Madrid, 21 May 2014 – The campaign to get future members of the European Parliament to commit to support the regulation and transparency of lobbying has been a huge success in Spain with 116 MEP candidates signing the pledge to “stand-up for citizens and democracy against the excessive lobbying influence of banks and big business.”

20th May, Brussels - 5711 european candidates in a database, 11 NGO defending different interests and 6 month of collaborative and hard work! This is the result a EP2014.org. A database that relies on CiviCRM, an open source CRM, which is already used by several of NGOs across the world.

What is EP2014 ?

Concord is the European confederation of Relief and Development NGOs and is a partner of EP2014.org project. A common platform supporting NGO campaigns for 2014 European elections taking place between the 22th May and 25th May. 

Concord recently launched  their politically independent campaign "EuropeWeWant". A campaign that encourages a debate on achieving a fairer Europe at home and abroad at the upcoming European Parliament elections..

Three main calls have been set up :

Matilda worked on finding the Swedish candidates for the European elections in may. So far, she has been the most active participant from all the other civil society participants working on EP2014.org and managed to find the contact details of 300 candidates in sweden. A short inteview describes how she proceeded and gives us advices.

Q: Could you introduce you and rfsl?

My name is Matilda Funkquist and Im an intern at RFSL in Stockholm. RFSL is the organisation for homosexual, bisexual, transgender and queer rights in Sweden.