<aside> đź’ˇ Campaigns have clear demands. Committing to these demands supports unity and focus, helps grow your base, boosts credibility, and supports your tactics to build on each other.
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Demands are not merely what we want. Rather, they’re calculated bets on what we can win from our target to get us closer to what we want. We may want to block a pipeline from being built, but our demand might be: “release the environmental impact report to the public.” We may want to defund the police, but our demand might be: “remove minimum police employee mandates from the city charter.”
Crafting demands can be a challenging part of planning a campaign since they impact so many elements of strategy. It can also be difficult to narrow the scope of demands around complex issues. However, the payoff from setting strategic demands and sticking to them is high. Committing to clear demands supports unity and focus, helps communicate to and grow your base, boosts credibility, and supports your tactics to build on each other.
Effective campaign demands:
** Why 12-18 months? Although there are different schools of thought here, we believe that most grassroots campaigns, in order to recruit the support of at least one key constituency needed to win, must offer a short-term path to at least one small victory in order to build necessary momentum. If your “first order” demand can’t be won in 12-18 months, it’s often a sign that you should pick a smaller “stepping stone demand” that you could achieve in the next year on the way to that bigger, longer-term victory.*
Effective demands often occupy a sweet spot between our most visionary solutions and politically realistic solutions. Naming our visionary solutions keeps us from being overly reactive or defensive. Our campaign demands should be politically realistic enough to be achievable and visionary enough to expand what’s considered realistic over time. Strong demands also anticipate false solutions, so-called fixes, or compromises that give our opponents more power or that further discredit our long term goals.
Adapted from Movement Generation
One way our campaigns build power is by moving our visionary solutions into the politically realistic space over time. The politically realistic space is not static; it ebbs and flows based on political conditions and strength of movements. What goes in each “circle” depends on our group’s worldview and analysis, including of the pillars of support, points of leverage, and spectrum of support.
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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KKeBKcoLHUymcgoiaox6BcWkJh7H1TiHvzUo7hffWpA/edit#slide=id.g1f10c05034f_0_270