The meeting that took place in Warsaw on 14-15th of May, 2018, and it was a second workshop of a series called “Tell Me Your Story” that will be developed in Poland in 2018. The main objective of this project is to exchange knowledge and experience of liberal parties in building a permanent engagement with citizens and a successful permanent campaign based on storytelling and emotions. More precisely, a well-established political party – which has proven to be successful in advocating liberal solutions nonstop – will be matched with a rather new start-up party. Hence, both will be in the position to learn from each other, in terms of developing strategies to effectively engage with citizens and keep on doing so throughout election cycles. Consequently, the outcomes will benefit parties in future elections, especially the European elections of 2019.
14 participants from 7 different countries participated in this event.
The event started with a meeting with Adam Szłapka MP, Secretary General of Nowoczesma, who explained how the party was born in 2015 and what challeneges it has faced ever since.
It was followed by the presentation of Szymon Walkiewicz, founder and CEO of WALK Agency, who was also first campaign manager of Nowoczesna in the 2015 campaign. Szymon Walkiewicz gave an introduction to emotional campaigning and storytelling from a corporate point of view and explained on his own example how to build a brand and create own story online based on emotions. He finished his presentation explaining some of the details of Nowoczesna emotional campaign in 2015.
Last presentation of the day of run by members of VVD social media team, Maaike Langedoen and Guus Bathoorn. They explained how VVD is building its relations with voters via social media and showed best examples of their online campaign.
The second day of the event started with a presentation of Airis Meier on how to build a coherent story of a successful political party. The presentation gave practical advices on does and don’ts and used examples of long-term storytelling strategy implemented by the Reform Party in Estonia. The presentation was followed by a discussion when all participants were identifying emotions aroused by the their respective parties.
The last block of the event was country reports from Slovakia and Hungary. Michal Simecka from Porgressive Slovakia explained the current political situation in his country underlining the consequences of mass protests against the government in Bratislava. It was followed by a discussion on how political parties can benefit from social protests and manifestations. The very last part of the event was a detailed report on Hungarian elections, especially on the campaign of Momentum run by Borbala Tolcser and David Bedo.
