'Working with suppliers who care as passionately about our cause as we do makes all the difference in ensuring we have the right products to meet our needs. Ethical Media delivered a web tool to connect trade justice campaigners that helped us achieve the biggest simultaneous lobby of MPs this country has ever seen.'
Glen Tarman, Trade Justice Movement
The Trade Justice Movement (www.tjm.org.uk) campaigns for trade justice. In past years it has successfully organised lobbies of the Houses of Parliament, bringing people together in London to get their message across.
This year the approach was to go local with a 'Scale up to Trade Justice' (www.tjm.org.uk/scaleup) forming a mass lobby of MPs nationally. The ideal means of communicating with its wide-ranging supported base was the internet. Through requirements gathering, assessment of the user base and the needs of the member organisations of the Trade Justice Movement, a solution was devised that in fact was relatively simple.
The amount of information that needs to be conveyed is relatively small, but it needed to be well organised, and available through multiple different websites (Christian Aid, World Development Movement). The system provides a search across various different areas, geographical and political, and a means for anyone to register and add a notice. Notices can be of different sorts, confirmed events or just 'are you out there?'. Administrators can add or amend any notice, and they provide the moderation to the system that is needed to make sure that it is not abused. 1 month before the event there are 333 notices on the system, and 206 users, numbers that are judged to be a success.