This summer, we asked our 2000 supporters to take a survey so that we can reflect on what we should do together to achieve a  fairer, safer, more democratic money and banking system. Here is what you told us.

Positive Money Europe is a people-powered movement. We want to bring people’s voices into the high-level discussion about how our financial system works, to ensure that financial institutions like the European Central Bank work for the interest of the many. 

With 10 years of experience in the UK, the Positive Money team has found that doing annual surveys of our supporter base is a critical exercise in making sure the priorities of the office team are aligned with the priorities of our supporters. It also allows the team to learn more about who are our supporters, and in this way, it gives us direction for our work as well as many useful tips on how to improve the campaign and communication. 

We thought the one year anniversary of Positive Money Europe’s creation would be a good time to carry out our first supporter survey; which 270 of our supporters took. I’ll now cover some of the most important findings from the survey.

Knowing what our supporters care most about is key to us. We believe all these areas are important and closely interconnected, so we’ll continue working on all of them. 

These results give us an even stronger motivation to keep working on the environmental dimensions of monetary policy. But they also remind us that helicopter money is a key proposal and we need to push more for it.

The results corresponds broadly with what the office team has been focusing on in the past months, so it’s reassuring to see that we’re aligned with the views of our supporters. In fact, it is somehow unusual that “lobbying” (which is usually thought of as a rather unpopular activity) came out first. This suggests that our supporters see and understand the effectiveness of our lobby work.

And here’s how you – Positive Money Europe supporters – want to get involved:

Thank you for offering your help! This is a people-powered campaign, so we can’t achieve our objectives without you involved. We’re counting on you to spread the word by sharing our articles, videos etc. on social media and via emails. Thanks so much to all of you who are willing to do more – write articles, donate, translate, organize, volunteer… We appreciate it very much and we’ll get in touch with you when we will need this specific help.

Here you can see how we are looking as a community of Positive Money Europe supporters:

As you can see, a weakness of Positive Money Europe is that our network lacks diversity. This is an important thing to change. It’s very male-dominated and younger people are underrepresented in our community. For the campaign to be really successful, it needs to be diverse in terms of gender, age, background etc. We need the energy and enthusiasm of the young generation.

Together we need to work hard to reach out to younger and more diverse audiences to make our campaign stronger and relevant, our range of thinking broader, and ensure our reforms speak and work in the interest of the whole of society.

As we expected, people following our work come with different levels of knowledge about monetary policy, money creation, central banks etc. – from those who are completely new to the topic to experts who write and teach about it. As you can understand, this is also a bit of a challenge for us in our communication – in our newsletters, articles, videos, social media posts – because we need to ensure that everyone can understand what we’re talking about while at the same time not being too simplistic. We will try to do our best in ensuring that.

Here you can see how our community is composed in terms of work and interest in politics:

And finally, we were also very curious to see how people position themselves in the broader discussion about the Eurozone since most people interacting with us on social media are often very negative about the Eurozone. However, the survey results show a much more nuanced picture, with a strong majority (72%) of our supporters saying they are in favour of the Euro, while only a tiny majority (6%) saying they want to leave the Euro now.

Thank you again to all of you who completed the survey! The Positive Money Europe team is now working to make some of these plans a reality. Be sure you’re signed up to our mailing list so we can keep you posted!