Campaigning Summit: Switzerland and Vienna part ways
Business Campaigning Switzerland, the organizer of the Campaigning Summit Switzerland, terminated its contract with the Campaigning Bureau Vienna on January 9, 2015; the contract governed their collaboration on hosting the Campaigning Summit in Zurich.
Switzerland’s first campaigning agency, founded in 1997, cited the inability to agree on a new name as the reason. Philipp Maderthaner, the founder of the Campaigning Summit Vienna, reportedly insisted on the concept of city summits, which, according to the organizers in Switzerland, doesn’t make sense there. The rift occurred when the Vienna-based agency took over the Swiss organizers’ Facebook page and stripped them of administrative rights for nearly two weeks.
«Switzerland is too small for city summits, and a name like »Campaigning Summit Zurich« tends to discourage people from Basel and Bern from attending the Campaigning Summit. To bring the event—which we have heavily subsidized up to now—into the black, the name change was essential,» said organizers Peter Metzinger and Lorena Valentini Metzinger in a statement. The name change, as well as numerous updates to the concept, stem from an analysis of feedback and numerous discussions with participants. “Since the contract with Vienna did not give us the freedom we need to address the participants’ needs, we had no choice but to terminate it in the participants’ best interest,” said Mattia Bütikofer, who developed the new concept.
According to the contract, the local organizer bears the full risk, while the Campaigning Bureau Vienna receives all the data.
