As a result of the Lisbon Treaty, European citizens gained the right to invite the European Commission to make a legislative proposal. The European Citizens' initiative (ECI) is a new (very bureaucratic) way of participating in the European legislative process. In this blogpost I want to outline some basic information about the ECI and it's regulations.
The ECI will allow one million citizens (from at least one quarter of the EU Member States) to invite the European Commission to bring forward proposals for legal acts in areas where the Commission has the power to do so. For an example in the field of environment, agriculture, transport or public health. Any EU citizen (national of an EU country) old enough to vote in European Parliament elections can sign in support of a citizens’ initiative. In clear text: if you get 1 million EU citizens from a lot of different countries to sign your petition, the EU has to listen to it and will make a proposal on how to act upon your issue.
Who can organize an ECI?
As if it wasn't hard enough to get 1 million people to sign your petition the EU put a few more regulations in place. The organizers of a citizens' initiative (a so-called citizens' committee) has to be composed of at least seven EU citizens who are resident in at least seven different Member States. All EU citizens who are old enough (18 years old except in Austria, where the voting age is 16) are entitled to be organizers. Organizations or non-profit organizations cannot run an ECI. Only citizens can. But non-profits can support or "sponsor" initiatives provided that they do so with full transparency.
How does the process work?
The organizers of the European Citizens Initiative have one year to collect the necessary "statements of support" (= signatures on your petition). The number of "statements of support" has to be certified by the authorities in the Member States. That means that all your signatures will be processed and "veryfied" by the EU country the citizen who signed your petition lives in. As you can imagine they all have different regulations. But more on that in a later blogpost.
Once you have successfully collected and verified your signatures the Commission will then have three months to examine the initiative and decide on how to react.
The first ECI can be launched on 1st April 2012.
When the one million supporters sign a petition, these three steps follow:
- commission representatives will meet the organizers so the issue can be presented in detail,
- the organizers will have the opportunity to present their initiative at a public hearing in the European Parliament,
- following a careful examination of the initiative, the Commission will adopt a formal response stating which actions it intends to take (if any) and its reasons for doing so.
To cut it short: the ECI is a very bureaucratic process and if you actually succeed with your campaign there is no guarantee that the EU will act upon it. But it's a great way to pressure the EU, mobilize supporters on a global scale and get some public attention to your issue.
Important links:
- Guide by the EC in English:
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/secretariat_general/citizens_initiative/docs/gui... - All the citizens’ initiatives launched across the EU will be registered on this website.
http://ec.europa.eu/citizens-initiative
The technical side of the ECI
The most problematic challenge of the entire technical setup for an ECI is to apply ecampaigning best practices to your website while still being compliant with restrictive EU legislation. The EU and the member countries have put regulations in place that make it very hard to turn the act of signing an ECI engaging.
Many of those regulations either don't make a lot of sense or they contain something even lawyers find hard to put in clear text. For an example you are not allowed to actually use the data you've collected with your ECI. In the worst case that means you can't count the amount of supporters who have signed your petition. A progress bar (which should be on every petition page) or a list of recent supporters could be declared a violation.
Our solution to the ECI technology problem
Our attempt to solve this problem is to entirely separate the campaign website from the ECI signature form. What does that mean?
Your users see a website with all the bells and whistles you want. Everything that happens on this website, including the supporter data collected on this site, are entirely under your control. Your supporters click on "Sign the petition" and they land on a petition page. At first they only have to provide a few basic details like their email address and their country. Once they have filled out the form, the data is saved on your campaign website (and hopefully synchronized with your CRM system).
After filling out the first form, your supporters land on the "actual" ECI petition form. The tool behind this is the open source software the European Union provides. From a technical point of view it has nothing to do with your website. Therefore you only have to make the second tool compliant to the EU regulations.
The tools you'll need for your ECI
- A campaign website
- A certified eci tool (and a host)
- An email blasting tool
- Tracking and analytics
Your campaign website
To present your cause you will need a website. If you implement what's needed as part of your usual website, your partners might not be very fond of that. We recommend a separate setup with a clear visual identity of it's own (independent from your organization). Depending on the country the user selects on the campaign website, copy and visual appearance can be localized.
To this shared campaign website all your partners may have direct access. You can also grant them permission to edit their sub-section of the site and maybe even download the supporter data that has been collected in their area.
What's most important for the campaign website is that it has a flexible functionality for petitioning and forms. Ideally you can collect any data you want and save your supporter records in an integrated database. That allows you to further profile your supporter base and makes data export much simpler.
On the petition site itself you should make sure to have "social proof", a sense of urgency and very good brief copy. For "social proof" you can show a short list of recent people who have singed the petition. To create a sense of urgency you can use a progress bar and create little challenges like "are we going to reach 10.000 signatures today".
Of course the copy should be short and sweet. But finding the exact right words that convince people can be quite a challenge. The solution is to split test and see which content works best.
The certified ECI petition tool
The software used to collect valid signatures for your European Citizens Initiative has to be compliant with the EU standard. Fancy filling out a 300 pages form? The software for each ECI has to be certified by the EU member country where the servers are in. For the European Citizen Initiatives we're launching with our clients we have servers in Germany because German regulations are ok in comparison.
The good news is that the suggested setup doesn't require you to have a custom built tool certified by the EU. For the official ECI form you can use the EU software, remember? I suppose the EU will at least do a semi-good job at keeping their own software compliant to the regulations. That means you can be quite certain that your tool will be certified.
We've been thinking about getting our own Drupal based petition tool certified to collect ECI signatures but the risk involved is just way to high. Imagine we'd spend 3 months developing a website and then it gets rejected by the authorities.
The good old email blaster
Thanks to this specific technical setup you are allowed to collect supporter email addresses. Now that's great because you can also send out emails to those supporters and engage them further in the campaign. You can also track who has not completed the "official" ECI petition form and send them a friendly reminder every once in a while.
Even if you think about other actions for your supporters the email tool is crucial. It has to allow segmentation and you have to be able to track at least opening rate and clickthrough rate. The email tool should be integrated with your campaign website and, if you want to save a lot of hassle, it should be hosted within the EU.
Tracking and analytics
The third technical element every ecampaign needs is a tracking and analytics tool. Whether you use Google Analytics, Piwik or Open Web Analytics you'll be able to track how visitors browse your campaign site. But most importantly, you can track how well your petition site convinces your visitors (by checking the conversion rate).
Particularly for joint campaigns it's great to see which organization and which channel recruits the most supporters. Yes, such a thing can be tracked. For an example each of your partner organizations can have a unique URL suffix like www.someurl.org/?org="partner1". They can mask this url any way they want to. But once a user lands on the site you can track the URL and see whether this particular user also fills out your form. Good fun!
Ideally your tracking tool works well with the campaign website and the email setup. This will put all your reporting in one place.
Need a helping hand?
If you need a helping hand for the technical side of your ECI, feel free to get in touch with us. We've been working in the field of website design, development and ecampaigning for quite some time now and we'd be happy to help you out! Currently we're collaborating with different networks concerning the technology to run an effective European Citizens Initiative. To find out more about our offers download this PDF!
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