It is useful for campaigners to assess their political landscape as they go about setting their goals, and re-evaluating their plan. The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) framework is useful for helping you assess your political landscape. This framework was originally developed for the business sector, but it is useful for advocacy groups as well. So what do these terms mean? The "S" and "W" of SWOT stand for your organization's "strengths" and "weaknesses". … [Read more...]
350.org Education Program on Media and Organizing
First off, 350.org is brilliant at mobilizing people across the planet to take action on climate change. Now the brilliant innovators at 350.org have just developed a new program offering workshops on media and organizing. Their new website has downloadable resources and training guides on online and offline media, as well as organizing and building a movement. I appreciate how some of the resources contain information that is immediately usable for people who don't define themselves as … [Read more...]
Campaign Planning Guides
Spitfire Strategies has released a campaign planning guide called "The Just Enough Planning Guide A Roadmap to Help Nonprofits Reach Their Campaign Goals” Spitfire Communications Strategies". The author, Grimm, sells the guide as having the minimal amount of information you need to effectively plan a campaign. I like that approach. Campaign planning can be overwhelming. Overall, I appreciate the questions and the information the guide includes. It is clearly written for groups with large … [Read more...]
Campaign Goal Setting
Choosing a goal is often the first step to creating a campaign plan. But we shouldn't just choose a goal out of thin air. It's often wise to develop a set of criteria that you can use to evaluate a list of possible campaign goals. Ideally, everyone in your group understands and helped influence the process of selecting these criteria. I have uploaded a useful handout that outlines some criteria groups can use to assess and choose their campaign goal. Here's some criteria that we developed at … [Read more...]
New Security Culture Guide
I wrote a guide on security culture with Dan Spalding. Dan and I are both affiliated with the Ruckus Society. Thank you Jacob Conroy for designing the guide. We wanted to create a guide specifically for non-violent direct action campaign groups. We also wanted to talk about the people-side of security culture, which I haven't seen many guides write about. Security culture is a big deal in Toronto right now due to the infiltration that was experienced during the g8/g20 protests in June 2010. … [Read more...]