Five things we learned from being on the BBC
It’s early August — the UK flirts with summer temperatures, people drift into holiday mode, and slow news days abound.
Perhaps that’s how we made it onto several BBC outlets in one week, last week! Hey, we’re not complaining. There was the Today Programme on Radio 4 here on YouTube.
On the heels of which came the Victoria Derbyshire show here at 1:07.
And then a quick interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, and finally a news article on the BBC homepage.
Finally the next day BBC Northwest evening news picked up the story, where founder Julia Salasky spoke into a camera but couldn’t see the presenter asking rapid-fire questions up in Salford.
What a great moment for CrowdJustice in its early stages! Here are five things we learned.
1. Coverage coverage everywhere, but not a drop of funds
National press exposure doesn’t necessarily boost donations to cases being crowdfunded on CrowdJustice. But it does create a dialogue around the issues and opens the law up to the public. For example, the day after we launched the case “Be part of a Supreme Court case” (an intervention by a group called JENGbA, aiming to change the law on joint enterprise), Joshua Rozenberg of the Guardian wrote a thought piece about the issue of joint enterprise.
Or when we launched “The Right to Kiss my Wife” — a human rights case around the boundaries of institutional care and the right to private and family life — it meant that the idea of how you can promote your human rights in practice got a lot of airtime.
But great press coverage doesn’t necessarily lead to a huge bump in financial support for a case. As Kickstarter says, in relation to the creative projects on its site, support tends to come from people who are in your network or your network’s network.
2. BBC Broadcasting House is a magical place
We’ve heard out of the corner of our ear the calls for further cuts to the BBC. We admit that we don’t know the background, but we spoke to several people during our fifteen seconds inside Broadcasting House — a professional hair and make-up artist, a technician in the green room — who are all freelance. “It’s been cut down to pieces,” the technician told our founder Julia as she waited for her turn on set. “Not sure where they’d cut from — all they own really is this building”.
And at the same time, being whooshed from one room to another by magically present assistants, thrust in front of cameras “down the line to Salford” and whisked away into a different room and magically picked up by another person to go into a Radio booth, live on air at 5 minutes notice, with someone else on the end of the phone, instructed urgently to put a microphone down the front of one’s dress, on air screens buzzing and presenters pivoting down the runway of the studio, going off-air to have a dab of make-up on their face (men, women, both), pivoting back to engage the great bake-off contestants in conversation one minute, and ex-Olympians the next — what an exhilarating, logistically impressive, and magical place.
3. You don’t get told the questions in advance.
We often wondered how it was that some people come off as being hugely polished on TV and Radio. They must know the questions in advance, we thought. Well, we got that clarified: Nope.
4. What CrowdJustice is doing could be a game-changer
Crowdfunding legal cases is not entirely new; it has happened offline for legal cases for a long time, particularly in environmental cases. And yet crowdfunding online can create a broader ripple effect, reaching people who never knew that a legal decision was being made that might affect them too.
That increases access to the law in a different way from just funding. We think the internet is just at its early potential in terms of demystifying the legal process and making law more accessible in all sorts of ways.
In a way, all the press provided validation that, in the words of Morag Ellis QC in her interview on the Today Programme, that what CrowdJustice is doing could be a “game-changer”.
5. Finally, we might make some enemies
On BBC Northwest, the developers said how unfair it was that donations could come from anywhere — not just from the people directly affected.
This was an interesting comment for a few reasons. First, in environmental cases like the one he was complaining about, donations do tend to come from those most closely affected — those who live near the geographic area affected.
But second, why should legal representation be denied to people with fewer resources who might live in a certain area? Why does it matter if one’s ability to access legal representation comes from local people or people further afield? Isn’t the point, after all, that accessing the law should not only be a privilege of the rich?
What a week! We’re exhausted, but we’d do it again…
Have a legal case that could benefit from crowdfunding?
