What’s your Goal?
A strategic goal should be clear and measurable.
Choosing your strategic goal is the most important choice we make in designing a campaign.
No one strategic goal can solve everything. In order to put our resources to work solving our problems, we have to decide where to focus.
We must ask ourselves: what goal can we work toward that may not solve the whole problem, but will get us well on the way to solving the problem?
Unless we choose a goal to focus on, we’ll risk wasting our precious resources in ways that just won’t add up.
Remember, strategy is nested; a campaign’s ultimate goal, or the “mountain top” goal, is likely not achievable in one attempt.
Instead of chasing after the mountain top goal all the time, we can set smaller, nested goals that help measure incremental progress throughout the campaign.
Nested goals may take place over time (e.g. a local campaign for a municipal living wage policy may start with electing supportive council candidates before moving on to pushing for an actual bylaw), or over a geographic area
(e.g. a provincial election in British Columbia may have up to 85 nested goals, one for each provincial riding a party or group wishes to influence).
An effective strategic goal:
- Is measurable, ideally as a number with units (e.g. people, votes, dollars, hours, etc.).
- Focuses resources on a single strategic outcome.
- Builds the capacity of our constituency.
- Uses a point of leverage: our constituency’s strength or our opposition’s weakness.
- Focuses on a motivational issue that is visible and significant to our constituency.
- Can be replicated or emulated.
Access Resource
This excerpt is from the guide – Organizing: People, Power, Change (PDF), see pg 34
Other Languages
- Spanish – Español – Organizando: Pueblo, Poder y Cambio
- Turkish – Türkçe – Örgütlenme: Halk, Güç, Değişim
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