Pitfall #2: Reactive Planning & No Systems

By Heather Klindworth, Partner

This is the second part of our series on the pitfalls of lack of systems and structure in campaigns, nonprofits, and businesses. You can find the first part here!

On Monday, we started a series on project management pitfalls on campaigns, identifying pitfall number one: lack of clear roles and responsibilities. Today we will discuss pitfall number two: reactive planning and lack of systems for tracking progress.

Campaigns don’t have measures of success built in until the very end when you determine if what you have done has been effective. This is why it’s critical to build out your goals and your calendar; use what you know about campaign timelines, budgets, the electorate, and your staff. Building out a written campaign plan keeps you from being reactive and allows you to be proactive, taking time to reflect and adjust. This written plan, complete with qualitative and quantitative benchmarks also informs staff and volunteer role expectations. It’s important to also build in “buffer zones” for unexpected situations or circumstances. For example, if your team payroll is on the 15th, you’ll want to create a fundraising benchmark for the 13th.

For each area of the work, you’ll want to utilize a project management matrix referenced in our previous post and add when tasks need to be completed and how the task needs to be done (i.e. your standards for the work product/quality control). You’ll need to answer several questions in each area of the work.

Here’s an example of some questions to consider when writing your field plan:

-What’s your win number?

-What’s your universe?

-How many passes will you make?

-When do those passes need to be completed?

-How many people do you need to accomplish those passes?

-How will you find volunteers and when do you need them?

-How does your field plan fit into the rest of the work?

-What constitutes a conversation?

-What constitutes a good conversation?

-What data will you collect?

Once you've created your plan, you need to create systems for tracking your progress. If you don’t have the systems to track your progress, you may not even notice if you miss a benchmark– defeating the purpose of a benchmark in the first place! You’ll want to utilize tracking tools to monitor key metrics you identified in your planning phase. Regularly updating data and creating easy-to-read dashboards ensure that you have eyes on your most important metrics at a glance. The key is to set consistent intervals for checking and ensure the task is clearly assigned.

Finally, debriefs are not just for the end of your campaign! The Sage team loves a good debrief. We recommend conducting debriefs after any event or phase of the campaign, particularly those that you will be repeating. This might mean debriefing after each door knock, a fundraiser, an email campaign, a candidate forum, etc. Identifying areas for adjustment as you go is crucial when operating under such a short timeline. Identify things that went well and need improvement and then assign who and how those adjustments will be made.