Skiftet’s No Train Fare Hike Campaign

Storstockholms Lokaltrafik is the organization that runs the public transportation system in Stockholm County, Sweden. After the election, it was announced that the Stockholm County Council, which oversees Storstockholms Lokaltrafik, was planning to hike ticket prices for riders. When the team at MinKampanj – a project of Skiftet – heard the news, they sprang into action. We talked to Robin Zachari, a campaign manager at Skiftet, to get the scoop.

Before

MinKampanj’s Storstockholms Lokaltrafik campaign began as a single petition targeting the Stockholm County Council officials and asking them to stop the fare increase. Within weeks, the campaign had collected more than 10,000 signatures from concerned Stockholm residents who didn’t want the most environmentally friendly means to transit to become unaffordable for people in Stockholm County.

To grow the campaign, the MinKampanj team sent an email to all of their Stockholm-based members asking them to sign the campaign and share with friends and family. They also publicized the campaign on Twitter and Facebook. “But,” as Robin recounted, “the real boost was when we asked people who had large Facebook groups on public transport in Stockholm to share it.” By using existing social networks – particularly groups with an interest in public transportation issues – the MinKampanj team was able to quickly gain support for the fledgling campaign.

The Campaign

As the campaign became increasingly popular, the MinKampanj team decided that they wanted to give their members more control over the campaign. As Robin described, “We thought that people would like to run their own campaigns in their municipalities, neighborhoods, and on the streets.” To allow interested members to lead the campaign in their communities, the team created a landing page campaign where users could quickly start a local petition that was part of the larger effort. Robin shared the numbers with us: a “total of 184 campaigns [were drafted], but a lot of them were doubles and a lot [were] not published. But more than 50 are online. In total we have [gotten] over 42,000 signatures on the campaign, in a region of only 2 million people. Our list grew rapidly and we cover over 3% of the population in Stockholm now.”

After the local campaigns were created, the MinKampanj team sent emails to members in the local areas directing them to their local campaign. As Robin said, “It was a lot of work, but totally worth it.”

MinKampanj also used traditional media to spread the word about the campaign. In addition to fundraising for newspaper ads, the the campaign also received extensive media coverage because all of the local campaigns mapped to a local newspaper.

If you’d like to check out the campaign, you can visit the landing page’s hub page.

Next steps

Q: What’s next for this campaign?

A: Seeing the success of the minimum wage ballot measures, we will look to support new ones in 2015. The ongoing petitions create a perfect launching point to successfully help build and win all across the country.