“Civocracy is a creative agency and a civic tech platform specialised in civic engagement. Which means we equip organisations like municipalities, NGOs and now companies with participative tools and strategies to onboard their community, their members, into their mission.”
Pahud believes that Civocracy fulfils an urgent need in society. “I have a weird obsession which is how to transform a normal citizen into an engaged one. To fuel civic engagement, there are two routes to take. The first is to use bottom-up participation, since top-down communication doesn’t work anymore. The second is that people are story animals. They need great stories to make sense of what’s happening in a complex, changing world and take action. We wanted to build an online platform to gather all actors of our society, not only politicians and citizens, but civil society and companies, so they could debate and take action on the matters they care about. So this is how Civocracy was born, and today it’s a civic tech platform.”
Civocracy has seen impressive grown since its inception. “Over 10 years, we’ve worked with about 200 governments and launched 300 consultations around public policies. We worked with a lot of NGOs and we work more and more with mission driven companies, because we think they are amazing change makers. So for them, we created a new approach that we call cooperative marketing that relies on three main pillars. The first is cooperation, how those companies can team up and mutualise their resources to get the same visibility that only big corporations can afford. The second is creating new narratives to find audiences that are not usually drawn to sustainability and other societal topics. And the third is to leverage their client communities, to make them ambassadors for their mission.”
And Pahud says the company has ambitious plans for the future. “We are focusing on mission driven companies and cooperative marketing. In cooperation with the German Federal Ministry of Climate Protection, we’re launching five campaigns gathering those mission driven companies around topics people care about – eating, dressing up, traveling, parenting – things that are part of our daily life. Our goal is to make companies who work on those issues cooperate to amplify their message, to help new audiences adopt their solutions and in the long term, protect our daily life, planet and democracy.”
