[0:00]out the way. We're going to start off this afternoon with a little bit of a change to the program. Um we're going to be talking about outreach. One thing that was coming up as we were kind of going around all the conversations earlier about designing the plans that are now on the wall is this kind of need for consistency. This need to have an absolute like backbone of something we do regularly, consistently and we know it helps us get closer towards our goal. And that thing, for some of the most successful campaigns, whether it's been passing motions at a student union level, whether it's been opening a vegan coffee machine, opening a vegan canteen. has been ruthless dedication to good outreach. This has formed the absolute pillar of campaigns that have gone on to be really, really successful and continuing to be successful. Now, in my opinion, there is one person in PBU who is the best outreacher, and his name is Kevin. He is from he's from the University of Uppsala, um, who you heard about earlier, their campaign. Um, I saw his workshop on outreach at the Nordic Summer camp that we had that some of you were at a few weeks ago and it blew me away. It was incredible the insane dedication to detail that Kevin has. that he can take someone who's approaching it just to take a bit of free food and get them walking out, going to a social the next week and becoming a member of the up shop campaign. As I say, consistency is key and this is something that we can all learn from. Now, the reason we were delayed is because Kevin happened to get bit by a tick a few minutes ago. So a round of applause for Kevin to battle through getting his tick taken out and be like, no, I'm coming, I'm doing the workshop. Nothing else is happening.
[1:42]Thank you, thank you. Oh, how close do I need the microphone? Pretty close. Cool. So, thank you Nathan for that. Um, as he mentioned today, we are going to be talking about outreach and outreach is so fundamental to so many things, right? Um, at the campaign we have an amazing team of so many people, we do so many social events. Those of you that are here from the pavilion can attest to how hectic our schedule is, right? Um, over the next few months we are going to be doing four or five events every single week and one of those events that we're always doing is outreach. And if there is only one event that we were doing per week, it would be that outreach. Because it's so connected to everything else. It's connected to mobilization, it's connected to getting the resource needed to get those events. Again, event beget members and members beget events. It is just a cycle and you have to start somewhere and very often the place that you start after you do this really fundamental research is outreach. Uh, and so today what we're going to do is we're going to walk through pretty systematically. Four things that you can do at outreach to move towards those wins. And you know, when we started the campaign in and started doing outreach, it went shockingly shit. I mean, we spent three, four hours at certain camps and we would get three or four signatures. It's garbage. And I mean at University, we have was it eight main campuses, right? We don't have one nice central location. And within just a few, you know, months of of adapting and changing what we were doing and seeing what was working and you know, really talking to people, talking to people at outreach about what they thought was doing was working. Uh, we we we transformed our campaign massively. I mean within, you know, a few months, we'd spent one hour at a campaign and we had 10, 20 times the number of signatures. And did we do something fundamentally different? No, but we followed these four steps, which you can apply and you can modify it at your university and give you something really, really concrete so that you can get people signing petitions. And now of course, winning is good for the sake of winning. We we we want those wins. We want to implement a 100% plant-based system. But also, you need people in your team to be motivated, right? And if you do outreach and you stand there for three, four hours and it's your first time doing outreach and you're a little bit nervous or very, very nervous as as most of us are. And you get three or four signatures, it feels horrible. But if you go there and every person you're speaking to you have a great conversation and 80% of the people you're speaking to sign your petition, it feels so, so good. It is so massively empowering. So hopefully, what you get out of today is those of you that have done outreach, get better at outreach. And those of you that have never done outreach or that are still very nervous about doing outreach come out of it, thinking actually, shit, I know what to do, we're going to have some massive successes. So, if I grab a pen and I write on both both the boards very quickly, step one, what do you do without reach comes way before you're actually at the table, way before the actual day, and that is preparation. Now, the way that I want to run this is fairly interactively. So I have my notes. I said certain things I want to talk about, but what do we need to do before we actually do outreach and raise your hands. What do we need to think about? How do we how do we plan an effective outreach session? Okay, knowing important facts, good. Now, this is going to sound a little bit silly. But if you control the narrative from the beginning of your outreach, if you can drop a few important facts, but importantly, win them over on the emotion, that is how you're going to get the signatures. So, a lot of you have have have probably approached outreach and you just spit 10 facts at someone. And what happens they get bored after the third facts. Yeah, this percentage of emissions comes from animal agriculture. Okay. Fuck does that mean, right? So you need the facts so that you're credible. You need the facts so that someone doesn't call you out on not knowing the facts. But the facts aren't going to win you the petition signature, right? And so we'll talk about how you control the narrative, we'll talk about how you get them to agree. But yes, you need to know some sort of fundamental facts and hopefully, right? You need to know how to uh respond the criticism of the campaign because you will have people that criticize you and yes you need facts. Now, bear in mind when you do outreach it's never just one person at the table. It's very rarely just one person at the table. It's often a group of friends or or multiple people. And so having facts and being able to respond to the criticisms of one person, even if you don't win them over, sets a really good example for the other people, right? So it's not just the person you're speaking to. It's the entire sort of vibe of of the group. Yes, okay, you need some facts. Good. What else do you need? Yes.
[6:33]Yes, good. There are some really fundamental logistics. Where are we going to do outreach? Really, really important. Find a really busy place, right? For some universities you have a singular campus and you have a main entrance, that is the place that you are doing outreach. For other places, you have maybe a subway station or a bus station where a bunch of students get off, that is the place that you do outreach. Perhaps you have a canteen, lots of people are going to, that is the place that you do outreach. So think about the physical location that your table is at. Good. What else do you need?
[7:08]Outreach material, excellent. And in this box I have some outreach material. So we're going to get there in a second. Um, so someone over there talked about place, also think about time. This depends on your university, but lunch is an excellent time, right? Everyone's coming out, no one's got class usually between 12 and 1:00. Talk to people, they have free time, talk to people between classes. Don't show up at 9:00 in the morning on a Monday. Students don't go to class at 9:00 in the morning on a Monday. Right? Don't show up last thing on a Friday. People want to go home, people want to go to a club. Go there, right? Go there at a time when there's actually students in that particular place, right? Um, the worst outreach session that I think I ever had, wasn't one of these times where you had three or four signatures, we had zero because we went to a campus and realized, oh shit, there is zero classes this day at this campus. That was horrible. Don't do that. Um, good. There are some small logistical things, book it, plenty in advance, share to the team, right? Obviously, uh, you need people there. Um, how do you get people manning the table, right? Because if you have one person, if it's just me at the table,
[8:29]it's not very inviting. There's no community, there's no group here, right? Again, perceptions matter so, so much. The difference between having one person and two people, three people, is huge for multiple reasons. One is is is this vibe, right? But also, students come out in waves. You come out of a class, you've got 20 students coming out of the class. What are you going to do? Speak to 20 people? Really meaningfully? Probably not. But if you have two, three, four people, it's much more manageable. And then half an hour there's no students, right? Because everyone's fucked off back to class or everyone's eating their food. So, really important that you have enough people at the table. And again, especially when you're starting and everyone's worried about outreach, how do you get your group? People from your campaign to the table. Yes.
[9:17]Good. Run and outreach workshop. Do something like this, have some some some training, some practice. Good. But you do outreach workshop. You're still a bit nervous. What do you do? You post in your WhatsApp channel or your Facebook chat or whatever. You say, hey, to the 50 people in the chat. Do you want to come to to outreach? And what happens? You get two people coming to outreach, if, if that. What happened to the other 48 people, right? We we all have this problem. What do we need to do, Ben? You ask him directly, uh, yes, story forization is I'm a very important person and I'm asking you to do something very important. Good, exactly. So I'm guilty of this. I'm in so many chats where people say, hey, do you want to come to this event? Yeah, kind of. Um, I can't really be bothered there, I'm not going to put it in my my calendar. Oh, I'll go if it's convenient. It's never convenient. I'll never go. But if they talk to me directly, if they at the very least send me a message saying, hey Kevin, last time we met up, you said I don't know, you were going to spend some time with family. Hope you had a really nice time on that trip. We've got outreach next week. I really want you to come. This is really important, right? There's a much higher chance that I'm going to come. Someone calls me and does that exact same conversation. There's an even higher chance that I'm going to come, right? So we kind of need to start operating a bit like call centers sometimes, right? It seems a bit systematic, it seems a bit manipulative. But know about the people in your campaign, form social connections with them, right? I think and Harley's going to have an awesome workshop about mobilization later, so I won't go into too much details, details, but if you have friendships and you have meaningful tasks, you are going to get people getting involved in what you do. Outreach is a meaningful task. So what's missing? It's that friendships, reach out to them, make them feel important because they are important, right? Again, the difference between one person at the table and three people is fucking huge. So, okay, we have preparation. We've got most of that, uh, out of the way. Um, good. Okay. We had physical outreach material. Obviously, we have a table. Usually, you can get that from your university. Sometimes not bring a table. Cool. What else do you need? What goes on the table? Banner. Excellent. So, in my box of stuff, we have a banner. If you haven't painted a banner, paint a banner. I can't open my box.
[11:46]Oops. Good. Now, now we have a banner. What else do we need? Fliers. Okay. So, because this was last minute, I only have these fliers, but you'll have something like this on your table. Here's another hot take. Whilst you want fliers on your table, they're crap. I mean, they're absolutely dog shit. If you just give out fliers to people passing by and say, hey, we're plant-based universities, we're a really cool environmental organization, read a little bit about us. There's a QR code on the back, sign our petition, no one's going to sign your fucking petition. You will have so many people reading it after the end of your outreach, they're going to be fliers all over the campus. Cool. Yeah, you exist. Now what, right? There is no, there's no real ask. There's no real communication. There's no real friendship, right? So you need something more. Now, don't get me wrong, there are times when flyers are important. Well, they make your table look pretty, right? They make you look like a real organization. Again, vibes, atmosphere is important. Sometimes someone really is in a rush and you try and hunt them down, right? You follow them say, they've only got two minutes. This will only take 30 seconds to don't worry, and they're still walking. All right, fine. Last ditch resort, give them a flyer, it doesn't hurt. But again, that is only a last ditch resort. There are so many more important things. So if not a flyer, if that's not going to get us a position signatures, if that's not going to get us our meaningful conversations, what do we need to do? What else do we have? Food. Okay, good. Here's a plate. Here's some cookies. Now, cookies are cool. We'll share these afterwards. Um, but you can was it feed two birds in one go? I think that's the vegan version. Um, by having a baking event the day before, right? Now think about this in your mobilization. You've just met someone. The first thing you're going to do, invite them to outreach. It seems pretty scary, right? What's a lot less scary? Baking with people, invite them to your home. In Sweden we make chocolate balls. That's what we do with that. You can bake cookies, you can bake cakes. It doesn't matter. Cinnamon bun day in Sweden, big thing. We all bake cinnamon buns. We give cinnamon buns out of our outreach. That Tuesday we we eat these cream buns. We made cream buns. We posted it on social media. We had 60 people coming from a $5 spend on Meta saying I came here for free for free bun. What did we do with those 50, 60 people? We spoke to them. They all signed our position. There is so much you can do, right? Um, again, Clara, we we often joke that you live at our apartment. Um, and that's because Clara lives five minutes away. We're always baking. I mean, one day we baked 500 cinema cinnamon, not cinnamon buns, 500 chocolate balls in one go. All of my my double fridge freezer like two drawers were just filled with chocolate balls. It was crazy. What do we do? We gave them out at outreach. Why? Because people really, really like having this type of stuff, right? It's a hook. It brings them in. But we're not a group that just gives out free vegan food, right? So again, this might be so context dependent. In Sweden, you'll have, you'll have cookies, uh, and or chocolate balls or whatever. And people still won't stop. Oh, why? You don't, you don't want free food? Well, what we often have is we have another sign. And we have a sign saying free food. But even that isn't enough. People will look at the sign and then look at you in your soul and then they'll walk past anyway. Why? Because you're not reaching out to them. It's the exact same thing as sending someone a personal, you know, text or calling them, but in real life with a stranger. Talk to them, say, hey, would you like a free insert, whatever really good thing that you've made here, right? Not only have you had a social movement the time before where you can bring people in, also time to speak with existing campaigners about different things, right? Also just having fun with your friends, hopefully. You've got something really good for people at outreach. And if you've baked it really good and it tastes good, one of the big arguments against vegan food, plant-based food, it tastes shit, that's gone. Because you are enjoying this thing which you didn't even know was plant-based. What are you going to say now? Yes, you have a question. Hi, I was just going to ask because at our campus, we're not allowed to give out food, which really sucks. But basically, the caterer has a monopoly on all food that is sold or uh given out on campus. So we're really wondering how we can bring people in otherwise. Um, your university is lying to you. Read the contracts, read the caterer agreements. They probably have a monopoly on selling food, almost certainly not giving out. If, however, they do have a monopoly on all food, you do stand outside the university. It's public land, they can't stop you doing that. So there's always something that you can do. It's a pain in the ass, right? It might be cold, it might be rainy. Um, but again, the food is a nice to have. You can do so much even without it. And we'll we'll come back to that. But yes, if your university says, you can't stand here, you're not allowed to, you need to be a registered student association, you can't stand here because or you can't give out food. Challenge them on that, right? So many times that University we've been told you can't do that. What do we do? We come back. Hey, here's the law. We're going to stand here, right? Um, often, it's also just better to ask for forgiveness than permission because they actually don't care if you give out a free, you know, free cookies or things like that. Um, so push the push the boundaries and if you need help, I'm sure there's people in the campaign or or in the region that can help you look through those contracts. Um, unfortunately, university administrators don't often know what they're doing, or don't always know what they're doing. Um, but yeah, really good question. Okay. So, okay, look, this is your sort of fundamental what I think you should have on your outreach. So that's that's your prep. Now, one of the things which is really important is absolutely that hook, right? Because it doesn't matter how many people are walking past your table. If they're not engaging with you, well, you're not going to have any success. So that hook is often that cookie or maybe it's an event, or maybe it's stickers, or maybe it's coffee, or tea, or something else.
[17:45]I think the best hook that I've ever heard, the best hook that I've ever tried is something which Sophie suggested to us, waffles. waffles are so good, we can't do it inside at our university, maybe you can. We just go outside, plug into um, an outlet, we have waffles. waffles are so good, but they smell fucking delicious. If you're on the other side of the campus, you can smell those waffles. Um, not only they smell really, really good. They take time to make. Don't do it in minus 3 degree weather. That takes too long. We tried that. It took 15 minutes to make a waffle. Big, big mistake. But what is more reasonable weather and people actually want to be outside, make a waffle, takes three, four, five minutes. What's going to happen? People are going to come around. You're going to say, do you want a waffle? Yeah, obviously, you want a free waffle. Um, and now you've got three or four minutes where you have to speak to them. Otherwise it's really, really awkward. And they're going to speak to you because they want that waffle. Yeah, uh, my question was like after getting a win, um, why do you think it's still significant to do that? You know, like maybe the people that are coming are actually interested and want to like contribute and they wondering what are they going to contribute when it's a win. Yeah. I mean, there are lots of things but Excellent, uh, question, because there's always another win to be had, right? Again, our our North star is the entire world, all society is plant-based. Universes are part of this. A student union win is not the end, right? That's what our our previous session is on. Um, there's always another department. There's always another campus. There's always more students who we can educate, bring into the group, do more social events, do more lobbying, get more people. I I mean, you know, sometimes I think, um, it isn't like really conflicting thoughts and I think they are conflicting thoughts. Sometimes I think, we don't have enough people to do all the stuff we want to do. And on the other days, uh, I think, we have so many people, what the fuck are we going to do, right? Uh, I brainstorm with the team. There is always more that you can do. I mean, at University, as I said, we're four or sometimes even five events a week. I mean, big events, formal dinners for 100 people, right, clothing swaps. We're organizing a sustainability fair for the entire university, right? We're doing outreach, we're doing lobbying. We're talking to the Chancellor on a monthly basis. These are huge huge things. There's so much more we could be doing. And if not at University, we would have a campaigner helping out at Stockholm or helping out in other places, training these people, developing these social movements because they can spread so, so far and wide. So I think if you thought we've won, we're done, we just need to think, what else can we win at? You have one, but there's always more. But it's a really, really good question. And using that as a motivator to get people there is really important. Why am I coming to outreach? Right? We were doing so many outreaches up uh running up to Student Union vote. And as we were getting better at outreach, we were getting more and more people, and as we're getting more and more people, we're getting better at outreach. So there's so many positive feedback loops as you get good at outreach. Okay, so we have a hook.
[20:53]Someone comes up to your table. They say, yes, I will happily have a chocolate ball or a cookie, whatever it is. Then what? How do we not just become a group which gives out free food? So, I've did a little bit of outreach already and I've noticed that if you just be like, hey, can I have one minute of your time, they're just going to be like, no. So, I started to ask them, hey, do you know Plant-Based Universities? And then they say, no, and I just start explaining it. So, that was the best way to hook them because, yeah, that's it. Good, exactly. And there's so many things again. Worst case scenario, your university really doesn't let you give out food. That would really suck. There are so many different ways. Try out different introductions, right? And you think, oh, I don't know what works. Yeah. Spend five or six hours at outreach. I'm not joking. Do this every week. There is no reason we can't, right? We often say, we don't have the time, we don't have the resources. dedicate the time, start of term, build your team. You don't need to be at every outreach. Your team needs to be at every outreach. There is always enough people at a university. If you have 2,000, 3,000, 10,000, 20,000 students at university, there are absolutely five or six people that you can rotate between and have outreach every week. It's, you know, it's two, three hours of your life. Um, and trying these different things, trial and error, learning what works and what doesn't work as as it seems like you've done is is so, so important. Absolutely. Do you want to pass it back and we can sorry for missing out before? No worries. I have a couple of points actually. So at UCR, we are UCR PBU. And we have pancake Mondays, which is super fun. So, it's a very known thing around the campus. And we're in the same spot every time. And we make plant-based pancakes. Everyone knows PBU kind of because of this. And we also have bi-weekly dinners where people know the time and the place. And we cook plant-based food with them and then we talk about it while we eat the food. So, that's a really good way to get people knowing about plant-based universities. And it is still free food, but it's also a conversation. Good. And exactly what you've done there is you've you've got a hook. You've got a social element. You've got a meaningful task, or meaningful discussions, and hopefully tasks come out of that. You have created a system of mobilization and you've got it regularly, right? Um, the day before that I that I came over in the train, I spent like a one-hour lunch with some campaigners. New campaigners at Stockholm from our Nordic camp. Um, and they were really, really concerned and they're like, well, we've had this team and we haven't really been able to do much. And the first question that I had was, well, how often do you meet when and where? And they said, once a month. And I said, well, yeah, that's your problem, right? You have to be doing things regularly. Do outreach once a week. Have another meeting once a week. Have a social event every two, three weeks that you can always be plugging it at an outreach. If you're not doing that, there's not these low enough barriers for people to join. There's not these opportunities once they join to get meaningfully involved. They will come to your events and they will never come back afterwards. So, make sure that you've got this cycle, right? It's a smooth running uh machine, hopefully.
[24:15]Um, yes. Yeah, yeah, sorry. So the question is once you've done, you've built this list of people, you want to mobilize people, and you're reaching out to them and they're ignoring you or or they're giving you excuses. You know, at what point do you give up? Um, honestly, you will get most people responding to you positively if you reach out. There will be some that don't. For the most part, it's okay. Don't, don't respond. You can do another outreach and meet a new 100 people and find another 20 people to reach out to you. So I don't think there's a shortage of students. Now, of course, let's say there's someone ahead of a student union who comes by and they're really, really important, you're going to want to keep preaching out to them, right? But if it's just a student who was a little bit interested, maybe just took a sticker and you've reached them twice and they're giving you excuses, we're not responding to you for a few weeks. Okay, we can live with that. But yeah, have them on a list. There's always opportunities, they can always come to the next social. It never hurts because they might get invigorated and motivated to do something later, but you don't need to waste your time on that. There's hundreds of other students. But really good, good question.
[25:34]So this is a really, really good question for me. It's a really, really good question and a very common one as I said. Okay, so there's really two parts to this question. One is how do you not get tired of doing all of this outreach? And the other one is, once you have one, what do you do with them, right? So it comes back to this, it comes back to this cycle, right? So, getting people to do something which is easy for them. So, getting that first yes is very important. And if you want to get people not tired of doing outreach, don't have them stand there for five hours. That's a massive mistake, right? Don't don't give them this perception that we're going to stand here and get four people to sign. It sucks. No one wants to do that. People will not sign up to that. What you want is, what do you do in our pitch, right? You spend two, three hours, max, at an outreach. If it's a big outreach, it's a big event. Two hours is enough. One hour is enough, right? And then you just get to know people. Then you get them to sign the petition. Then you follow up with them. Then you invite them to the next social. Then you invite them to be a part of the next outreach and the next social, and the next outreach, and the next social. And there's this exponential growth where you always need more people if you want to do more stuff. There is always more stuff to be done. Like I said, North star, a plant-based world. What do we do? We have student union wins. We have university wins. We are doing outreach all the time, right? We need people to keep being involved, to keep doing stuff. Because there's always going to be another thing, always going to be another project.
[27:08]Now, about the six steps, my first point is presenting yourself. Yeah. And I've done some outreach in the streets and it's for the preparation process of the book that I have like script of discussion according to the six steps that everyone doing the outreach workshop before doing the outreach could read that at his at his home. Like your first part is um presenting yourself. You you really have the text and you can show it. So I would just say the different parts and it can be. Hoby has been useful to have these scripts at the workshop so that I could read it when I'm alone and read it again before going to the the out reach. And so I have also some facts inside it. Everything is in that sheet of paper, which is the four part. which steps here and I can just say it again with my own words. So the the steps that I found that that were there are first presentation.
