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 that has pre-planned stages of operation, 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. Additionally, it makes it easier for managers to assign tasks to both employees and volunteers and make sure everyone works in coordination with one another.
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
Campaign-based approach allows organizations to make sure they 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 there is a problem that 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 any internal documents. But for the day-to-day activity to be as smooth and successful as possible, this mission has to be defined.
Ideally, it has to be broken down into SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound milestones that 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 you have clearly defined your organizational goals, the next step is to create a blueprint on how to achieve 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 of these 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. Utilizing such gamification tools will make it more efficient and also help increase your volunteer retention.
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
By adopting a campaign-based approach, you 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