups have proved indispensable for rapid communication, enabling volunteers to collaborate in real-time, foster a sense of cross-border solidarity, coordinate action days, adapt content to evolving political situations, and mobilise for on-the-ground signature collection at short notice.
My Voice My Choice has already collected one million signatures; however, they are continuing signature collection to reach the recommended additional 20%. Communicating this to the public, who were aware of the one-million goal, has proven to be a challenge. This underscores the importance of carefully framing messaging from the start to allow for later adjustments if needed. Coordination in such situations is crucial and requires effective communication tools. My Voice My Choice, therefore, uses its WhatsApp community to reach out to national teams. Through these national teams, they aim to secure the final signatures by looking further at the grassroots level, engaging smaller and more local NGOs, activists, events and signature-gathering locations.
However, outreach efforts can be difficult at the beginning of the campaign as well. Successful signature collection is not guaranteed at the start, so grassroots engagement could instead be the starting point. PsychedeliCare, a quite new campaign, is developing a festival-based strategy to boost participation by reaching supporters at large public events. At later stages, momentum may carry the campaign over thresholds, making outreach at higher levels more likely to produce desired results. All in all, outreach efforts may evolve as campaigns progress.
Engage the public: ECI outreach strategies that deliver
While internal coordination is crucial, a campaign’s success also depends on reaching the public. Diversifying social media presence ensures visibility beyond campaign members and expands outreach to new audiences. Following the 2024 U.S. elections, My Voice My Choice faced shadow-banning on X/Twitter, forcing the campaign to expand onto alternative platforms such as Bluesky, Tumblr, and Pinterest. The lesson is clear: no campaign should rely on a single social media platform, as algorithms may change unfavourably, even due to political shifts. In short: be everywhere!
Hiring experienced communicators early saves time and improves efficiency. PsychedeliCare found that onboarding untrained campaigners often slowed progress, diverting resources away from messaging and outreach. Experienced communication professionals can assist in shaping a communication strategy, which should be established before the signature gathering begins. PsychedeliCare also highlighted the value of having scientific experts within the team or even a dedicated science team, which can be particularly beneficial when addressing highly debated topics.
My Voice My Choice found it effective to draft a post for one platform and then modify it for others. PsychedeliCare prioritised accessibility by translating campaign materials into 15 languages and ensuring national teams had social media accounts in their respective languages. National teams also benefit from “communication packages,” which include ready-to-distribute leaflets, pamphlets, and messages (or their drafts) that a local partner organisation can easily use. These packages simplify the onboarding process for new partners.
Partners are important for social media, as they can share campaign content. However, partner organisations are sometimes less effective at dissemination than individual social media influencers. While the social media of established organisations provides credibility, individual influencers often engage audiences in a more personal, relatable manner. Both My Voice My Choice and PsychedeliCare actively monitored engagement on their posts and identified influencers with a significant number of followers. WhatsApp groups for national teams proved especially valuable in identifying nationally relevant influencers. For both campaigns, like-minded influencers created their own content, such as sharing personal stories and explaining their support for the ECIs. This allowed campaign messages to spread organically beyond the campaign team’s direct control.
From webinar insights to action
Running a successful ECI requires good planning and effective communication. It is crucial to anticipate potential challenges while also preparing to seize opportunities when circumstances are favourable. The team should be effectively divided, and online communities offer a great way to achieve this. A solid strategy should be in place, and plans should be adjusted based on input from national and expert teams. Communication is the key to securing partners, funders, and, ultimately, signatures.
Contributors
Veli-Valtteri LehtonenVeli-Valtteri Lehtonen is the European Programme Intern at Democracy International e.V. and the Lead Coordinator for the Student Network on Future Democracy. He has experience in planning and organising international democracy-related events and coordinating collaborative projects. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in political science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
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