Pitfall #1: Unclear Roles & Responsibilities
By Heather Klindworth, Partner
This is the first part of our series on the pitfalls of lack of systems and structure in campaigns, nonprofits, and businesses.
Heather here. I love campaigns. Fueled by passion, deep ideological belief, dedicated supporters, and volunteers coming together in a shared vision, we evoke imagery of good fights and put on our best political theater. Campaigns are flashy and they’re fast, but to be successful, they also need to be good at the boring stuff. Hear me out. Building a campaign is a lot like building a start-up business, except it’s on a tightly compressed timeline. Campaigns must manage multiple personnel, paid and unpaid, different vendors, multiple departments, important performance-based and administrative deadlines, and financial management. Even from the start, there is a need for solid systems and project management. Without them, balls get dropped, time that you already don’t have is lost, quality control may be overlooked, and overall chaos ensues. Over the next few posts, we’ll identify common project management mistakes on campaigns and ways to avoid or fix them.
Let's jump in!
Pitfall 1: Lack of clear roles and responsibilities.
I often run into two different scenarios. The first is, “Oops, I thought you were doing that.” They are missed opportunities because tasks lack a clear owner. Scenario number two is, “Oops, we both did that.” These are moments of wasted capacity when work is duplicated and, again, tasks lack a clear owner. There are several different matrices one can use to delineate responsibilities. There is RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed). There’s also MOCHA (Manager, Owner, Consulted, Helper, and Approver). Whichever system works best for your team is best. Having clear decision-making systems upfront is critical for ensuring that external communications stay on message, teams feel clear, and the campaign stays on budget. Some candidates like to have eyes on everything and others are more than happy to delegate. How a candidate chooses to include themselves in the approval systems to meet these preferences is up to them, what’s most important is that it is explicit.
For roles, I recommend writing job descriptions, even for volunteer positions. When thinking of how to build out a role, I first advise clients not to think about the title, but to think about responsibilities. Common campaign roles include Campaign Manager, Political Manager, Fundraising, Communications, Digital, and Field. There is a natural overlap (underscoring the need for roles). You may combine traditional roles' responsibilities or have someone responsible for just one task. Work to the strengths of your team. It’s important to bake in the interdependence of roles, with no person or team operating in a silo. To summarize, you don’t need to worry so much about the titles as much as making sure your tasks are covered and everyone knows who is doing what and how the approval process works.
What have you done to prevent a lack of clear roles and responsibilities on campaigns you’ve worked on?
