2. THETHE
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At the end of this session, participants will:
be familiar with the 3 principles of effective
organizing
have a clear understanding of the campaign planning
process
be prepared to use the Matrix in a real-life situation
4. THETHE
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1. Win real, immediate, and tangible improvements in
people’s lives.
2. Change the balance of power
3. Give people a sense of their own power
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• a series of military operations undertaken to achieve a
large-scale objective during a war—and more
peacefully,
• a series of operations energetically pursued to
accomplish a purpose.
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“Without a vision, the people perish” Proverbs, 25:18
Your organization needs a clear goal and a common
vision to avoid distraction and ineffectiveness.
A long-term goal or plan makes people take your
organization more seriously, see how they can fit into
it, and help with recruitment.
9. THETHE
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1. Issue Focus
2. Background Research
3. Campaign Goals
4. Lay of the Land
5. Strategy
6. Campaign Communications
7. Tactics & Timeline
8. Volunteer & Resource Management
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“What issue are we working on?”
Identify the problem and frame the campaign in terms of a solution to the problem.
i.e. instead of saying that your campaign is about global warming, your campaign is about getting your campus to commit to being climate neutral.
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Existing Policies and Programs related to your issue
History of Issue
Campus Climate Challenge Specific Questions:
Has my school done a greenhouse gas inventory?
Does my school have hybrid, efficient, and/or alternative fuel vehicle fleets?
Does/can my school measure energy consumption by dorm?
What new building projects are planned?
What buildings are in need of renovation?
Has the school done anything to increase energy efficiency? What?
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What changes do you want to make with the campaign?
What should the public demand?
What should decision-makers deliver?
What determines a victory?
How will you quantify a success?
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How will the campaign strengthen your group?
How many new activists?
How many new core members?
How many leaders?
Other considerations: coalition partners, media
connections, reputation in the community,
relationships with decision-makers
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Public Audiences:
Your likely supporters
People outside your club, within the general
campus community and the surrounding town who
you trying to reach with your message
Think about areas, demographics, and
constituencies on campus.
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Story:
The way you communicate the problem and proposed
resolution to your targets and public audience.
No more than a few compelling sentences
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Plan Backwards. Start with deadlines and major
events
Be realistic—don’t overschedule yourself
Use the earlier steps of the process to inform your
creative tactics
Maximize your strengths; tailor your strategies based
on your allies’ and opponent’s plan
28. THETHE
MATRIXMATRIX
Let’s take a look at the Tactics & Timeline document,
that you downloaded the same time you downloaded
this presentaiton…
Discuss these three, explain the plan for the rest of the session. You’re going to go over some basic concepts of organizing, then discuss the matrix itself, then try it out in small groups
This embodies a real paradigm shift for the high school and college audiences. HS audience is used to recycling things and picking up trash. They’ve been told their whole lives that they’ll have power when they’re older. You’re suggesting that they have it, and can use it, NOW. The college audience is used to “educating” people. We DO NOT run education campaigns in the Club. Educating people happens along the way to creating social change, it is not the end goal, though. Prepare an example or two to help drive this home for them (from your own experience, or from the Bingaman script, or you can contact Dave Karpf for an old SSC story or two). We’re talking about power here, get them used to that concept. On the 3rd principle, you can bring up the subject of apathy, which usually resonates with the audience. People are apathetic because they either don’t know something affects them or don’t think they can do anything about it. The way we change that is through these campaigns
Bring up the gravity metaphor—the matrix serves as a primary force guiding your organization where it needs to go
Smaller organizations should take on smaller campaigns. Through the process of running your campaign, you are growing your organization through recruitment, leadership development, building relationships with media, other groups, and the public. (these are all things we will talk about more tomorrow during Org Dev training). After a win, your organization is in a better position to take on a bigger campaign. And after the growth and relationship building that happens during _that_ campaign, you are in a position to take on an even bigger campaign. And so on and so on. **Give a personal example of an organization that took on too big a campaign—and what a more appropriate campaign might have been. **Ask what campaigns they’ve worked on.
(this section should take 45min-1 hour depending on the length of the stories you tell) -Issue Focus: Don’t worry too much about this. This is just, “what issue are we working on here.” -Conservation Goals: Clear and quantifiable. How will we know when we’ve won? This is one of the problems with “education campaigns.” You never know when you’re finished, and it ends up burning a lot of people out. Also think short-medium-long term. This is key because environmentalists don’t party enough. When you accomplish a goal, you celebrate, then keep moving. More clear, quantifiable goals = more parties. -Organizational Goals: Refer back to the O&C diagram (also in the Grassroots Manual (pg 11). At the end of any campaign, your group should be stronger than when it began. This is especially important for our groups because of graduation. We’ll discuss during the organizational development session tomorrow how you use campaigns to build organization. But it’s important to set clear goals here as well. -Strengths and Weaknesses: Old SSC story… county-wide high school group (MCSEA) was just getting started. In a discussion of possible activities, one of the leaders suggested “let’s have a march!” She was asked “what do you mean?” “You know, like a big march on Washington.” “about what?” “I don’t know, the environment.” What ABOUT the environment? “Umm, how about endangered species.” Yeah, a few problems here [You can break up the lecture monotony by asking, “anyone see any problems here?”]. First, this was thinking tactics first, strategy last. Second, let’s think resources. They had three students, with $10 between them. This might have some impact on the tactics you choose. [Use this or a similar story to demonstrate why we use this section. We want to spell out what we have and what we lack so we can scale our strategy and tactics accordingly] -Allies and Opponents: Who can you bring in to help counter your weaknesses? Are there groups that would be interested in this issue for other reasons, have other sources of power that they can bring to bear on the issue? Who will oppose you and what do you expect they will do? -Strategic Vehicle: Basic example I like to give here is from the Arctic campaign a few years back. SSC and PIRG were both working on Arctic. We were trying to pass a wilderness bill through congress, they were trying to pass a shareholder resolution through BP/Amoco. Same issue focus, two different strategic vehicles (the bill and the resolution). It’s important to be clear about this so you can be clear on who the targets will be. -Primary targets: This is the person or set of people who can give you what you want. If you cannot identify a clear primary target, you need to go back and rethink your campaign a bit. Someone needs to be able to say yes or no. Be specific. We never target Congress. We target individual Congressmembers. We never target a corporation. We target specific executives who can be held accountable. -Secondary targets: Primary target is the person who can deliver what you want. Secondary targets are the people who can deliver the primary target. Great example from SSC history… We were working in coalition to try to get the California Desert Protection Act through Congress (1994). It was being held up in committee, the chair (from Louisiana) wasn’t letting it come up for a vote. A high school SSCer named Stephanie Jowers had been trying and trying to convince the Congressman. She’d tried phone calls, letters, lobby visits, etc. Then she found out that the Rep’s daughter went to her school. So she convinced the daughter, then the daughter started lobbying her dad over the dinner table. Yeah, it came up for a vote. We won. Usually you won’t find that sort of dues ex machina in your campaign planning, but you want to engage in the same sort of thinking regardless. Who has more power over this person than I do? Can I enlist them to help? -Public audiences: Just use something from the Manual or the Bingaman script here. I usually gloss over it. -Message, Story, and Media outlets: We cover this separately on our media day, so I recommend telling them that, giving them a very brief overview or maybe an example, then moving on. At this point, you’ve been lecturing for a while, want to get them involved again ASAP. -Tactics and Timeline: Now we’re at the fun part. The whole process thus far has been to answer the questions and set the stage so that we can be strategic when designing our tactics. A few additional considerations… 1. Bingaman has a good piece on the two sources of power – pleasure and pain – we want to motivate our targets through pleasure or pain to do the right thing. 2. Think of your tactics as if you had a radio dial. You start quietly, letters, a lobby visit, etc, then build up to more major events as needed. Carl Pope has argued that the best campaigns are the ones you win using the least effort (so that you can then move on to the next campaign – we’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to save the planet). 3. Plan backwards. What sort of deadlines are you looking at? Hearings? Major votes? Schoolyear? Start with those focal points, then plan backwards to make sure you can accomplish everything you want to do. Try not to overschedule yourself, be realistic in your planning. 4. Use the earlier steps of the process to inform your creative tactics. Maximize your strengths, tailor your strategies based on your allies’ and opponents’ plans, think about how you can best influence this particular decision-maker, and these particular secondary targets. -Resource management: You can do this last section in brief. Plan out your budget, think about fundraising possibilities, think about how you’re going to achieve your organizational goals. -Summarize, ask if there are any questions.
Don’t spend too much time on this.
“ Someone” is not a name, “a lot” is not a number, “as quickly as possible” is not a date.
Give them the suggested order for goal creation: Long-term conservation first, then interim, then short-term Then do organizational, starting with long-term, and involving three categories: core members, active members, and finally the general club populace.
Old SSC story… county-wide high school group (MCSEA) was just getting started. In a discussion of possible activities, one of the leaders suggested “let’s have a march!” She was asked “what do you mean?” “You know, like a big march on Washington.” “about what?” “I don’t know, the environment.” What ABOUT the environment? “Umm, how about endangered species.” Yeah, a few problems here [You can break up the lecture monotony by asking, “anyone see any problems here?”]. First, this was thinking tactics first, strategy last. Second, let’s think resources. They had three students, with $10 between them. This might have some impact on the tactics you choose. [Use this or a similar story to demonstrate why we use this section. We want to spell out what we have and what we lack so we can scale our strategy and tactics accordingly]
-Allies and Opponents: Who can you bring in to help counter your weaknesses? Are there groups that would be interested in this issue for other reasons, have other sources of power that they can bring to bear on the issue? Who will oppose you and what do you expect they will do?
Strategic Vehicle: Basic example I like to give here is from the Arctic campaign a few years back. SSC and PIRG were both working on Arctic. We were trying to pass a wilderness bill through congress, they were trying to pass a shareholder resolution through BP/Amoco. Same issue focus, two different strategic vehicles (the bill and the resolution). It’s important to be clear about this so you can be clear on who the targets will be.
This is the person or set of people who can give you what you want. If you cannot identify a clear primary target, you need to go back and rethink your campaign a bit. Someone needs to be able to say yes or no. Be specific. We never target Congress. We target individual members of Congress. We never target a corporation. We target specific executives who can be held accountable. Another tip: It’s better not to just talk the talk to these people, get them on your side, and move on. They have individual strengths to offer, and if you build real relationships with them, when you WIN your campaign they will feel like they are getting something out of it and will want to work with you again. Organizing is about personal connections with your activists…and allies!
Secondary targets are the people who can deliver the primary target. Great example from SSC history… We were working in coalition to try to get the California Desert Protection Act through Congress (1994). It was being held up in committee, the chair (from Louisiana) wasn’t letting it come up for a vote. A high school SSCer named Stephanie Jowers had been trying and trying to convince the Congressman. She’d tried phone calls, letters, lobby visits, etc. Then she found out that the Rep’s daughter went to her school. So she convinced the daughter, then the daughter started lobbying her dad over the dinner table. Yeah, it came up for a vote. We won. Usually you won’t find that sort of dues ex machina in your campaign planning, but you want to engage in the same sort of thinking regardless. Who has more power over this person than I do? Can I enlist them to help?
Note here that people often confuse their allies with their public audiences when they write their matrices. Most people on campus and in other groups are Public Audience, NOT allies. It is your job to MAKE them your allies through your campaign!
We cover this separately on our media day. Give example slogans on a flipchart, like “ Re-Energize ______ U” “ Global Injustice? Not with My Money” “ Build for the Future: Make Dascomb Hall Green” What other ones can they think of?
emphasize that it this is largely conceptual. A story should appeal to values; creating it will help humanize your campaign and make it easy to understand
have them brainstorm, with your own list ready: newspaper, campus radio, facebook, alumni mag, community papers, alternative campus publications
ALWAYS ask yourself as you are considering a tactic: “how will this put pressure on my target?” If you don’t have a good answer, discard it– you need to spend your time and resources strategically! 1. Bingaman has a good piece on the two sources of motivation– pleasure and pain – we want to motivate our targets through pleasure or pain to do the right thing.
Think of your tactics as if you had a radio dial. You start quietly, letters, a lobby visit, etc, then build up to more major events as needed. Carl Pope has argued that the best campaigns are the ones you win using the least effort (so that you can then move on to the next campaign – we’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to save the planet). Here you can have the group brainstorm some tactics. Then taking from the list, put tactics where they belong on this chart.
3. Plan backwards. What sort of deadlines are you looking at? Hearings? Major votes? Schoolyear? Start with those focal points, then plan backwards to make sure you can accomplish everything you want to do. Try not to overschedule yourself, be realistic in your planning. 4. Use the earlier steps of the process to inform your creative tactics. Maximize your strengths, tailor your strategies based on your allies’ and opponents’ plans, think about how you can best influence this particular decision-maker, and these particular secondary targets.
Ask if there are any questions. See if people can cite and describe the steps of the Matrix from memory—call on people at random or get volunteers—try to get a lot of participation
Try it out (40 min) Divide them into small groups (~5 people). Have them take the “campaign plan” they started out with in the opening session and fit it into the Matrix framework, filling in any holes as needed.
Debrief (20 min) No need for full report-outs here. Ask how it went. Was the process useful? Did it generate any new ideas? This is also a good time for a “top lesson” whip. Have each person reveal what the top lesson they’re coming away with is. You can also (or alternatively) do a five-finger shoot on how ready they are to take this back to their own groups. Ask a medium, then a low, then a high-responder why that is. End by reminding them that we’ll have an opportunity to construct a full campaign plan at the end of the week as well. Close with whatever core theme you feel is most appropriate.
