Planning (Campaign Toolkit)

From Democracywiki

This page is part of the Campaign Toolkit.

1 Introduction
2 Overall Strategic Objective
3 Tactical Targets
4 Your Key Messages
5 Target Audiences
6 Methods Of Delivery
7 Timing
8 Evaluation Of Success
9 A Guide to Action
10 Campaign Planning Checklist
11 Case Studies
12 Links

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Introduction

The essential component of a campaign is a plan.

Without it, your campaign will lack focus, squander resources, burn out your activists, and suffer from what the military call 'mission drift'. A plan helps target your resources, ensures that all your volunteers are pulling in the same direction, gives a shared understanding of what you are attempting to achieve, and gives you a compass by which to steer your activities. Advance planning and preparation can save valuable time and money as the campaign develops.

Your plan should be flexible, and allow for unforeseen developments and opportunities. The best campaigns are those which can quickly react to events and turn the unexpected to their advantage. Your strategy should be soundly worked out, but your tactics should be flexible and adaptable.

The elements of your campaign plan should include:

Overall strategic objective
Tactical targets
Your key messages
Target audiences
Methods of delivery
Timing
Evaluation of success

In other words:

What you want to achieve
What the steps are along the way to achieving it
What you want to say
Who you want to say it to
How you want to say it
When and for how long you want to say it
And how you know if you've been successful

It is worth looking at each of these elements in some detail:-

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Overall Strategic Objective

This is your final goal - the target which unites your supporters, spurs on your activists, gives your campaign its 'personality' to the outside world, and which provides the yardstick against which all your activities should be measured.

It might be a grand objective, such as the global disarmament of nuclear weapons, or a localised one such as preventing the closure of a local branch of a high-street bank. If you choose the grand objective, you should ensure that your tactical targets are realistic and achievable.

You may be able to attract support for visionary objectives, but without immediate targets which can be achieved quickly, your supporters will soon evaporate. Like Monty Python's Popular Front of Judea, if your campaign objective is akin to 'the dismantling of the Roman Empire by Wednesday week', you will lack credibility.

The overall strategic objective might become part of your campaign's written communications. You might want to codify it into a snappy 'mission statement' or statement of aims, so that everyone clearly understands what you want to achieve.

Without such shared understanding, you will find that your volunteers and activists are working to different agendas, and that you public profile will be confused with your target audiences. The overall objective reflects your campaign's values and provides the answer to the question 'what is your campaign for?'

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Tactical Targets

To give a campaign vibrancy and life, you should aim for some tactical targets which can unite your supporters and give your campaign direction and focus.

In business jargon this is known as going for 'the low-hanging fruit' or gaining 'quick wins'. It means that the morale of your campaigners is given a boost by small but significant victories, and you gain profile and enhanced reputation.

Examples might include achieving a target for fundraising, or for a mailout or leaflet drop, or securing a key pledge of support from a politician, or winning a goal which puts you on the way to your overall objective.

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Your Key Messages

Your key messages are what you want to say. These should be short, snappy and memorable, and devised to engender as widespread an understanding as possible. They should avoid all jargon or rhetoric, and be written in everyday language. You might want to show them to a twelve-year old to see if they pass the comprehension test.

Your audiences, even those directly effected by your campaign, have little time for lengthy documents, manifestos or lists of demands. Your key messages must be short and understandable to busy people with many other distractions and competing influences. Your campaign may be the most important thing in the lives of your activists, but for the rest of the population the same is not true.

These key messages can be boiled down into 'soundbites' for use in the media. Just as Lenin condensed the whole of his political theory into the soundbite 'Bread, Peace, and Land' or campaigners in the 1980s struggled for 'Jobs not Bombs' or 'Coal not Dole', so you should aim to create a campaign lexicon which is equally concise and robust.

Repetition is essential, throughout all your literature, interviews and speeches, so that the message is reinforced through all forms of communication. In politics this is called 'Staying On Message'. If you find yourself repeating the same messages for the thousandth time, console yourself with the thought that someone, somewhere is hearing them for the very first time.

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Target Audiences

To be successful, you must decide who your campaign is aimed at. Your audiences will fall into several categories, and each will need a different style of approach, and for different purposes. Your activists need to hear different messages and be treated differently from sponsors, or journalists or politicians. The people taking the decisions which will determine your campaign's success or failure might number only a handful, and possibly even one, but the numbers of people who influence the decision-makers might number thousands or millions. A consumer boycott involving millions of people across Western Europe might be aimed ultimately at a company Board of just ten people.

Your audiences might include:-

Activists
Supporters
Potential supporters
Opponents
The media
Third-parties
Politicians
'Influencers'
'Deciders'

Each of these groups should be carefully researched and their views and motivations clearly understood.

Some of your target audiences are the decision-makers who can influence the outcome of your campaign, others are the influencers whose views the deciders listen to. Other audiences will be the media, who will help you reach deciders, or third-parties with whom you can make common cause.

It is even worth communicating with your opponents, because their opposition might be based on misconception or inaccurate information about your campaign.

Accuracy is vital - be sure to spell names correctly, get peoples' titles right, and ensure that you are writing to the right person, not the person who left the job three years ago.

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Methods Of Delivery

How you communicate is as important as what you communicate. The methods of delivery you chose will depend on your budget, your campaign's style and approach, and the size and place of your audiences.

Most forms of mass communications are prohibitively expensive - television and newspaper advertising costs tens of millions of pounds. That is why most campaigns, run on limited resources, depend on imaginative techniques for 'low-cost/no-cost' communications which allow you to punch above your weight.

Successful campaigns have been pitched against global companies or even countries and won, despite being massively out-resourced by their enemies. The methods of communication must be appropriate to the audiences you seek to reach. Language and graphics must be accessible to all, including people with disabilities or people without English as a first language.

But you should also be aware that certain forms of communication are ineffective with certain groups. For example Cabinet Ministers are virtually immune to being shouted at by demonstrators - that comes with the job - but will listen to a well-made argument soberly put.

Traditional forms of communication such as leaflets are poor ways to reach people - in urban areas letter boxes are stuffed with mountains of unsolicited material advertising pizza, minicabs, decorators and so on, so your campaign leaflet might be fighting for attention alongside a great deal of competition. People are becoming immunised to 'junk mail' and now junk e-mail, or 'spam.'

Public meetings are usually poorly attended. The old-style campaign is in danger of extinction - and those which prosper will be those which use imagination, lively attention-grabbing methods and the latest technology.

Low-resource campaigns may use the techniques of 'guerrilla marketing' to promote their cause.

These might include fly-posting, attaching stickers and posters to 'street furniture' like lamp-posts and at zebra crossings, or by using graffiti to change the meaning of other's poster ads. Anti-smoking campaigns, or campaigns against cars have used these techniques to great effect. You should be aware that you may be committing a criminal offence if you engage in this style of activity.

The campaign toolkit includes:

Media relations
On-line communications
Advertising
Direct mail
Stunts
Public meetings
Street activity
Demonstrations, marches and pickets
Lobbying and briefings
Leaflets and posters
Guerrilla marketing
Direct action

Part of your planning must include consideration of what kind of techniques you chose to communicate with, and the appropriate balance between different techniques.

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Timing

Campaigns need a beginning, middle and end. A launch event affords the opportunity for media activity and a spurt of campaigning work. You might decide that your campaign will keep going until your objectives have been met.

If so, you need to identify phases of campaigning, and campaigns within your campaign to keep people interested and involved. Some campaigns give themselves a deadline, such as the Jubilee 2000 campaign. It is important for your volunteers and sponsors, as well as your target audiences, to know when your campaign intends to start and finish.

The calendar is a guide to activity. For example, August and late December/early January are bad times for calling demonstrations, public meetings or organising a petition because people are on holiday or off work for the festive season, but these are excellent times for getting stories in the media because there is less 'news' going on.

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Evaluation Of Success

Your evaluation of success is rooted in your campaign aims and goals, but can only be focussed on smaller tasks and activities. What is important is to have a shared understanding within the campaign and its activists of what the criteria for success are, so that people stay motivated and focussed.

The criteria for success might be simple - such as a certain number of people who sign a high street petition, or a particular amount of money raised, or the thousandth envelop posted. These small milestones give the opportunity for celebration and a shared sense of achievement.

But evaluation is not just about the things that went well. If a particular event is a wash-out or a direct mail letter does not receive a high response level, you need to find out why. Assessment of failure is an important way to ensure that you get it right next time.

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A Guide to Action

A campaign plan is essential to success, but a campaign plan which gathers dust or is used to prop up a wobbly table in the campaign HQ is pointless. Your plan should be a living document, being endlessly updated and tested against reality. It is a guide to action, which is regularly discussed and improved.

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