David Axelrod and Karl Rove give a Master Class on Campaign Strategy and Messaging.
Karl Rove segment about the “Campaign Plan” is full of superb advice.
Below is a transcript of much, although not all, of those 8 minutes and 10 seconds.
The advice he gives is as relevant if you are doing a public affairs campaign or lobbying in Brussels as it is helping a candidate get elected to office.
The sad truth is most campaigns fail because they don’t have a written campaign plan. I’ve held that view for more than 20 years. I can now refer to the wiser advice of Karl Rove.
Summary
A lot of the campaign is going to depend on the message … 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 and numbers. And to spread them over a calendar so 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 is going to cost. Campaigns that plan tend to be campaigns that have a greater propensity to win because it means that they’ve made conscious decisions about what’s necessary to do, and when to do it, and to make sure that have the resources in order to execute that plan. So it starts with the message and the theme …. And you need to take those ideas, what is it that you want to talk about, and plan them out when you’re going to talk about them and how you’re going to to talk about them. The win is relatively easy. It requires some, you know, sort of thinking it through. How long do we want to talk about that issue? When do we want to introduce this facet of the candidate’s background? When do we want to emphasise this particular theme? You can have a robust discussion about that and plan it out. But the how gets to be really problematic, because the how involves spending money. It is not just simply now, we’re going to send our candidate out and talk about it this week. But we’re going to have to back that up with whatever kind of media is available to you…. That means you are going to have the full range of communications available to you – television, cable, radio, digital, mail. And, again, you’re going to need, again, plan. What do we need? How of that do we need in order to win? And then, it’s an iterative process. Are we able to put that money together? You then need to think about volunteers and your ground game, which we’re going to talk about later. But how do you go about mobilizing people who will then communicate with and focus on the target voters that you’ve agreed upon in order to persuade them and then get them out to vote? All this needs to be done at the beginning of the campaign and agreed upon and committed to paper and then reduced to numbers. That is to say, you need to have a budget spread over time that shows, for each one of those activities, how much you’re going to need to spend, what you’re going to need to spend it on, and how it shows up across the budget. And, then carefully check it against the fundraisers.
You have to follow through and evolve.
Over the years, I’ve seen, more often, that people fail in a campaign because they don’t have a plan than they do have a plan and don’t execute it. There is some – there’s a discipline about putting this all down, putting the working 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 make the race about? Answering those questions and all the other things that go into a campaign and committing them to 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 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 offense. And by having a plan, you’re more likely to be on the offense. Look, you can’t plan 12 months in advance or 16 months in advance or nine months in advance of a campaign what’s going to be happening in the final stages of the campaign. But you can have some working assumptions and then modify those working assumptions as you go along by saying, we’re going to have a process and a group of people who are going to examine what we’re doing and decide whether we ought to keep doing it or ought to change. …. So in our plan, we built targets for what we wanted the registration pictures to look like in big states. And we also, then, mapped out our program for identifying supporters and doing the things necessary to get them to the polls – calling them on the phone, knocking on their doors, send them mail pieces. And we could then monitor them. We had, literally, a set of numbers. Every Monday morning, for almost a year and a half, I would get a document that showed me how we were doing in every battleground country in every battleground state on registration. So when we began to show shortfalls, we could redirect resources to those states. Similarly, during the summer and fall of 2004, I got regular reports that showed how we were doing in terms of battleground counties, battleground states. How many doors were being knocked on against our target? How many phones were being rung against our target? How many volunteers were being recruited against our targets? And any time we showed up with serious shortfalls, everybody in the system knew that we’ve got to solve that. So that’s why a plan is so important. And that’s why having mechanisms in place led by a group, but also involving – today, technology makes it so easy to monitor so many of these things in a campaign…. But you can’t do that unless you have a plan and mechanism to monitor.