Introduction to Political Action Plans

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” – General George S. Patton

Leave it to the ever colorful Patton to make the monotony of planning inspirational. He may have been in the Army (I’m contractually obligated to make fun of my brothers in the Army), but General Patton left us some great nuggets of insight.

This quote is drilled into the minds of young officers in every branch of the US Military. In the moment, it’s meant to inspire a sense of urgency in young leaders. There’s plenty of good reason for instructors to drive this point home again and again – they are pushing against years of bad planning habits developed in the theoretical world of academia.

Battlefields are far from theoretical. Practical application is king. Much the same can be said about the world of politics.

Many in the world of advocacy have the same primary bad habits as young lieutenants: we wait for perfect information about the environment, and we assume there’s a perfect approach to getting good policy across the finish line and signed into law. These bad habits lead to inaction.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to share some of the basics surrounding political action plans; how to formulate them, the tactics to execute them, and ways to refine them. But before we go down that path, we need to start with a framework of what a political action plan can be.

I honestly don’t know when I started to think in these terms, and I don’t think you’ll see it stated this way in most courses on advocacy, but I tend to boil the basic Political Action Plan down to the 4 Ts: Targets, Tactics, Timing, and Testing.

Targets

Likely the easiest to understand, Targets are simply the people you will try to influence to implement your policy agenda. Targets aren’t just decision makers like legislators or executives. Targets can include the media, social influencers, donors – and early in your plan you may also be targeting your own volunteers for education on your issues.

When you have a clearly defined set of policy priorities, an early step is to evaluate how those policies will have to come into being, and who can help you or hurt you along the way. You won’t always need a piece of legislation, many times an administrative rule will do. Identifying the who’s who of your action plan will align you correctly to start developing your tactics.

Tactics

If we’re equating advocacy planning to project management in the business world, tactics aligns best with resource management. The tactics you develop within your political action plan should balance the roles your internal stakeholders can assume in the process: grassroots volunteers, PAC resources, communication and consumer education specialists, etc.

Identifying which of your resources can best position you to get to your “ask” is a difficult balancing act, and one we’ll explore in another post. But conceptually, your planning team should be taking measure of your existing relationships, touch points you can adopt easily, and what you don’t have capacity to pursue.

Timing

And while we’re thinking about what tactics we can and can’t pursue, we should also take measure of when we can or can’t pursue them. Your team needs to take honest stock of whether your issue is salient to the broader trends you’re seeing in the legislature. Is this the time to push a specific bill, or should you re-trench and focus on educating stakeholders and decision makers?

The bottom line is that your issue is not always at the top of mind for most other people, including elected officials or bureaucrats. Identifying your targets opens the door to understanding their priorities, and attaining that understanding will help you divine whether now is the moment to strike. Building in structured feedback loops to evaluate your timing will drive home the last and most important aspect of your plan.

Testing & Feedback Loops

This final pillar of advocacy planning is likely the toughest to internalize. Frankly, many organizations devote significant time and resources to developing policy positions and getting the conversation started only to let the momentum slowly fade away and a good plan thus earns its spot on a dust covered shelf.

And if I’m being honest, I’m still figuring out my own best practices on this part of planning. The reality is political advocacy planning is an ongoing process. You’ll never have a perfect product – but you can have one that helps you prepare for as much of the process as you can control. Making this shift will keep your team leaning forward in the process, and stand out as proactive instead of reactive.

Good testing depends on identifiable metrics, but also an intangible set of gut checks. How do you set a metric to judge the impact of your messaging? Policy work is ever changing and difficult to wrangle. I hope as I go through this series on political action plans, you’ll join in the conversation. If you can, drop a comment on ways you judge progress within your own advocacy management.

But as we go through the conversation, I’ll ask you to keep General Patton’s observation in mind. No plan is perfect. Waiting for perfect information will stall your agenda before you ever get started. Ensuring that you internalize each of the 4 T’s will help guide your team through an ongoing process of analysis and revision. Your agenda doesn’t have to wait for perfect, get started now and fully commit to the ongoing process. You’ll find yourself in a better position year over year, and you’ll maintain that ever-important longterm mindset.