Resist the temptations of formulas

I know the pattern well: You’re planning a campaign. You’re in uncharted territory, so you start from square one. You ask all the critical questions to develop your strategy. You launch the campaign. It goes well.

Next time, you think, “Well, this worked last time; let’s do it again.” Pretty soon you have a formula. You follow the formula. It works. Then it stops working.

The second corporate campaign I ever ran, we launched with the same social media post we used against the first target. It worked. So why not? It worked again.

A year or so later, we were running another campaign. My colleague said, “We should make children the face of this campaign.” It had worked with our first target, McDonald’s. But this time the decision-makers were politicians. Was this the messenger they cared most about? I wondered if we’d stopped practicing the art of strategizing and were following a formula.

Formulas can be useful. When we have momentum, that might be all we need to keep winning. But this comes at a cost. We’re trading near-term efficiency and impact at the expense of strengthening our strategic thinking and training others. We stop scrutinizing whether we’re using the sharpest tool to win any given campaign.

Sometimes that cost is worth the short-term gains. Very often, it’s not.

At some point, after following formulas for too long, we start to pay that cost. Our ability to strategize atrophies. We fall into the habit of skipping over questions we should be asking. We bring on people whose only experience of campaigning is following a formula. Our ‘strategy’ is not necessarily designed for our target or our audience, but just for expediency. And we inadvertently train our targets to harden themselves against our formula.

I’m doubtful I’ve had many (or any) original ideas. More often than not, I look to my own or others’ work for reference points to solve the problems I face today. The more varied the set of examples I can draw from, the more likely I am to find a solution that fits my current context.

The case I want to make is not that originality matters. But we need to be aware and careful of the cost of following formulas. Let me be more precise, because in the next breath, I’m at risk of contradicting this point. We need to be careful of following formulas that shortcut critical thinking.

The art and process of campaign strategy

There is both an art and a process to designing effective campaign strategy. The art is seeing through the eyes of your target (target-centric strategy), and creatively identifying how to change their environment and incentives to make the easiest thing to do the thing that you’re asking for. The process is the set of questions that get you there.

Most campaign strategy processes are asking some variation on the same themes. Here’s a 9-question framework that I like from the Democracy Center.

• What do we want? (ask)
• Who can give it to us? (decision-maker)
• What do they need to hear? (target framing)
• Who should they hear it from? (messenger)
• How do we deliver the message? (tactics)
• What do we have? (resources and allies)
• What do we need to develop? (missing resources or allies)
• How do we begin? (initial action plan)
• How will we know if it’s working? (key indicators)

I’ve contributed to campaigns that skipped over many of these, because we had a formula. We knew the ask, so we didn’t spend time practicing issue cutting. The decision-maker was similar to last time, so we didn’t spend time doing target research or power mapping. Often, we didn’t even think about messenger. We just assumed our activists should be the messenger. You get the idea…

I’ve also seen campaign kick-off meetings started with an Asana campaign template. “We’ll need X social media posts, Y videos, Z in-person actions.” This is not campaign strategy. It’s a task list.

A formula gives us the false certainty and comfort that we have a plan. But a plan that hasn’t been designed for our current context is not a strategy.

A new formula?

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a number of groups and activists shake up campaign formulas. ICAW, Animal Activism Collective and CAFT have brought energy and passion to in-person protests. Animal Equality has leaned into direct action. Others have effectively engaged boards. Others still have used digital, TV and outdoor advertising to great impact.

These aren’t new tactics. But these groups have broken what had become formulaic approaches to campaigns. This innovation is exciting to see.

There are different lessons we could take from this.

One lesson could be: Our established tactics don’t work anymore. Therefore, we should adopt new ones—be angry, engage boards, run hard-hitting ads, and participate in direct action. This is achieving greater cut-through, and we should all adopt these tactics.

But before the rest of us run off to buy a megaphone, let’s resist the comfort of adopting a new formula and consider a deeper strategic insight underpinning these tactical shifts.

An alternative lesson could be: Formulaic campaigns get less effective over time; we need to resist or break those formulas. And some of our peers are executing good examples of how to shake up our formulas. We can all challenge ourselves to go back to campaign strategy and ask, “What will work in this context, with this target?”

This is the strategic circuit breaker that saves us all from mobilizing children to persuade politicians.

I would be excited to see the movement choose this second lesson. Formulas are tempting. They make planning easier. But I’m confident we gain more from the second lesson.

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Breaking the formula

I’ve been involved in successful pressure campaigns that were positive in their messaging; that expressed outrage; that used humor and ridicule. Tone is a design choice. Just as are messenger and framing.

In a recent interview, the legendary music producer Brian Eno talked about the process he uses to push bands to find creative breakthroughs. He talked about deconstructing a band into its constituent parts, and then playing with configurations.

“Let’s say, there are five people in that band. How many possible duets is that? How many possible trios? How many possible quartets? How many solos?”

In campaigning, we similarly have a number of design choices that we can play with to get creative.

• Message and framing
• Messenger
• Tone
• Point of intervention
• Method
• Medium (e.g. billboard, megaphone, balloon, video, postcard, chocolate)

Each of these can either enhance a campaign or drag it down. Recognizing that these are design choices can help us develop a strategy and tactics that meet the needs of our current campaign.

Of course, it’s equally risky to get into indefinite brainstorming mode. We can have a great time coming up with creative ideas, but not translate them into a concrete action plan that fits our current needs.

Developing adaptable campaigners

Dave recently wrote about how city-based campaigns, such as foie gras bans, can be valuable training grounds for new activists. Part of what makes these campaigns useful for training activists is that they need to adapt to their context and solve novel challenges. They learn to navigate uncertainty. In short, we’re building theirs and the movement’s strategic capacity.

I often come across campaigners who have primarily worked on campaigns targeting one type of decision-maker. They might say “I don’t know anything about political campaigning. I’ve only worked on corporate campaigns.” My sense is that this sentiment comes from a few things:

• A lack of self-confidence.
• Too much reliance on formula. Not enough immersion in strategy, treating each campaign as a novel challenge, and navigating uncertainty.
• A lack of familiarity to realize it’s the same skillset.

If we break out of formulas and rigorously immerse people in campaign strategy, then they will grow in their self-confidence and in their ability to see how all campaigning is using the same core skills.

Most of the best campaigners I know have been able to translate their skills across various domains because they see the same methodology at work: they can navigate uncertainty, see through the eyes of their target, and break out of formulas.