A few months ago I announced that CAMRA Vancouver was going to be reinvigorating an old initiative in the F.U.S.S. campaign. For those that don’t know, the Fess Up to Serving Sizes campaign was aimed at educating consumers on the legal requirements of bars and breweries when it came to posting the size of their beers, and to how much beer they are actually pouring. This was a campaign that came to fruition several years ago under the guidance of past CAMRA BC executive teams. The basic concept is to visit an establishment and see if it meets certain criteria. Mainly, do they advertise what measurements they are pouring and do they pour what is advertised on their menu. That’s it. You would think it would be pretty simple but it’s actually proving to be quite difficult.
The problem we face in a situation like this is we are not only trying to tackle a contentious advocacy issue, but we are doing so while being saddled with a bit of rocky history. The reality is, the F.U.S.S. campaign comes with negative connotation. When I decided to reinvigorate it this year something I tried to focus on was the fact that past versions of this campaign were not properly managed. They were done in a way that was negative, confrontational, and antagonistic. I did not want to take it in that direction as it felt as though it was not the way to foster constructive relationship with the community members that happened be in the industry. Despite my best efforts to frame the campaign as positively as possible this time around, I have felt that there is overwhelming resistance to involvement. Something I thought was very important was that pubs or breweries agreed to have us come in and measure and not just have people with graduated cylinders and beakers showing up.
So, after the letter I wrote went out, I put out a few feelers to the places I thought would be interested. Much to my surprise, the most common response I received was some kind of variation on “we pour properly/advertise our pours, but we don’t want you coming in.” To which, my response was almost always “If you are pouring properly, why don’t you let us measure? It would just make for positive advertising for you.” To which their response was usually “We just don’t want to be associated with this campaign as a brand.” After several of these conversations happened it became very clear to me that previous incarnations of the CAMRA Executive had made it so that this campaign would most likely never have traction in this city again. On one side, I could approach it the same way that we had in the past and take a guerrilla tactic and measure out restaurants without much warning, and publish our findings. Many of our members may very well say that that’s the route to take; in theory from an advocacy standpoint they’re not wrong. But being on the executive board of the society has taught me that you really need to know how to play nice with the community. If I were to begin an onslaught of every single supplier of beer in the city and indiscriminately measured each one of them out, I can almost guarantee that our members would not like the consequences. So many of our members appreciate the member benefits they get by presenting their CAMRA card at many of these establishments – I know I do. If I were to turn our society into the enemy of industry, many of those benefits would disappear. If people like our education classes, they may be out of luck as places like Steamworks, Big Rock Urban, 12 Kings Pub, offer up their locations free of charge to us as a way of giving back to the community. I don’t think they would be willing to do so if we were to launch a full scale attack on their friends in the community (Not that these places aren’t meeting serving standards, I am just using them as an example.) People may not like the fact that the decisions we make from an advocate front are viewed through this lense, but they are. I had a discussion of this nature with a longtime member recently, who told me he would rather have a society of 20 people that are focused on advocate work then a society of several thousand were only a handful were strong advocates. I told him I respectfully disagreed. Some may not like our benefit program (as they may feel it diminishes our legitimacy) but it is necessary for what we’re doing. Our organization is 100% member funded, without corporate donation or government grants we need every member we can get to fund what we do. Does that mean taking on members who are only interested in having a card that they can show to save a bit of money? Absolutely. That doesn’t mean that those members are never going to see the value in taking an advocate stance. Everyone start somewhere. Even if those members never become strong advocate minds, but they keep paying their yearly dues, that will fund our efforts for years to come. Consider it like bankrolling, or a group of Venture Capitalists.
Following the vein of making advocacy decisions that are in the best interest of the organization the executive board has decided it is best to retire the F.U.S.S. campaign as the branding is tainted, and we see no real positive yield from it moving forward. That being said, this is a fantastic opportunity to open to new campaigns and new ideas. We on the board have a few ideas we are toying around with, but we’d love to hear from you. If you are interested in helping us by forming an members advocacy advisory board, please contact me to let me know. I would like to form a group of members who will get together and help us strategize local advocacy efforts in the Vancouver area. These aren’t decisions that should be diven by a handful of us – instead it should be driven by our passionate membership. I’m always looking to get members more involved in what we do and this is a great chance to do so. This is a great opportunity if consumer advocacy is your thing, shoot me an email, let’s talk!
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