Taking Action: Tactics & Timelines

Key Concepts

For a tactic to be effective, it should implement your theory of change, add resources to your organization, develop leaders, align with your values, and prioritize movement building.
To effectively engage our people in action, we need to get their commitment and use motivational engagement.
An organizing sentence summarizes your campaign and provides clarity on your people, strategy, tactics, and timeline.

Step 5: What are the Tactics?

We can think of strategy as our plan for making change, and our tactics as the actions through which we implement our strategy. Just as it’s important to devise effective strategic goals, it’s important to choose the most effective tactics to meet those goals. Your organizing effort will quickly run into challenges if you use tactics that fail to move you towards your strategic goal. Similarly, if you spend all your time strategizing without putting it into practice via tactics, you will have wasted your time.

The Sweet Spot

A tactic is most effective when it meets these five criteria:

Implements your theory of change: it results in concrete, measurable progress toward your campaign goal. In a power over campaign, you must be able to answer how the tactic gives you leverage over your target.
Adds resources to your organization: it attracts and engages new people; it adds resources to your campaign; it increases your community’s capacity to work together to make change.
Develops leaders: it builds the leadership, skills, and capacity of your community.
Aligns with your values: we should never sacrifice our values for an easy win.
Prioritizes movement-building: we are not operating in isolation in our campaigns - our actions affect others that are working towards justice and we must be mindful of that as we choose tactics.

When choosing tactics to implement your strategy, you’re aiming for the “sweet spot” where all of the first three criteria overlap. There may be times when, due to particular constraints or context, a tactic may only hit two of the three criteria and you will still go ahead with it, but ideally most of your tactics will meet all three.

However, there are two criteria that you don’t want to compromise on meeting. In order to ensure that we are building towards the world we want to live in as we design and implement our tactics, it is essential to choose tactics that always align with your values and don’t undermine other campaigns, communities or allies in the movement.

Commitment and Motivational Engagement

There are two central components to engaging people in effective action: commitment and motivational engagement.

First, action requires that leaders engage others in making explicit commitments to achieve specific, measurable outcomes. We know that we cannot achieve our goals on our own, so we need others to join us.

Second, to successfully engage others in a way that expands rather than depletes our resources, we need to design action mindfully through motivational engagement. Once we have secured commitment from others to join us in action, it is important that they have a meaningful experience when they join us. If people don’t feel like what they are doing is important, or they do not grow and learn as they act, then they are unlikely to say yes the next time we ask for a commitment.

There are three characteristics of a motivational action:

Meaningful: people can see that the action is significant and makes a difference towards achieving a meaningful goal.
Autonomy: people are given levels of responsibility according to their skills and abilities to achieve a particular outcome.
Feedback and Learning: people can see the progress of their work, measure success, and receive coaching and support from more experienced leaders so they can learn and grow.

These three characteristics lead to greater motivation, higher quality work, and greater commitment. In designing and delegating action steps, then, the key is to commit people to engage in ways that facilitate such experiences.

In addition, there are five assessment criteria that serve as guidelines for designing motivational action:

Task Identity – Do people get to do the whole thing from start to finish?
Task Significance – Do people understand and see the direct impact of their work?
Skill Variety – Do people engage a variety of skills, including “head, heart, and hands” (or strategic, motivational, and skills tasks)?
Autonomy – Do people have the space to make competent choices about how to work?
Feedback – Are results visible to the people performing the task, even as they perform it?

The more we ask people to commit to actions that meet these five criteria, the more likely they are to continue taking action. Nearly any action can be redesigned to provide a more meaningful experience that supports individual creativity and growth while achieving the campaign’s goals.

Step 6: What is the Timeline?

The rhythm of organizing is the campaign: coordinated bursts of activity focused on achieving specific goals. Campaigns unfold over time with a rhythm that slowly builds a foundation, gathers gradual momentum with preliminary peaks, culminates in a climax when a campaign is won or lost, and then achieves resolution.

In organizing, we assume that we begin a campaign with far fewer resources than we will need to tip the balance of power and achieve our goal. We use relational tactics such as telling stories, recruitment phone calls, recruitment 1:1s, house meetings, coaching, and leadership development to grow our capacity (people, commitment, experience, money, skills, etc.) to have enough power to succeed. This capacity-building is what builds momentum. Like a snowball, each success contributes resources, which makes the next success more achievable. For more on relational tactics, see the Building Relationships section (pg. 29).

As we map our campaign, we identify milestones for when we will have created enough new capacity and developed enough power to undertake campaign tactics that we couldn’t before. Campaign tactics are when we mobilize our resources to affect change. Read on for more details of what happens during each step of a typical campaign timeline.

Foundation

During the foundation period, the goal is to create the capacity needed to launch a campaign. A foundation period may last a few days, weeks, months or years, depending on the scope of the undertaking and the extent to which you start ‘from scratch.’ Organizers prioritize relational tactics during the foundation period. This typically includes 1:1 meetings, house meetings, and meetings of small groups of supporters. This is a crucial period for leadership development.

Kick-Off

The kick-off is the moment at which the campaign officially begins, and is the first campaign tactic. Setting a date for a kick-off creates urgency and focuses the concentration and commitment it takes to get things going. The kick-off becomes a deadline for initial recruiting, planning, and preparation of materials. Ideally, a kick-off both builds public excitement and awareness for the campaign and is a sweet tactic which clearly implements the theory of change. The kick-off event allows organizers to exercise leadership, new recruits to be identified, and commitments made to the next campaign tactic(s).

Note that for organizers, the primary purpose of a kick-off isn’t to create a media event, but to bring in new people and establish commitment to the campaign. A kick-off is also a deadline for the formal delegation of leadership roles to those who will be responsible for carrying out the campaign.

Peaks

The campaign proceeds toward a series of peaks where campaign tactics occur, each one building on what has come before. By crossing the threshold of each peak, the campaign breaks through to the higher level of capacity needed to reach the next target. Each peak should have a measurable goal (e.g. decision passed by a local government, number of signatures on a petition, dollars raised towards a fundraising goal, etc.) that launches the campaign forward towards its next peak. This way, it is possible to measure success and make adjustments accordingly based on observable data.

Strategic Goal

The campaign peak comes at the moment of maximum mobilization when the campaign will achieve its strategic goal. Beware of peaking too early – often, campaigns accidentally peak at the kick-off. Your goal as an organizer is to have your campaign capacity reach its peak at the time when it is needed most. In some cases, the timing of this peak is predictable (e.g. when a decision is made by a regulatory body). In other cases, those who lead the campaign can designate the peak. In still other cases, the campaign peak emerges from the actions and reactions of all those playing roles in the campaign.

Evaluation, celebration and next steps

Campaigns are either won or lost. Only by risking failure do we make the kind of commitments that make success possible. Whether or not a campaign is successful, there is value in learning and celebrating the effort.

To succeed at winning, you must realize when you have won and learn to celebrate success.

Never claim a victory that’s not yours or pretend a loss is a win. It robs the effort of its value. We need to acknowledge a loss as a loss, and debrief the loss, interpret what happened, accept responsibility, recognize those who contributed, and prepare for what comes next.

Win or lose, a campaign should always conclude with evaluation, celebration, and preparation for next steps. When we win, we are sometimes so interested in celebrating, we forget to learn why we won, what we did right or wrong, and recognize those who contributed. When we lose, even when we do evaluate, we may not celebrate the hard work, commitment, courage, and achievements of those involved in the campaign. The important thing about campaigns is there is indeed a ‘next time’ and it is important to prepare for it. Or, as many a Canucks fan has remarked, “Just wait ‘til next season!”

Organizing Statement

The organizing statement is a tool used to clarify the important components of your strategy and organizing plan. Every team in a campaign – including the core leadership team and each distributed leadership team – should compose an organizing sentence unique to their team.

An organizing statement looks like this:

We are organizing (WHO) to pursue (MOUNTAINTOP GOAL) by (STRATEGY) to achieve (STRATEGIC GOAL) by (WHEN). We will use the following tactics: (TACTICS) to achieve (KICK-OFF/PEAK) by (WHEN).

For example, an organizing statement on the Montgomery bus boycott might have read like this:

We are organizing black transit users in Montgomery to pursue ending racial segregation by putting financial pressure on the bus company to achieve desegregation of the buses by the end of 1956. We will use the following tactics: a one day city-wide boycott and a rally to achieve the start of the boycott by December 5, 1955.

By going through the process of writing out an organizing statement, you check off every aspect of your strategy and get your whole leadership team on the same page.

To summarize, we implement tactics to take action and put our strategy into practice. In order to be effective, we must employ sweet tactics that are strategic, strengthen our organization, develop leaders, align with our values and prioritizes movement-building. In turn, formulating an organizing statement that employs sweet tactics and is mindful of the campaign timeline is a useful tool for guiding and focusing our organizing.