Euro Vape Race Update & the Heroes of the EFVI campaign (Part One)
At Liberty Flights we think that the European Free Vaping Initiative (EFVI) is massively important so we decided to dedicate a special two-part blog piece to it. Here is part one…
In our last blog, we outlined the likely impact of the upcoming Tobacco Products Directive and it is clear from the forums and social media platforms that the vaping community is feeling angry and frustrated. The details of the legislation are clearly unrelated to the scientific evidence generated so far and represents a challenge to people’s personal freedom of choice. The EFVI presents an opportunity for us to prove how unpopular the TPD is and force the European Parliament to listen to our arguments…
Liberty Flights got behind the initiative fully in March, putting the EFVI link on our homepage sending out e-mails, tweets and Facebook posts to our community and the response has been excellent. We have seen the UK overtake Germany in the vape race since then, which is great. We are also advertising the initiative in our 16 retail outlets and gathering signatures on the spot.
To add a bit of spice, we are even running an in-house competition for the retail outlet that manages to collect the most signatures!
And for the competitive among you, the latest in the Euro Vape Race is as follows…
Well done Spain for jumping from 7th to 5th since our last update on March 10th!
Getting serious again, we can challenge the legislation…..all we need is 1 million signatures. And it’s not going to be easy. We have made a good start, but there is still a mountain to climb and we need to reach the summit by November, otherwise our efforts will have been in vain.
However, before we dig into this further we would first like to show our appreciation for some of the individuals who have been doing a great job in campaigning for the EFVI and we would like to give them a mention here: Andy Oakley (@andieoakley), David Dorn (@Hifistud), Lady Beki Jane (@bekijane), Height (@orchardmax), Andy Morrison (@GMFCfantasy), Fergus Mason (@fergusmason1), Caerulea Sea (@caeruleansea), Sarah J (@twigolet), Yoda 1970 (@prodart501), Andrew Leach (@psionicsoldier), Rhydian Mann (@vapingjuggler), Entropy (@entropy72), Patricia Waters, Federico Arrighetti. We would like to send you a token of our appreciation so if your name is there and you are reading this please get in touch and send us your details so we can mail it out to you.
These are just a few of the many people doing a great job to support the EFVI. If you would like to nominate an individual out there who you think we have missed out, please post their details in the comments section below, or on our Twitter or Facebook page and we will try to give them a mention in the next update.
We have made a great start, but the reality is we are not moving fast enough. It has taken us over 2 months to get 63,000 signatures, but to get to 1 million signatures, we need to be getting almost 30,000 new signatures PER WEEK between now and the 25th November. We know that the paper signatures haven’t been added to the 63,000 total yet, but we clearly need to raise our game if we are to be sure of hitting the target. The reality is that the number of new signatures added each week has been DROPPING every week for the last 3 weeks from 8,000 down to below 4,000 this last week.
It should also be recognised that even if all the countries hit their quotas, it STILL DOESN’T GET US TO 1 MILLION SIGNATURES! The sum of all the individual country quotas comes to just over 500,000, so realistically we should DOUBLE the target quotas for each country to be safe. In that light, the UK should be aiming for 100,000 signatures…
In our next blog post we are going to explore some ideas for things we can do differently to ensure we achieve our goal of 1 million signatures and 7 countries hitting their quota.
We need your ideas!
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Please let us know what you think we can do differently to raise our game. We need your ideas to contribute to that blog piece so please post on our Facebook / Twitter pages and we will add the best ideas and explore ways to make them happen.
Liberty Flights as a business is ready to help where we can and we can also use our influence as a Founding Board member of ECITA to help make things happen at an industry wide level.
Please use the share buttons below to help us get this message out there – we need to reach as many people as possible and gather as many great ideas as we can before we publish part 2 of this blog piece.
Thank you.
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