5-stage impact pathway

Years of campaign experience has taught Breakthrough that every campaign goes five stages. Understanding that pathway can help you understand where you are on your campaigning journey and what tactics you might need to consider to move your campaign forward.

1. CATALYSE - At the first stage, you connect with others who share your experience of injustice, build your belief to take action together and start planning your strategy. At this stage, focusing on developing your ‘asks’ - making sure you can communicate what you want to change and why it matters.
   
2. LAUNCH - Now you want to share your story and asks with others, to attract people that will support your campaign. You might speak out in the media, do a creative stunt, look for other allies in your community. At this stage focus on building support with others who are also affected and build a narrative to the wider public about why the change matters.
   
3. SURGE - By now you’re more established, maybe you’ve got some media coverage, or signed up your first supporters. Now you need a moment to really “breakthrough” and secure widespread attention. Think about creative ways to get attention or moments in the news that give you a change to talk about your issue. It helps to break your ‘asks’ into small wins (e.g. meeting decision makers, signing up 100 supporters, doing a stunt). These small wins help
   to build momentum for your campaign and grow their supporter base.
   
4. SUSTAIN - Now you’ve broken through and people are talking about your campaign, you might have met with decision makers. But to secure change you need to keep up the momentum - keeping the issue on the agenda and building a network of champions who will support you to keep moving your campaign forward. You want to focus on secure meetings with decision-makers, build your audience online, keep energy up with supporters by building community, as well as stacking up the small wins to keep the pressure up on them, and embedding their issue on the national agenda through a drumbeat of media stories.
   
5. TRANSFORM – You’ve campaigned hard and finally you’ve got a commitment for change. Now you need to keep going to negotiate the final outcome. Now you need to navigate through policy processes to ensure that decision-makers fulfil their commitments. You can keep up supporter actions and media engagement to keep public pressure for change.

Breakthrough’s Accelerator programme supports campaigners on their journey to bring change for themselves and their communities. Sometimes that looks like helping a community group to secure their first piece of national press. For others it looks like making submissions to parliamentary select committees. There’s no right way to make change, there’s just the journey, and understanding that journey is half the battle. Breakthrough’s five-stage campaign pathway exists to help us, and now you, to do that.