“Oameni noi in politica” (New People in Politics) is a citizen initiative aiming to reform electoral laws so it simplifies the access of competent citizens in politics, initiated by the civic movement Initiativa Romania (Romania Initiative) along with 26 other civic organizations and 4 political parties. In order to reach the Parliament vote, the initiative needed to gather at least 100,000 signatures from at least 11 counties of Romania and Bucharest. We supported the initiative with the development of the communication strategy and the related materials, focusing on social media.
More client info and work: Initiativa Romania
Skills: communication strategy, art direction, copywriting, photo editing, DTP, project management
#OameniNoi turned out to be the largest civic electoral reform project in Romania. Back in the autumn of 2018, the initiators identified 7 amendmends to the electoral laws that would allow people to access easier the political stage, to vote easier and to be represented in accordance with the new context (i.e. related to the Romanian diaspora). After 30 years from the regime change that took place in December 1989, the local political class is still dominated by rigid, non-transparent, self-centered political structures. #OameniNoi promoted the idea that a new perspective on politics is highly needed, and that young people with fresh ideas should step up and actively get involved into politics. The goal of the initiative was to gather the necessary number of signatures to be taken into consideration by the parliament, to raise awareness regarding the inadequacies on the current electoral laws, to ask people for donations to support this project or to get involved as volunteers.
Communication followed three major topics:
The communication of these three themes over a long period of time (the campaign lasted over 5 months), mostly on just one channel (FB), meant that we had to keep people's attention, but without bombarding them with similar materials. As such, we created several series of messages with different creative approaches.
The proposed amendments to the electoral law aimed to give easier access of the competent citizens to politics and to improve the political offer: system for monitoring the attendance at the vote and the illegal vote, preferential vote on party lists (open lists), election of mayors in two rounds, reduction of the number of signatures required for registration in elections, etc. We communicated them by developing two creative routes: using simple and easy to understand illustrations (made with the help of the illustrator Iulia Givan), and using the power of numbers.
Online communication was spiced up with reactive messages at events that took place daily and were relevant to the campaign.
Any opportunity (including Halloween!) was taken in order to promote the campaign's messages and values – especially non-conventional visuals proved highly effective on social media, becoming viral.
For people who were not part of the "civic bubble" active on social media platforms, and in order to penetrate different society layers, we also produced standard information tools. Various printed materials were distributed in larger cities.
There was also a need for regular communication of updated situations regarding the number of signatures collected. So we created several types of visuals for that, emphasizing the urgency of the need to collect signatures, towards the end of the campaign, especially from the counties that had the potential to reach the target.
The core team of Publicator, Diana Moldovan (Capatina) and Iulian Puiu, started under the name Reply in 2002.
In 2015, the team changed the name Reply into Publicator and continued the business as usual.