THEY'RE making a list and they are checking it twice. And they've got a very clear idea of who they think is naughty and nice. Stop Funding Hate, which campaigns to persuade companies not to advertise in newspapers that the organisation claims "spread fear and division", had a major success last week. They persuaded stationery chain Paperchase to stop advertising in the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail has responded in exactly the fashion you'd expect, calling the campaign "sinister" and an "arrogant, tiny minority who want to impose their views on us all". But whatever you think of the campaign, you have to admit it's been effective, as the newspaper's advertising department will surely attest.

Now Stop Funding Hate is targeting John Lewis in the run-up to Christmas. They've made a parody video of the firm's festive advert from last year, featuring the same dog. This time, Buster is sad because big firms are still advertising with the Mail, Express and other newspapers which "spread fear and division".

John Lewis are being robust in their response for the moment. They say: “Withdrawing advertising on the basis of editorial coverage would be inconsistent with our democratic principles, which include freedom of speech and remaining apolitical.”

Every campaigner knows that you win some, you lose some. The important thing is to understand why and adapt your approach accordingly. Now, I suspect that Stop Funding Hate may not yet be done with John Lewis – there are still 28 shopping days til Christmas, after all.

For my money, their Stop Funding Hate John Lewis video is a clever idea. It uses a core principle of campaigns aimed at companies: taking their imagery and messaging and turning it back on them. Producing high-quality video, images and text is a key factor in running a successful campaign that involves digital media. That means being able to convey your arguments in a way that is quickly and easily understood by people who are not as close to an issue as you are.

The greatest video-based campaign I've ever seen was one produced by Greenpeace to persuade Lego to drop a partnership with Shell. The beautifully shot 105 second film showed an Arctic landscape built from Lego - complete with polar bears and Santa Claus - being slowly drowned in oil, with a soundtrack of a mournful rendition of the song Everything Is Awesome from the Lego movie. It got more than 8 million views on YouTube. Lego dropped the partnership with Shell.

Another key success factor, especially for a campaign aimed at a commercial organisation, is making sure that a good number of the people contacting them look like their customers. This is the same principle as making sure that people contacting MPs or MSPs about a campaign come from their constituencies. Again, having fresh interesting content and messages that make sense to people not already invested in the campaign is crucial here.

The trick for Stop Funding Hate will be to make sure that the people tweeting at John Lewis about the campaign come across as the kind of people who shop at John Lewis. And tweet they will, because Twitter is one of the key channels for campaigning. Politicians and companies make great use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms to tell us about their achievements and the services. But these are two-way means of communication – and that means that politicians and companies can be made to listen, in a very public way.

So we've identified some of the key ingredients: attention-grabbing content, straightforward messaging and a two-way medium of communication. There's something missing from that mix, though, if you want have a really successful digital campaign: lots and lots of people.

It’s a myth that digital campaigning is just about social media. Digital campaigning is about people, just like every other form of campaigning. If you are not able to persuade lots of people to lend their attention and their time to your campaign then you will have a very sticky time.

I work for 38 Degrees, heading up our Scottish operation. We are a campaign organisation based on the idea that when lots of people take small actions together, those add up to real change. A lot of our campaigns involve a strong digital element. Quite a few readers may have received the odd email from us, for instance. In fact, more than 400,000 people have taken some kind of campaign action with us in Scotland in the past three months, across a huge range of issues. A lot of that is online – but a lot of it isn't.

Many of our campaigns start with an online petition. The largest Scottish-focused petition we have running at the moment is calling for control over devolved powers to be repatriated from the EU to Holyrood – not Westminster – after Brexit. More than 40,000 people in Scotland have signed this, making it one of the biggest we've ever run here.

Now, there can be some sniffiness about online petitions. Some try to dismiss them as virtue signalling or too easy to take part in. Actually, at 38 Degrees – and many other campaign organisations that use the same tactic – they are just one part of a package of campaign actions designed to engage people and help them have impact.

What is dismissed as "just clicktivism" is actually making it as easy as possible for people to get involved in politics. For lots of people, signing a petition is the first step to taking part in a campaign that changes the law, or forces a business to change its practices. And I do wonder about those who are sniffy about others signing petitions. In 1838 would they have looked down their noses at the Chartists and said: "Well, they're not proper campaigners. All they've done is pop their names on a bit of paper ..."?

Far from shying away from making involvement in campaigns easy, we relish it. 38 Degrees is built on the concept that democracy works better the more of us who get involved.

We have a deliberately low bar to being a member of 38 Degrees. To be counted as a member all you need to do is take action with us. You don't have to to sign a pledge. You don't have to agree with a policy platform. You don't have to give us any money. You are under no obligation to take part in further campaigns and you can unsubscribe any time. And once you take an action with us you’ll be asked about what kind of campaigns we should carry out and what direction we might take.

We take that latter part very seriously indeed. 38 Degrees is member-led. In practice what that means is we are guided by what members tell us in responses to surveys or test campaigns and responses to emails.

I've worked as a journalist and I've worked in Scottish politics. I've never worked anywhere that has given me as much freedom to experiment and innovate as 38 Degrees has. There are very few rules. But the absolute ironclad one is that one about being member-led and if the members say we don't do something then we simply don't do it.

There is no wiggle room. Often I will find myself in the situation of having created (what I think is) a top-notch, super-duper campaign strategy – and then, after testing it with members and finding no appetite for it, having to toss it into the bin.

We are entirely funded by member donations – tens of thousands of people are kind enough to support our work. There are no big donors holding the purse strings. There's no party affiliation. We are beholden to nobody but our members.

As for the charge of "just clicktivism", for many people, signing (or starting) a petition with us or another organisation is just the start of the journey. As well as petitions, we do events, stunts, contacting politicians, meeting MPs and MSPs face to face, surveys and opinion polls, people-powered policy pickers. We also crowdfund research and investigations.

To take that devolution campaign I mentioned as an example, as well as signing a petition, 38 Degrees members have written to their MPs, met their MPs, taken part in an in-depth survey for a submission to a House of Commons committee and crowd-funded for constitutional legal advice. We've made and shared videos, memes and guides.

That mix is quite usual. Along with many others we were part of the successful campaign against fracking in Scotland. More than 23,000 people signed a petition calling for this risky form of energy extraction to be banned for good in Scotland. But for many people who signed, that was just the start of their involvement. We showed up outside the Scottish Parliament. We commissioned research to highlight the potential risks of fracking to Scotland's whisky industry, our tourism sector and employees' health. We crowdfunded for the Ferrett investigative platform to speak to people in Pennsylvania who'd been affected by fracking. And we contacted MSPs in great numbers.

I won't pretend that all politicians relish emails arriving by their hundreds in their inboxes. But then again they are being contacted by their constituents, the people they work for. I have found that many MPs and MSPs respond really well to this kind of dialogue, even if they don't agree with what our members are asking. They are certainly willing to listen and learn about the level of public feeling.

Using a mix of tactics, 38 Degrees members have had demonstrable impact on issues as diverse as ScotRail's performance, mental health and land reform.

We also provide an online platform for people to start their own campaigns. These can range from campaigns to save local bus stops or to protect wild spaces or to force companies to treat their employees properly. It gives people easy access to tools to campaign for real change in their communities.

Not all of them are right for us. Last month a petition was started on our website calling for historian Neil Oliver to be removed as president of the National Trust for Scotland. We took it down because our terms and conditions do not allow for petitions calling for non-elected people to be sacked from their jobs.

That shows one of the more challenging aspects about mass campaigns. When organisations are mobilising tens of thousands of people they have no control over what those people say or do. Anyone who has spent three seconds on social media knows that there are bampots and zoomers out there. But they are a tiny minority. Social media allows us to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people campaigning on an issue hundreds of miles away.

38 Degrees goes to great pains to emphasise that being polite is a really effective way of communicating. But at the end of the day, each individual is in charge of what they say or do with a Tweet or Facebook post.

To be fair, this is not entirely new. Anyone who has ever attended any kind of protest march will have seen people coming along whose views aren't entirely "on message", be it the Clown Army or someone with a fixation on chemtrails. Having a range of voices – from fringe to centrist – is a price worth paying for democracy being opened up to as many of us as possible to have our say.

Mass campaigning has always had the potential for great political power. Now, thanks to the internet, it’s easier than ever to work together to stand up to vested interests and those who would sacrifice the rest of us for profit.

Politics is too important to leave to the people who have always done it. As a society – and as a planet – we face problems that require all of us to get involved if we are going to find solutions that actually work. That’s not to do down politicians or political activists. But we have to recognise that there is untapped wisdom and energy among people whose voices aren’t yet heard.

Campaigning has always been about reaching out to people. That will continue to be the case, on the doorstep or at the keyboard.

Stewart Kirkpatrick is head of Scotland for 38 Degrees