Sustainability and Long-term Viability

Fix the Status Quo’s commitment is to be here for the long run, and to support NGOs and coalitions in their efforts to create a more sustainable and inclusive Europe.

We’ve been running coalition-powered European Parliament election campaigns since 2014, and maintaining a database of the Parliament’s members and their committees since then. The database is an open data resource currently used by multiple NGO partners, and after the 2024 elections, it will be updated with information about the newly elected MEPs. We also maintain mepwatch.eu, a database of all the rollcalls votes since 2014.

We’ve learned valuable lessons from our past experiences in election campaigning, and we will apply these learnings to improve our approach this time around, as evidenced by the project plan outlined above. Part of our plan is to continue to learn about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to influencing who gets elected, and we’ll share our knowledge among the NGO networks.

The long term sustainability of this project is also about building a network of NGOs, both large and small, who are familiar with the EP election process and have gained new experience in election campaigns and collaboration across borders. This experience can be carried forward into their work in the years to come, ensuring the long-term impact in creating change in Europe.

People power and our distributed campaign tool was used by hundreds of NGOs to engage with millions of supporters for many Europe wide campaigns. This will continue, and hopefully with many more NGOs that used our tool for the ep2024 elections and would want to campaign again for specific votes in the future.

As for the specific tool to create a shared database of candidates and our existing campaigning tools, they are under an open source licence, and we hope that we or another provider will be able to use it for national or local elections and campaigns in the future.

Budget

The budget is split between core tasks that will be mostly independent of the number of campaigns:

  • Coordination & outreach

  • Shared legal and campaign content and translations

  • Opensource IT development

  • Candidate database

And costs that are directly proportional to the number and size of each campaign

  • Support

  • Mailing providers

  • SaaS/hosting

Detailed budget available upon request