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merit's deep-dive

Turning Public Support into Political Pressure
Deep-dive by Merit Valge, (Nähtamatud Loomad, Estonia)

1. Problem: the bill to ban cages was at risk at the first reading

In March 2026, the bill to ban cages for hens in Estonia was about to reach first reading in the Parliament.

The political situation was not in favour of the animals: the largest governing party was against the bill and the industry lobbying was active.

This deep-dive looks into how in 17 days we made rejecting the bill more politically, publicly, and morally costly for politicians than allowing it to continue through the legislative process.

2. Strategy: increasing the cost of rejection

Our strategy was to build several layers of pressure at the same time.

No single action was expected to change the political situation on its own. The goal was for all of them to reinforce each other, so that rejecting the cage-ban bill would no longer feel like a quiet technical decision, but a visible political choice under public scrutiny.

The pressure came from five directions:

Direct voter pressure — supporters emailing Members of Parliament through our write-to campaign
Public media pressure — publishing a new investigation in one of Estonia’s most-watched TV programmes one week before the first reading
Social legitimacy — stakeholders and other influential people publicly speaking out against cages
Visible public presence — public events and outdoor media
Direct political influence — lobbying and direct work with politicians

3. Preparatory work: what had to be in place before the campaign started

The campaign lasted only 17 days. But the ability to create pressure that quickly depended on things we had been building for months (and in some cases, years).

Before the political window opened, we needed five things already in place:

🛠️ Infrastructure — a tested write-to platform
💌 Audience — a large, warm supporter base
💶 Money — funds available before the mobilisation peak
🧠 Know-how — experience from previous campaigns and other countries
👥 People — enough capacity to run everything at once

A write-to page that was ready before we needed it

At the centre of the mobilisation was a dedicated write-to platform that guided supporters through contacting Members of Parliament. Building the write-to platform required significant time and resources, with around six months of development, testing and preparation before launch.

Out-sourced external developer
271 hours of internal staff time — 188 hours from one team member and 63 from another + around 20 hours from volunteers
around 6 months for adaptation, coordination and testing

The platform itself was also built on experience and infrastructure already developed in other countries. This saved us from starting from zero.

The investment paid off almost immediately: once the system existed, we were able to build a similar write-to campaign page in just a few days for the next stage of the political campaign.

💡 The lesson: if there is a realistic chance that your campaign will need people to contact politicians, build the infrastructure early. Politics is unpredictable and by the time you urgently need the tool, it is too late to start building it.

user: nl
pass: qmtpixtd

A supporter base built over years

A great mobilisation tool is useless without people to mobilise.

By 2026, our newsletter list had grown to 29,495 people.

Estonia is a small country with a population of just 1.36 million, meaning our newsletter reaches the equivalent of around 2.2% of the entire population.

Much of this audience had been built through years of campaigning, including petition drives and previous actions.

This mattered, as newsletter list was by far the most effective channel for mobilizing supporters and existing contacts generated around 81% of all emails sent during the campaign.

The same principle applied beyond email. Relationships with influencers, journalists and other allies had also been built long before this particular political moment.

💡 The lesson: petitions, newsletters and lower-barrier actions do more than deliver their immediate result. They build the audience you can mobilise when the stakes become much higher.

Money before the mobilisation peak

Political pressure campaigns require money at exactly the moment when there is very little time to raise it.

The write-to journey also included fundraising after people had taken action. We first asked for a monthly donation, followed by a one-off donation if they declined.

Only a relatively small number of people reached these asks: the monthly-donation page was reached in 293 sessions, and the one-off donation page in 240 sessions.

From this, we gained 7 new monthly donors (€67/month) and 18 one-off donations (€455 total). Around 7.5% of sessions reaching the one-off donation page resulted in a donation.

The total amounts were small mainly because so few people reached the donation ask in the first place.

💡 The lesson: Fundraising can work inside a write-to campaign, but its ceiling is naturally limited by the number of people who complete enough of the action journey to ever see the ask. This kind of write-to campaign should therefore not be expected to finance itself.

Fundraising before the political peak

We knew that once the write-to campaign was running at full intensity, it would be difficult to combine a strong political action ask with fundraising.

So one month before publishing our investigation into an Estonian cage-hen farm, we ran a focused three-day fundraising campaign to finance the upcoming campaign work.

In three days, we raised:

💶 €6,364 in one-off donations
🔁 €65/month in recurring donations
❤️ 383 donors

The timing was deliberate: we raised the money before asking the same audience to focus intensely on writing to politicians.

More info about this in the appendix under fundraising materials.

💡 The lesson: If a write-to campaign needs funding, raise it before the mobilisation peak. A short fundraising sequence built around a specific upcoming campaign moment can secure much of the needed budget without competing with the political action itself.

We did not start from zero

A large part of the campaign was built on knowledge that already existed.

We studied mobilisation campaigns from Lithuania, Slovenia and Poland, looking closely at how their write-to campaigns were structured and how they communicated with supporters.

We also had our own accumulated knowledge:

analyses of previous write-to campaigns, especially what had worked in newsletters (our template for campaign-analysis is available here);
experience with supporter mobilisation;
an internal analysis of what works and what gets rejected in political Meta advertising.

💡 The lesson: analyse your campaigns and keep the learnings. Borrow aggressively from organisations that have already solved similar problems. When the political window opens, there is little time to reinvent things that somebody already knows how to do.

Systems still need people

Outsourcing, reusable infrastructure and previous campaign knowledge saved enormous amounts of time, but none of them removed the need for internal capacity.

The campaign required people working simultaneously on the website, newsletters, Meta ads, social media, events, influencers, media and political outreach. Priorities also changed quickly as the political situation developed.

Creating urgency inside the team therefore mattered almost as much as creating urgency among supporters. Everyone needed to understand that this was a short, unusually important window where normal priorities had to move aside.

Our internal mobilisation showed what a highly engaged small group could achieve: 18 out of 20 people in our main Slack channel participated in the write-to action, and collective writing sessions generated a large number of emails even with very few participants.

At the same time, this showed the limitation: we had more mobilisation opportunities than active people available to pursue them. With a larger volunteer base, we could have run more collective writing sessions, done more direct outreach and followed up more intensively with potential supporters and allies.

💡 The lesson: good tools increase what a team can do, but they do not replace people. At peak campaign moments, coordination and capacity can become the bottleneck.

💡 The bigger lesson

When the political opportunity appears, most of the capacity you need has to already exist.

The write-to page, supporter list, money, campaign knowledge and relationships were not created during those 17 days. They were the reason we could use those 17 days effectively at all.

4. How we got people to write to politicians

Estonia is a small country of around 1.36 million people.

In 17 days, people sent 5519 personal emails to Members of Parliament asking them to let the cage-ban bill move forward.

The Estonian Parliament has 101 members, and we selected 80 MPs whom people could contact through the campaign landing page.

Each selected MP was assigned a different probability of receiving an email, as some needed more public pressure than others. On average, each of the 80 selected MPs received approximately 69 emails through the campaign.

For us, the scale was unprecedented: we had never before managed to send this many individual emails to such a large group of politicians in such a short period.

Goal vs result

💡 The lesson: Reaching fewer people does not necessarily mean creating less pressure. Highly engaged supporters can compensate by taking the action several times.

The charts below show the distribution of writers and emails sent by UTM source: the first counts individual participants, while the second counts all emails they sent.

Email drove both the largest share of writers and the most intensive participation. Facebook was the second-largest source of writers, but generated fewer emails per writer.

Getting the first email sent was the hardest part

The campaign page received 7,658 visitors. Around 30% reached the stage where they could start writing to politicians, but only 10.1% sent at least one email.

At the start, the landing page assigned each person a set number of MPs to contact, based on the number they had chosen. After writing to each MP, the user could mark that email as sent. Completing the full writing journey meant marking all of the MPs assigned to them as contacted.

Results show that once people had written their first email, they were highly committed: 606 of 774 writers (around 78%) completed the full writing journey (=wrote to all politicians assigned to them).

💡 The lesson: Our biggest conversion problem was not getting writers to finish. It was getting people to send their first email.

Real political moments created mobilisation peaks

Email volume increased as the vote approached.

The strongest peaks coincided with real developments in the campaign:

14 April — 445 emails

The day after the parliamentary committee confirmed that the first reading would take place on 22 April.

16 April — 433 emails

The morning after the investigative TV show Pealtnägija investigation aired, when public attention was focused on cage farming.

21 April — 869 emails

The biggest day of the entire campaign — one day before the first reading.

Our communications changed with these moments. Instead of repeating a generic “please write to politicians” message, we repeatedly gave supporters a new reason why today mattered.

💡 The lesson: 💡 Real-world events are mobilisation opportunities. Connect them immediately to one clear action instead of running the mobilisation campaign separately from political and media developments.

Newsletters were our main mobilisation engine

Between 6 and 22 April, we made 33 separate newsletter sends across different audience segments asking supporters to send emails to Members of Parliament.

This does not mean that each person in the newsletter list received 33 emails. Most campaign days had different versions for different segments.

One person received around 14 campaign emails over 17 days (about 0.8 emails per day on average).

We segmented people primarily by their previous behaviour:

the general newsletter list;
people who had written to politicians in previous campaigns;
for the first three sends, monthly donors;
and, later, people who had already written during this campaign.

Once someone wrote during the campaign, they could move into the repeat-action segment and receive a different version asking them to contact more MPs.

The emails also changed with the political situation. As the first reading approached, we increasingly used concrete political developments, deadlines, social proof and urgency rather than repeating the same message.

Getting the general newsletter list to write

In this context, the general list means everybody who has not emailed politicians before (neither this campaign nor previous writing campaigns). Our general list contained around 27,000 people.

Below are the three general list emails that generated the highest number of emails to politicians.

🥇 13 April — “Big news! 22 April is critical for hens”

27,212 recipients · 23% open rate

18 writers → 160 emails

Writer conversion: 0.07%

The parliamentary committee had just confirmed the date of the first reading. The email could therefore give supporters something very concrete: a date, a political decision and a clear reason why acting now could still matter.

🥈 18 April — “I know you want to be part of this, dear friend”

26,867 recipients · 22% open rate

20 writers → 127 emails

Writer conversion: 0.07%

🥉 21 April — “Tomorrow is the first reading”

26,865 recipients · 20% open rate

29 writers → 122 emails

Writer conversion: 0.11%

This email produced fewer total emails than the two above, but the highest writer conversion of the three. The political moment could hardly have been clearer: the first reading was the next day.

Across the newsletter campaign, subject lines with clear time urgency generally performed better.

💡 The lesson: for a broad audience, make the political moment concrete. People need to understand what is happening, when the decision will be made and why their action can still matter now.

Previous write-to participants were much easier to mobilise

At launch, we separately contacted people who had written to politicians in previous campaigns.

This was a much smaller audience (around 850 people) but the conversion difference was dramatic.

Below are the two strongest emails to this segment:

🥇 7 April — “Friend, this is urgent”

843 recipients · 56.5% open rate

30 writers → 157 emails

Writer conversion: 3.56%

🥈 6 April — “Act before everyone else”

862 recipients · 53% open rate

21 writers → 108 emails

Writer conversion: 2.44%

The emails explicitly referred to the recipient's previous behaviour: you have written to politicians before, you know how to do this, and animals need you again.

Compared with the general list, the difference was huge: writer conversion was much higher.

As a surprise, monthly donors who had not written to politicians in previous campaigns did not send significantly more emails than the general list, even though we consider monthly donors our warmest audience.

However, the segment intentionally excluded monthly donors who had written in previous campaigns, as they were grouped separately as “previous writers”.

This meant that several hundred of the most politically engaged monthly donors were not part of the monthly-donor segment, which likely explains much of the weaker-than-expected difference.

💡 The lesson: Segment people based on the behaviour you want them to repeat. Previous political action was the strongest predictor of writing to politicians again.

The strongest newsletters of the campaign asked people to write again

From 13 April onwards, we created a separate segment for people who had already written during this campaign. Instead of considering them finished, we asked them to contact five more MPs (and then again and again).

We sent nine repeat-action emails to this audience.

And the three highest-performing newsletters of the entire campaign by number of emails sent were all repeat-action emails:

🥇 21 April — “Tomorrow is the first reading”

451 recipients · 51% open rate

34 writers → 338 emails

Writer conversion: 7.54%

🥈 18 April — “I know you want to be part of this, dear friend”

364 recipients · 55% open rate

27 writers → 207 emails

Writer conversion: 7.42%

🥉 14 April — “Don’t let this happen”

225 recipients · 62% open rate

23 writers → 175 emails

Writer conversion: 10.22%

The contrast with the general list is striking. A general-list email went to around 27,000 people. These repeat-action emails went to only 225–451 people, yet generated more emails to politicians.

The copy could also become much simpler and more direct:

“You have already written. Now write to five more.”

Their previous action had already removed the biggest behavioural barrier: they knew how the process worked and had already decided that writing to politicians was worth doing.

💡 The lesson: Do not treat an action-taker as “finished”. When there are many meaningful political targets, the people who have already acted can become your strongest mobilisation audience.

Meta ads became a major mobilisation channel

After newsletters, paid Meta advertising became the most important way of reaching people for writings to MPs beyond the existing newsletter list.

A major advantage was that we were not starting from zero. Before this campaign, we had already analysed what tends to work and what tends to get rejected in political Meta advertising.

That previous analysis turned out to be extremely useful and gave us a much stronger starting point for the campaign.

🔗 LINK TO OUR PREVIOUS META POLITICAL ADS ANALYSIS

The results

We spent €3,321.13 including VAT on Meta ads.

The campaign generated:

💶 €3,321.13 spent

👥 218 unique writers

📩 ~1,058 emails sent

👤 €15.23 per writer

✉️ €3.14 per email sent

Around 4.6% of visitors from Meta sent at least one email.

This was far above our original expectation.

💡 The lesson: Paid acquisition can play a much bigger role in political mobilisation than expected when previous channel-specific knowledge already exists.

Strategy: optimise for enough data

Writing to politicians was a new conversion action for us, so we tested different optimisation points in the funnel.

The strongest setup was not the one optimised only for people who completed the entire writing process. It was optimised for an earlier meaningful step: getting past the contact form and reaching the facts page.

This gave Meta more conversion signals while still identifying people who had shown real intent. That setup ultimately produced the strongest results across writers, emails and finishers. More details about the ad manager setup available here.

The audience itself was broad: Estonia, age 18+, Advantage+ audience without detailed interest suggestions.

💡 The lesson: If the final conversion is relatively rare, an earlier but meaningful signal may give Meta enough data to find more people who eventually complete the deeper action.

The ads that brought the most writers

Below are the three best-performing ads by number of writers.

🥇 “I am afraid”

51 writers → 283 emails

Why we think it worked:

one individual hen instead of an abstract issue;
direct eye contact;
“I am afraid” communicates an immediate emotional state;
“My future is in your hands” gives the viewer responsibility and agency.

🥈 “Help me” — retargeting

38 writers → 175 emails

The photo, taken inside a cage-hen farm, had already been one of our strongest images in previous campaigns.

The message itself was extremely simple: “Help me.”

🥉 “Help me” — final-action optimisation

21 writers → 100 emails

The same strong creative also performed well under a different optimisation setup, although that ad set was less effective overall.

What the strongest ads had in common

All ads used the same main copy. The strongest creatives combined:

🐔 One individual animal — rather than an abstract industry

❤️ Concrete suffering — easy to understand immediately

⏰ Political urgency — a real decision was approaching

💪 Personal agency — the viewer could still influence what happened

👉 One clear CTA — write to politicians now

The creative created the emotional connection; the copy connected that emotion to a political moment and an immediate action.

💡 The lesson: Emotional content worked best when it was tied directly to urgency, personal agency and one concrete political action.

Political ads still came with restrictions

During the campaign, 11 of 51 ads were rejected.

This was manageable partly because our previous analysis had already helped us understand which combinations of political terminology, legislative language, accusations towards identifiable industries and strong visual content were more likely to create problems.

For deeper practical insight into the Meta campaign, ad setup and rejection patterns, contact:

Triin Lutsoja

📧 triin.lutsoja@nahtamatudloomad.ee

💡 The lesson: Political Meta advertising has a steep learning curve. Building that knowledge before a critical campaign can make a major difference to how quickly you can test, adapt and scale.

Organic social media: useful for visibility, weaker for direct mobilisation

Organic social media played a much smaller role in generating emails than newsletters or Meta ads.

Across 21 posts, we tracked 186 email sends, with an overall conversion rate of 0.19%.

Photos performed better than videos for actual action:

Photos: 106 emails · 0.29% conversion
Videos: 42 emails · 0.09%
Link posts: 4 emails · 0.04%

Videos reached more people, but that attention did not translate into more emails

The strongest individual post was extremely simple:

🥇“Help reach 4,300 emails — only 37 to go!”

3,815 reach → 34 emails → 0.89% conversion

Its strength was not emotional storytelling but a very concrete collective goal: only 37 emails were missing, so one person's action felt immediately meaningful.

💡 The lesson: Organic social media was better at creating visibility than direct action. When mobilisation was the goal, a clear political moment and specific CTA mattered more than reach or emotional engagement alone.

A small group can create a lot of pressure

A write-to campaign with many possible political targets gives each motivated supporter a lot of room to contribute.

We saw this clearly in our own team and volunteer mobilisation:

A visual used in Slack with the pictures of all our team members and opponents for engaging the team for writing emails.

22 people → 323 emails

Through Slack alone, 18 of 20 people sent 188 emails, an average of 12.5 emails per writer. We kept participation high through personal tagging, private reminders, repeated asks, memes, celebrating each writer and keeping urgency visible.

The biggest limitation was simply scale. Our volunteer group was small. If we had entered the campaign with a much larger active volunteer base, this layer of pressure could have been far stronger, but building that kind of community would have required sustained work long before the political window opened.

Writing together was by far the most efficient tactic

We also organised a Zoom writing session with employees and volunteers to reduce procrastination, make the action feel easier and give people a dedicated hour to write together.

At one session:

6 people took part → 135 emails sent in one hour

That is 22.5 emails per person.

In terms of staff time versus emails generated, this was one of the most efficient tactics in the campaign, and we underused it.

💡 The lesson: When there are many write-to targets, highly motivated supporters can generate disproportionate pressure. The bigger opportunity is to build a larger volunteer base before the campaign starts and plan multiple collective writing sessions, not just one or two.

Testing outside our usual channels

Delfi sponsored content: worth testing again

For the final five days before the first reading, we paid €372 for a sponsored article on Delfi, one of Estonia's largest news portals.

It generated:

👥 13 writers

📩 66 emails

✉️ 5 emails per writer

The value was not only direct conversion. The article put the campaign prominently on Delfi's front page immediately before the vote. One egg producer's CEO even contacted Delfi asking for changes to image captions, showing that the piece had reached (and upset) the industry as well.

💡 The lesson: New acquisition channels do not have to beat email or Meta to be useful. A tactic can generate actions and increase the public visibility of the pressure campaign at the same time.

Phone calls: probably the wrong audience

We also tested calling former team members and asking them to write to politicians.

25 calls → 12 answered → no tracked emails

The main problem was likely not the channel itself, but the audience we chose. Former team members seemed like a warm group, but many had not been involved with us for years and were much less engaged than expected.

If we tested phone calls again, we would target people who had already written to politicians in previous campaigns. Our newsletter results showed that this group was far more likely to take the same action again.

💡 The lesson: For high-effort outreach like phone calls, prioritise people with the strongest past behavioural signal, ideally those who have already taken the exact action you are asking them to repeat.

Where we left pressure on the table

There was still clear unused potential.

We were not able to effectively engage people outside our organisation to amplify the call to write to politicians (e.g. influencers).
Volunteers participated actively, but our active volunteer pool was small.
Writing party with team members on Zoom worked exceptionally well, yet we organised only one.
Repeat mobilisation proved extremely effective only after the campaign was already underway and we could probably have pushed it even further. The reason why we did not do maximum was team capacity.

💡 The lesson: Once a tactic clearly works during a short political campaign, scale it immediately. There may not be another chance after the vote.

5. Public media pressure: investigation at exactly the right moment

Screenshot from the investigation

We had already released several investigations into cage-hen farming in recent years, so for journalists the issue was no longer completely new.

Getting another major investigation published was not easy.

Yet we wanted to bring fresh evidence of conditions inside an Estonian cage farm into national media exactly one week before the first reading.

Long-term relationships with journalists became crucial. Eventually, we secured a 17-minute segment in Estonia’s most-watched investigative TV programme, airing on 15 April, exactly one week before the first reading.

Why this investigation was especially powerful

The story did more than show new footage of suffering hens.

For the first time, some of the strongest arguments for legislative change were being made not only by us, but by independent third parties.

A senior veterinarian from Estonia’s Agriculture and Food Board acknowledged that even if the current legal requirements are followed, the welfare of hens cannot be fully guaranteed in industrial cage systems, and that a legally fixed transition deadline would be welcome.

A sustainability representative from one of Estonia’s largest supermarket chains Rimi challenged another central industry argument: that banning cages in Estonia would simply mean importing cheap cage eggs from neighbouring countries. Instead, she described how retailers and consumers were already moving rapidly away from cage eggs and ban would be useful for Estonian egg-market.

The programme also questioned the egg industry’s voluntary promise to phase out cages by 2035, pointing out that unlike legislation, the commitment carried no legal obligation.

This mattered politically. The investigation gave us a fresh and highly credible reference point in conversations with politicians and brought the issue back into the national debate immediately before they had to make a decision.

The timing also connected directly with mobilisation: 433 emails were sent to MPs the morning after the investigation aired, one of the campaign’s largest peaks.

💡 The lesson: A new investigation does not need to rely only on shocking new footage. Its political value can be much greater when it is timed around the decision and brings credible independent voices into the argument. Long-term relationships with journalists are what make this kind of timing possible.

6. Social legitimacy: support from beyond our organisation

Martin Villig, the founder of Bolt, standing up against cages.

Another layer of pressure was showing that the cage ban was not simply a demand coming from an animal protection organisation.

Around the first reading, we managed to get visible support from well-known and credible people representing very different parts of Estonian society.

There were tens of influential people who did't stay quiet. Some spoke publicly about the issue, some participated in campaign actions, and others helped amplify the case for banning cages.

These included:

An experienced veterinarian from the Agriculture and Food Board;
A sustainability lead at one of Estonia’s largest supermarket chains;
An entrepreneur and co-founder of Bolt;
A well-known veterinarian;
One of Estonia’s most famous singers;
One of Estonia’s best-known younger singers;
One of Estonia’s most prominent writers.

The exact political impact of these endorsements is impossible to isolate from everything else happening at the same time.

But together they helped make one thing visible: support for the ban extended far beyond our organisation, into veterinary expertise, retail, business and mainstream culture.

Importantly, these relationships were not created during the 17-day campaign. In several cases, they were the result of years of previous communication and relationship-building.

When the political window opened, we were therefore not starting by approaching strangers. We already knew people who understood our work and were willing to step forward quickly.

💡 The lesson: Build relationships with credible public voices long before you urgently need them. At a critical political moment, having many different people support the same change can help make that position feel mainstream rather than marginal.

7. Visible public presence: creating media moments outside Parliament

We also wanted the campaign to be physically visible during the final week before the first reading.

We organised two major public actions near Parliament and ran an outdoor advertising campaign on large LED screens across Tallinn.

The first event, “The future does not fit in a cage,” took place the day after the investigation aired. We built a large symbolic cage and invited politicians and well-known supporters to cut through its wires.

On the day of the first reading, we returned to Parliament with new investigation images, banners, chicken mascots and supportive politicians speaking publicly about why cage farming should be banned.

Both events were deliberately designed to be highly visual and easy for journalists to cover.

The events generated major media moments, including national television coverage, video interviews, news stories and photo galleries. The value of the events therefore extended far beyond the people physically present: they created new reasons for the media to cover the cage ban again during the final political week.

At the same time, from 16–25 April, cage-ban advertising was running on major LED screens across Tallinn.

Video of the outdoor media

Unlike newsletters or Meta ads, the impact of public events and outdoor advertising cannot be meaningfully isolated or converted into a reliable number.

We therefore cannot say exactly how much political impact they created. But we believe they contributed strongly to making the campaign highly visible to politicians and the wider public at exactly the moment the decision was approaching.

💡 The lesson: A strong visual concept can turn an event into a much larger media moment and carefully timed public visibility can reinforce the pressure politicians are already receiving through other channels.

8. Direct political influence: connecting public pressure to Parliament

Public pressure was only one side of the campaign.

Throughout the campaign we were also in very close contact with political allies, who helped us understand what was happening inside Parliament, plan our next steps and identify where additional pressure could be useful.

Those relationships worked both ways.

Supporting politicians raised the cage-ban issue in parliamentary discussions and questioned opposers about it.

This allowed us to adapt the external campaign based on what was actually happening inside the political process.

A very significant amount of staff time went into direct political work during this period. It was one of the most important parts of the overall campaign, but lobbying is not the main focus of this deep dive, so I will not go into the operational details here.

💡 The lesson: Public mobilisation and lobbying should reinforce each other. Direct relationships with political allies help you understand where outside pressure is needed, whether it is being felt and how to adjust the campaign while the decision is still being made.

For more detail about our political lobbying strategy, contact:

Kristina Mering
📧 kristina.mering@nahtamatudloomad.ee

9. The pressure worked and the bill moved forward

At first, most MPs did not respond to the emails and largely acted as if nothing unusual was happening.

About a week before the first reading, however, there was a clear turning point: many MPs started replying to supporters and speaking publicly about the issue. Even politicians who had previously opposed it publicly stated that they would allow it to proceed.

Here are some examples of the signs that the poliuticians understood that rejecting the bill was too costly:

One politician whose party strongly opposed the bill, told one of Estonia’s largest newspapers that she was surprised by the scale of public engagement around the issue:

“I have never seen a bill that has resonated with so many people.” - MP who had publicly opposed the bill before the first reading.

Another politician from a party opposing the ban made a facebook post stating that he would vote to allow the bill to pass its first reading.

At the first reading, not a single MP proposed rejecting the bill, so it automatically moved forward.

No single tactic explains the outcome. Supporter emails, national media coverage, credible public voices, visible public actions and direct lobbying all reinforced each other around the same political decision.

The fight is not over, because the bill still has to pass the next readings, and we are now working to make sure it does.

💡 The lesson: Political pressure is strongest when several tactics reinforce each other at the exact moment a decision is being made.

A special thank you

I would like to sincerely thank Gabrielė Vaitkevičiūtė for her incredibly valuable advice and insights both in preparing the campaign and throughout its implementation, and Justas Raudonius for creating the brilliant write-to landing page that made this campaign possible.

Annex

Write-to campaign tools

Try the write-to page:
🔗 kiri.nahtamatudloomad.ee
User: nl
Password: qmtpixtd

🔗 Write-to journey / flow chart

Fundraising materials

Newsletters from the three-day fundraising campaign, which consisted of a four-email sequence and raised €6,364 in one-off donations:

🥇 13 March — “Confidential appeal”
166 donations · €2,946 raised · 0.59% conversion

14 March — “What happened yesterday is incredible 😍”
62 donations · €973 raised · 0.22% conversion

15 March — “The final step to help animals”
27 donations · €659 raised · 0.10% conversion

🥈 15 March — “I’m writing again because this matters”
117 donations · €1,721 raised · 0.42% conversion

Meta advertising resources

🔗 Deep Dive: Surviving Meta’s Political Ad Ban in the EU

🔗 Meta ads statistics
Ask merit.valge@nahtamatudloomad.ee for access.

🔗 Ads Manager setup

Campaign analysis resources

🔗 Campaign analysis template

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