A friend of mine who volunteers for Greenpeace Head Office phoned me up one morning. “Hi Chris”, he said, “would you like to get up at half past six in the morning and travel for three hours to teach the people of Southampton, Bournemouth and Salisbury how to run a stall”. Such is my great commitment to Greenpeace I said yes.
When writing my workshop I was initially sceptical of the idea. All my training on how to run a stall took place “on the job” and I've seen many people volunteer on stalls for the first time without any training and get lots of sign ups. Having passion for your cause is far more important than knowing the routine. But, if you are already passionate about why we must Go Beyond Oil, some extra training may help.
The main issue in running stalls is how to attract attention. Shouting a slogan (“sign the petition, stop oil drilling in the Arctic”) into a crowd seems to work for Trotskyists and market traders, but I've never known it work for Greenpeace. Yet just standing behind a stall and not approaching people doesn't seem to work either. This seems ridiculous at first, when you go to a pub the bar staff don't actively approach you to ask if you want to buy beer, but you get so many more sign ups if you approach people.
As regards approaches that do work, I prefer to choose an individual, smile at them, engage eye contact then give a “chat up line”. Something like “Would you like to sign the Greenpeace petition against oil exploration in the Arctic?”. I always put the words “Greenpeace” and “petition” at the beginning of the sentence so people know who you are and that you're not asking for money. If you're lucky some of the people targeted will stop and you can explain the campaign to them in, at most, three sentences. If people have stopped they'll probably sign, then you can leave them with a leaflet about how cool your group is, and a knowledge that Greenpeace Head Office will soon start sending them more details about the campaign.
Other people prefer to attract people's attention by handing out leaflets and saying to anyone who seems interested “and would you like to sign out petition too”. It's not an approach that's ever worked for me, but I know other people who do this and it works well.
The best approach, though, is to start open conversations with people, using an opening line such as “What do you think about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?”, rather than a very closed quesiton such as “Would you like to sign the Greenpeace petition?”. When you've had a chance to listen to what they've said you can steer the conversation towards signing a petition. It takes exceptional talent to do this, and very few people can; but the few who do this are brilliant.
So that's how you attract nice people to the stall, but how do you handle awkward people? There is a whole day's workshop on this which I can't summarise in one blog post, suffice to say that most people who stop are lovely, and if you get lots of awkward people you're probably doing the stall in the wrong place. After all, the campaign to stop another Gulf of Mexico type oil spill seems to be popular.
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