Planning a Campaign

Planning a Campaign

Lesson Objectives

• Learners will understand the planning stages of an issue-based campaign
• Learners will be able to follow these stages in their own organizing
• Learners will be able to utilize the tools provided in their own organizing

Image: Adobe

Stages of a Campaign

•Choose the Issues and Develop a Strategy

Stage 1

•Open Communication with the Decision Maker

Stage 2

•Announce the Campaign

Stage 3

Stage 4

•Begin Outreach Activities

•Stage Direct Encounters with Decision Makers

Stage 5

•Organization Building

Stage 6

•Win or Regroup

Stage 7

Choose the issue and develop a strategy

• Bring together a group of people united by a shared problem
• Decide on the issue: the solution to the problem(s)
• Deciding the issue will also decide the scope of your campaign
• A smaller issue will have fewer supporters, but might be more immediately winnable
• Bigger issues will have broader support, but you’ll be facing up against more powerful opposition

Issue criteria

• Result in a real improvement in people’s lives
• Make people aware of their own organized power
• Alter the relations of power
• Be worthwhile
• Be winnable
• Be widely felt
• Be deeply felt
• Be easy to understand

Issue criteria

• Have a clear decision maker
• Have a clear time frame that works for you
• Be non-divisive
• Build leadership
• Set your organization up for the next campaign
• Have a pocketbook angle
• Raise money
• Be consistent with your values and vision

Developing a strategy

As defined in Organizing for Social Change, a strategy is:

•“a method of gaining enough power to make a government or corporate official do something in the public’s interest that he or she does not otherwise wish to do”

They also describe it as “the design of the campaign combined with an analysis of power relationships.”

Midwest Academy Strategy Chart

After choosing your issue, fill in this chart as a guide to developing strategy. Be specific. List all the possibilities.

Midwest Academy Strategy Chart

After choosing your issue, fill in this chart as a guide to developing strategy. Be specific. List all the possibilities.

Midwest Academy Strategy Chart

After choosing your issue, fill in this chart as a guide to developing strategy. Be specific. List all the possibilities.

Midwest Academy Strategy Chart

After choosing your issue, fill in this chart as a guide to developing strategy. Be specific. List all the possibilities.

Midwest Academy Strategy Chart

After choosing your issue, fill in this chart as a guide to developing strategy. Be specific. List all the possibilities.

Midwest Academy Strategy Chart

After choosing your issue, fill in this chart as a guide to developing strategy. Be specific. List all the possibilities.

Developing a strategy

• The final part of developing your strategy is your timeline
• It’s helpful to make an actual timeline, either physical or digital, that your group can reference
• Timelines help you prioritize what work you’re doing and when

Open communications with the decision maker

• As part of developing your strategy, you should now have a decision maker or multiple decision makers that control your issue
• Get in contact with these decision makers and make your case – if they don’t give you what you want, they become targets of your campaign

Open communications with the decision maker

• Decision makers are always people – the problem might be institutional, but when you break them down every institution is made up of people
• Part of your strategy is identifying specific people in that institution that have the power to change things
• Individuals are weak points in the institution – people have motivations of their own, even as they operate as parts of an institution. These motivations are where campaigns can be effective

Announce the campaign

• When your organization is ready, it’s time to go public with the campaign
• Timing is important, as you can capitalize on current events or media focus
• Media events are effective as campaign beginnings – press conferences, the publishing of a study or documentary on your issue, etc.

Resources

• Strategy Chart -- filled in and blank

• Checklist for Choosing an Issue

• Organizing for Social Change, 4th Edition