If you are a lobbyist or campaigner, Karl Rove has 302 words that you should memorise.
In Masterclass he gives a session on the campaign plan. I’ve transcribed the section below.
Karl Rove – The Campaign Plan Masterclass
“But after you settle on what that message is, and what the theme is, you then need to sit down and write out a plan…. But you need to take the elements of the campaign and reduce them to writing into numbers, and to spread them over a calendar so that you have a concrete idea of what it is that you’re going to do. And when you’re going to do it, and how much it’s going to cost campaigns, that plan tend to be campaigns that have a greater positive propensity to win, because it means that they make conscious decisions about what’s necessary to do and when to do it.
Over the years I’ve seen more often that people fail in a campaign because they don’t have a plan than that they do have a plan and and don’t execute it. There’s some there’s a discipline about putting this all down, putting the work in assumptions about who is it that’s going to vote for us who’s not going To vote for us, where are we going to get our votes? What’s our message going to be? What are the strengths of our candidate? What are we going to try and make the race about answering those questions and all the other things that go into a campaign. And committing to that paper is an exercise that causes campaigns to be better simply by doing that, if you don’t do it, however, you’re going to bounce around and, and be driven more by the moment, I love to run against people who don’t seemingly have a good idea of what they’re trying to do. And when they’re going to do it. I like being on the offence. And by having a plan, you’re more likely to be on the offence.”
Karl Rove. Master Class. The Campaign Plan
Insights
The reality is few campaigns have a written plan. I’ve found out the existence of a written plan is the surest way of finding out if someone is going to win or loose. I’ve found over more than 25 years, that the correlation between loosing and not having a plan is in the order of 95%. I was pleased to see Karl Rove supporting my instincts.
The plan you use for a US election is different from what you use in Brussels. I use a template for all Brussels work. It’s served me well over 20 years.
The only constant I’ve found is that without a plan, you are going to loose.