Communication by interest groups within the European multi-level policy and decision-making system is one the principal means of influencing the legislative environment for both business and the multitude of non-governmental interests. Competition between interest groups is fierce and the campaign community has implemented numerous successful advocacy campaigns. ‘Traditional’ campaign tools and strategies such as face-to-face lobbying meetings, print publications and public events such as demonstrations and media events have historically been key to successes. Successes often measured in compromises between the interest of industry and civil society representatives. E-newsletters, social networks, e-petitions, e-demonstrations, campaign websites and email letter writing campaigns represent examples of the generations of new technologies used by campaign and lobbying groups. Using survey data from 65 interest groups active at multiple levels of governance we explore the importance of and reasons justifying the use of new technologies for different audiences. Tools are benchmarked for their importance relative to each other as well as the reasons for their selection or not for different audiences. Key preliminary conclusions show that interest groups favour traditional tools above new and social media in general, but that social media have joined traditional tools for use with supporters, the public and in particular the youth demographic. New and in particular social media is perceived as of below average importance for European decision-makers and above average for national decision-makers. Many ‘new’ technologies have joined ‘traditional’ tools, leaving social media as the more untested technology. Finally cost has a bearing on the adoption of these technologies, but for opposite reasons; namely cost efficiency for some versus adoption costs for others. Survey conclusions would benefit from a larger, more multi-national and multi-lingual data set coupled with repeated surveys spread over several years allowing for trend identification.
