Strategy and Planning

How to Plan to Meet Your Goals

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.” ~ Cesar Chavez

Keys to Strategy and Planning

Here are our main keys to strategy and planning:

• Create a mix of short, mid, and long term SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound), along with having campaign vs. organizational goals.
• Focus your plan on short-to-mid term strategic initiatives rather than relying on a long-term plan since much can change once you start acting.
• Consider how you can move swayable actors to your cause.
• Identify the specific capacity/power you need to make your strategy successful.
• Test your Theory of Change by using “If-Then-Because” sentences.

What Makes a Good Strategy

A Strategy vs. a Tactic?

To get started, let us go over the differences between a strategy and a tactic. Here are two ways to look at them:

• Strategies are how you use your resources to build capacity to reach your goals (i.e., as Marshall Ganz writes “turning what you have [resources] into what you need [power/capacity] to get what you want [goals]”) or a simple definition is “A strategy is your plan for change.”
• Tactics are the specific actions you take to carry out your strategy and thus, reach your goals (i.e., tactics are components/elements of your strategy).

Principles

• Your strategy should adapt as you learn by doing and creatively change as you put your plan into action. Marshall Ganz notes, “Although our goal may remain constant, strategizing requires ongoing adaptation of current action to new information.” This means you also need to be creative as you consider new ways to advance towards your goal. 
• Consider your opponent’s best responses, instead of hoping they will make a mistake. This means you need to put yourself in their position and think how would they try to stop you? This helps you create better, more resilient plans.
• Build pressure on multiple fronts. While it may seem easier to focus all your resources on one pressure area (e.g., grassroots advocacy), you can often reach higher levels of success if you build the capacity to pressure two or more areas at once (e.g., putting pressure on an elected official through grassroots advocacy, media pressure, and recruiting a primary election challenger). 
• Develop nested goals and strategies. Marshall Ganz notes we need to identify clear goals and strategies at 1. Scale: level of the organization and 2. Scope: time over which one is planning. (e.g., Obama’s 2008 campaign set team goals for the whole campaign, in each state, and each neighborhood. However, the state and local teams had relative autonomy on how to accomplish those goals.)
• Strategies should always clearly connect to the campaign’s goals.
• Be robust in pushing forward a strategy. Even the best strategies fail if not well supported. It is better to have a good strategy that has a lot of energy behind it than a fantastic strategy with only a moderate amount of energy. Strategy is disciplined. The whole organization needs to know how to fulfill its part of strategy.

Goal-Setting

Require Your Goals to Be SMARTIE

Have strong SMARTIE goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timebound, Inclusive, and Equitable) is essential to having an effective strategy. You must take time to carefully consider which goals you will aim to achieve. 

Identify Barriers to Your Goals

The Zig Zigler method for setting goals notes that it is important to try to anticipate the biggest potential obstacles to achieving your goals (e.g., improving your personal skills, lacking media attention, etc.). 

Set Goal Criteria

Marshall Ganz notes that each organization and campaign differs in their needs, so, we need to think through our criteria on how we will assess our goals. He mentions a few as examples:

• “Specific Focus” – You know very clearly what will be different if you win.
• “Motivational” – The goal encourages your people to take action and work for the long term.
• “Leverage” – This one makes the best use of your, “constituency’s strengths, experience and resources, but is outside the strengths, experience and resources of your opponent.”
• “Builds Capacity” – Achieving this goal increases your organizational strength and resources (e.g., people, money, expertise, etc.).
• Replicable and “Contagious” – These goals can be achieved by others and also encourage others to adopt them. 

Short, Mid, and Long Term Goals

Goals are not always far in the future, sometimes they can be right around the corner. Consider breaking your goals into short, mid, and long term goals (e.g., for a 1-year campaign, have a one to two month goal, a six month goal, and “mountaintop goal”).

Mission/Campaign and Organizational Goals

Ideally, your mission and the campaign will mutually reinforce each other (e.g., the OCOC cycle – build the organization, build the campaign, build the organization, build the campaign). So, consider how you can break your goals into the following:

• Mission/Campaign (i.e., what are the changes in the real world you wish to see?)
• Organizational (i.e., what helps build the organization or the campaign internally)

Nested Goals and Strategies

Marshall Ganz talks about the idea of nested goals, meaning you will have different goals at different levels of the campaign (e.g., Think of a presidential campaign: there are big national goals to achieve, but there are also goals to achieve at the state-level, city-level, and neighborhood-level). 

This also means you can give people at those different levels the autonomy on how to reach those goals on their own (i.e., you decide the what and they can decide the how). The how in this case is the strategy. 

Defining the Problem

While it may seem obvious to you, it is important to think through the problem or issue you are trying to solve. Marshall Ganz notes we should ask ourselves four key questions:

• “What’s the problem?”
• “How would the world look different if the problem were solved?”
• Why hasn’t the problem been solved?
• What would it take to solve the problem?

Power/Capacity

Overview

Building capacity consists of building your movement’s resources (e.g., people, money, legitimacy, and number of active supporters). 

Dr. King defined power as “the ability to achieve purpose.” Power/Capacity is essential to moving ahead towards our goals.

Marshall Ganz defines two main approaches to addressing problems (or a hybrid of the two):

1. Power Over Approach 

When someone else has the power to make the change you are seeking (e.g., an elected official, a company, etc.), then your job is to figure out how to build your power to influence their decision. Consider the following questions for this approach (adapted from Marshall Ganz):

• What influences this person/group with power (e.g., money, votes, media attention, people, etc.)? 
• What resources do your people need to gain to put real pressure on your target(s)? 
• How can your people obtain those resources?

2. Power With Approach 

When your community has the power to make the change themselves, then we just need to focus on organizing our resources within our constituency (e.g., starting a community garden). Consider the following questions for this approach (adapted from Marshall Ganz):

• What resources do our people hold that they can use to achieve their goal? Make a creative and specific list.
• Why haven’t our people used these resources to achieve their goal? 
• How can our people use their resources in new ways that can achieve their goal?

Defining Your Strategy and Theory of Change

Theory of Change

Marshall Ganz defines strategy as your Theory of Change which looks at what it will take to reach your goals and address the problems you have identified. 

Organizing: People, Power, and Change builds on Marshall’s work, recommending writing an if-then-because statement to test your Theory of Change. Here are some examples:

• Nashville (Power Over) – If we mobilize enough people to disrupt downtown businesses, then the Mayor will change the law to desegregate because we have a significant economic impact on those businesses. 
• Community Garden (Power With) – If a community organization looking to build a community garden on vacant land trains/identifies ten committed people as master gardeners, then the community will be able to maintain a successful community garden because they have the experience to maintain the plot.

Notes

• Once you have written your “if-then-because” statement, double check it to make sure it truly seems like it could be successful (i.e., if we do X, will it really lead to Y? Or are we just hoping it is enough?).
• Remember to consider your nested goals and ways you can give people support/autonomy to figure out their own Theory of Change to reach their goals.

Organizing Statement

Once you have your Theory of Change, now you can write out a short one-sentence summary of the key elements of your campaign. Marshall Ganz recommends creating the following organizing statement to analyze your strategy: “We are organizing WHO to achieve WHAT (goal) by HOW (Theory of Change) to achieve what CHANGE.”

Courses of Action

Robert Helvey in the final section of his planning tool The Strategic Estimate recommends identifying multiple potential strategies and considering your opponents’ responses. Here is what to look at (from CANVAS Core Curriculum: A Guide to Effective Nonviolent Struggle): 

• Courses of Action: 1. Assumptions, 2. Opponent capabilities, and 3. Our courses of action.
• Analysis: Consider your opponent’s courses of action. Always think through your opponent’s best response to your efforts instead of hoping they will make a mistake.
• Comparison: Review your courses of action. 
• Decision: After analyzing and comparing, decide what your initial course of action will be (but be willing to adapt as needed).

Example Strategies and Plans

1. Use Multiple Approaches to Build Pressure on Decision-Makers 

Here are some to consider:

• Lobbying and interest groups: Directly advocating with a decision-maker with individuals or groups.
• Grassroots advocacy: This is the process of asking the general public to contact an elected official regarding a particular issue.
• Media: Getting earned or paid communications focused on your issues.
• Legal: Challenging an existing policy or practice through the judicial system.
• Economic: Targeting, directly or indirectly, industries connected to your issues.
• Electoral: Building up a real or perceived challenger to specific elected officials.

2. Disruptive Strategy

This is the process of causing direct interference (e.g., at a business, government, etc.), or as Bayard Rustin said, “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable…The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places, so wheels don’t turn.” 

Some examples include the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement and overwhelming welfare offices with supporters until all the requests were met during the welfare rights movement.

3. Pull-In vs. Push-Out Strategies

A push strategy focuses on attacking the opponent and their pillars of support, while a pull strategy focuses on bringing people to your side and winning support from the opponent’s base of groups/people.

4. Strategic Operations

Mark Dvoretsky advocates for looking at strategy in terms of short-term strategic operations that connect and build on each other. He believes having a long-term plan only has limited utility, but the most important aspect is to continually be looking at the current context to determine the next set of actions. 

After spending months and months planning a long-term strategy, the whole situation may change next week. Therefore, spend time thinking of long-term goals, but focus on the time needed for your short-term strategic operation. 

5. Focus on Pressuring Two Weaknesses

Mark Dvoretsky talks about the idea that usually your opponent can handle you attacking one weakness (e.g., media attention on a legislator’s bad vote), but has a much harder time handling two weaknesses at the same time (e.g., focus on the bad vote and having a constituent building local support that may help them win an election).

6. The “Multi-Issue” and “Strategic Initiatives” Approach

George Lakoff writes about the idea of a “strategic initiative” which is a plan to change one area, that if successful will lead to easier changes in other areas down the road. Here are some of Lakoff’s examples:

• Multifaceted initiative or “cross-issue” approach: An initiative which focuses on one area, but also impacts many others (e.g., a “Transit-For-All” initiative instead of subsiding cheap oil, you shift it to, “promoting public transit systems, which improve local economies, creates jobs, reduces reliance on fossil fuels, improves public health and safety…” Or another example are tax cuts, which means it is then easier to say, “there’s no money in the budget” so you cut education/housing/environmental protections, etc.).
• “Slippery slope” approach: One action or change makes it easier to lead to others (e.g., The privatization of social security, which eventually would weaken or eliminate the program).