Want to scale your grassroots organization's impact and ensure it achieves organizational success? The most effective way to do that is to utilize a campaign-based approach to planning your movement’s activities.
At Qela, we have created a campaign-based methodology for our software to help our clients run successful programs. Whether an organization has been doing this for years or is just starting out, the following strategies will assist in planning campaigns that connect with people, meet goals, and advance organizational success.
What is a Grassroots Campaign
A campaign is a planned set of activities aimed at achieving a specific goal in a limited timeframe. View it as a mission addressing a certain issue with pre-planned stages of operation, an allocated budget, and resources.
Why Grassroots Organizations Should Strategically Plan Their Activities as Campaigns
1. Ensuring Cohesion and Alignment
Planning your grassroots campaigns and sharing them with your community will help align everyone’s vision for the development of your movement and manage stakeholders’ expectations.
2. Strategic Planning and Performance Monitoring
Campaigns provide a convenient framework to plan the financial, time, and human resources necessary for a specific operational period of an organization’s life.
3. Optimized Resource Use
The campaign-based approach ensures organizations don’t overspend or overstretch their resources.
4. Cultivating Urgency and Maximizing Impact
Campaigns generate a sense of momentum that captures attention and boosts motivation by setting clear, attainable goals and outlining a realistic path to achieve them.
How to Prepare for an Effective Campaign:
To set up a successful campaign strategy, consider the following questions:
1. What are your objectives as an organization? How can they be broken down into SMART goals? Who are your stakeholders?
Every grassroots movement or community comes together because a problem needs to be solved. Whether tangible or global, it always lies at the core of any organization’s mission. When a crisis hits, the problem is obvious and rarely needs to be crystalized in internal documents. However, this mission has to be defined for the day-to-day activity to be as smooth and successful as possible.
Ideally, it has to be broken down into SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound milestones the movement is trying to accomplish. Each one of these goals can be a basis for a campaign — a mission to achieve those goals.
In Qela, you can easily create, edit, target, and manage campaigns with our Campaign Master. Learn more about it here: https://www.qela.app/
While defining your attainable goals, it’s essential to identify the stakeholders involved in each mission—those who will benefit from your actions or take an active role in them. Any movement needs supporters, so defining your stakeholders’ needs and expectations will help you achieve your goals.
2. What Strategies and Actions Are Necessary to Achieve Your Goals?
After clearly defining your organizational goals, the next step is to create a blueprint for achieving them. Identify the strategies and actions you need to utilize to accomplish your campaigns. They might include:
marketing to raise awareness,
engaging in advocacy to influence policy,
collaborating with other actors,
building capacity to enhance employees'/supporters’ skills and resources,
fundraising.
Identifying which strategies might help you move closer to reaching your goals will help you break down your campaign into steps or tiers. In Qela, we call them quest chains.
After breaking it down into steps, define what kind of easily attainable actions your supporters can do to help you achieve each of them. Those actions will be the basis of tasks you assign to your community — in Qela, we call them quests. Utilizing such gamification tools will make it more efficient and also help increase your volunteer retention.
Create a quest journey for your supporters to keep them engaged and motivated to stay with you for the long run. The first quest you offer them should be a warm-up — e.g., watching an educational video or sharing information on their social media pages. The second one is the main event — invite them to a rally, ask them to participate in a collective work effort, etc. The last step is collecting feedback to see whether they have enjoyed the journey or have suggestions for your next one, so offer them a chance to fill in a feedback form or go through a quiz.
Having difficulty coming up with engaging tasks for your volunteers? We have 18 quest templates to motivate your community to help your organization! Sign up for Qela here: https://www.qela.app/register
Adopting a campaign-based approach can ensure cohesion, optimize resource allocation, and cultivate a sense of urgency and momentum within your movement.
At Qela, we offer the tools and expertise to help you create, manage, and optimize your grassroots campaigns. Ready to take your organization to the next level? Learn more about how Qela can support your mission and sign up today: https://www.qela.app/register