It’s time to update your campaign strategies: Leveraging your power to win

In early March, over lunch with a highly strategic and clear-eyed leader, we got to talking about campaigning in the shifting sands of the political landscape in both the US and Canada right now.  

Their organization had been toiling to update their campaign plans and they were feeling solid. Solid. A rare and delicious feeling for a campaigner. We savored it. But then, after another bite, we went there, you know, THERE: “What would it take to throw you off your game?”  

“Well, if the US administration started messing with NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), that’d be a problem.” 

The very next day, we woke up to this headline: The White House scraps decades worth of rules for how to conduct reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. 

Collective. Game. Thrown. 

In our work toward a sustainable and just future, finding the red thread – the throughline between current and desired states – can feel more elusive than ever. But the truth is, those of us doing this work have almost always been understaffed, underfunded, and under-resourced.

The movements that have come before us offer the answer: strategy is our secret sauce.

Keeping your focus on the long game, building strong coalitions, developing messaging that harnesses collective longing, evaluating and pivoting, relentless discipline, and seizing of opportunities: these are the hallmark of successful campaigns.

In Canada and the US today, we are experiencing political realities that were built on decades of deep, long-game strategic planning, scaffolded by the discipline to see them through.  

Are your organization’s campaigns geared up to win? Now is the time to reflect and refresh. 

Five steps to building powerful campaign strategies:  

1. What are you fighting for?

Zoom out from that rambunctious to-do list and unending inbox and get a handle on what you’re fighting for: go to the mountaintop.  

Start by defining success. Keep it simple by asking, “what would it take for us to kick up our feet and retire from this work?” It’s clarifying and crystalizes  your goal.

Your objectives are the work you’re going to do to achieve your goal. For example, if your goal is to protect critical forests in your province/state, you may bring legislative power, or community organizing, or direct action. If legislation is your jam, then your objective could be: we’re going to lobby to pass this bill to stop clearcut logging in this region.

2. Building and leveraging your power.

A campaign is all about using what you have to get what you want. That’s it. And so, you assess: 

• Your decisionmaker(s) & core audiences: Who has the power to make your objective happen? Campaigns are won by deep diligence, research, and resisting assumptions. In the case of a bill, your decisionmaker could be your legislature. But within that, which committee(s)? What one or two people can swing the vote your way? Get to know them – and get very specific. What do they care about? Who influences them? Of course, their constituents, but what about their family, their friends, their alma mater, their local community, their ski pals? What are the demands on them and how do you ensure that your campaign ask is actually doable in their world? For example, say you want a public leader to stop logging, but logging provides 4,500 jobs. Even if that leader agrees with you, they’re in a bind. How do you create a path for them to get to yes? How do you create social support for them to meet your demand? 

Be hard on the issues and soft on the people: successful campaigns are ripe with stories of someone on the inside of ‘the opposition’ who agreed with the campaign’s demands but needed the campaign to provide the impetus for change.  

• Strategies: Strategies reflect your careful analysis of what will make your decisionmaker do what’s needed to achieve your objective. They’re your best thinking on what will actually bring about the change you seek. Every tactic you build must be informed by your strategies, Beware of confirmation bias! You may be great at getting 30,000 emails to your decisionmaker, but will they care? Is that what moves them? 
• Your tactics: These are the visible actions you’ll take to bring your strategies to life. For example, building a list of 30,000 supporters is great, but what you do with that list? How will you leverage what you’ve built for impact? Will you deliver those signatures in-person with press attending? A rally? An ad? These are the tactics. 
• Who do you need at your side to win? Who cares about your issue? Who will it impact? Who else is working on it, or on issues that could help bring power? We generally go further together, and we ignore potential allies – and opponents – at our peril. TREC’s Picking Good Partners and Partnership Prioritization webinars are a helpful place to start.  
• What’s going to get in your way? Pregame every possible person, organization, article, event etc. that could work against you, then plan for them. This can be oddly satisfying. And always useful. TREC’s Predicting and Overcoming Obstacles Throughout Your Campaign webinar is a great resource for this.

3. Messaging to win: 

You win when you talk to your audiences, focusing on what motivates and means something to them. You lose when you talk to yourself and your people.  

Your main message should be simple and resonate with the people you’re trying to motivate.  It needs to communicate a story that people can follow and motivates them to take action. Sharing lots of data and information can be hard to resist but generally overwhelms – and even backfires, leading people to shut down. So KISS it: Keep It Simple, Smarty. Deploy 55 minutes of emotion to 5 minutes of fact, and repeat, repeat, repeat. You’ll know you’re on track when you’re so sick of your message that even your dog rolls its eyes when you say it.  For more on action-inspiring storytelling, check out this TREC webinar. 

Celebrate success, early and often. Everyone likes to be on the winning team – it’s motivating. Momentum builds power, so celebrate the small steps. Legendary organizer Marshall Ganz says campaigns should “meet, act, and celebrate.” We’re generally not great at the later, but don’t be shy!   

4. Evaluating, pivoting and surfing the backlash:

The best campaigns are constantly assessing the field of play, evaluating what tactics are and are not working, pivoting, testing new ones, and surfing the inevitable backlash. An industry association comes to town and hands out swag and runs a smear campaign on you? How can you make hay about it, diminishing their message while building your momentum?  

Make time in your campaign plans for emergence, for pouncing on opportunities and taking advantage of the inevitable challenges… also known as ch-opportunities. Ensuring campaigners and organizers have up to 20% of their time and funds allocated for emergence should be integrated into workplans. 

For a deeper dive on campaign strategy, including templates, exercises, and examples, join our campaign strategy webinar this fall. Keep your eye on your inbox later this summer for an invitation.

Here’s to fortifying our collective power,

–Kristi

Adapting to Win: Predicting and Overcoming Obstacles in Your Campaign

Have you ever worked on a really significant campaign where everyone got along the whole time, your opponents played nice, and everything went just according to plan? I’ll bet none of us have.

All too often when we plan, we skip the critical step of preparing for the inevitable bumps in the road. In this webinar we will introduce common internal conflicts, coalition dynamics, and opposition attacks. By taking the time to think through these inevitabilities we can prepare, prevent, and even use some of them to our advantage.

Pre-Mortem Exercise: Predict, Prevent, and Plan…Smarter

The Pre-Mortem is a planning exercise that helps identify challenges and vulnerabilities in campaign plans by imagining the worst conceivable outcomes or failures. Meaning “before death,” this activity engages your team in collective, speculative brainstorming and reflection so that you can learn from potential difficulties and failures before they ever happen. Use this Pre-mortem planning worksheet near the end of a campaign planning phase but before you launch so that you can leverage any insights from this activity and make adjustments accordingly.