<aside> 💡 The purpose of this workbook is to increase access to campaign planning tools, popularize campaign organizing traditions, and share other resources in the field.
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Campaigns are strategic sequences of actions toward achievable demands; they activate community leaders and engage key constituencies to pressure clear targets to make change. They’re capable of winning material victories and of building transformative movements. In tandem with other necessary political projects — winning elections, building organizations and/or collectives, shifting the narrative and influencing culture, starting and/or growing alternative institutions , changing corporate behavior, etc. — campaigns are key to building power and engaging in the struggle for justice and liberation.
Campaign organizers think longer than one-off actions and more specific than broad values. They are about implementing a piece of our long term vision in the here and now. All campaigns have instrumental and symbolic dimensions — concrete outcomes that immediately impact people’s lives and abstract aspects that shape narrative, normative culture, and political possibilities on an issue. In this way, campaigns are powerful onramps for new leaders, connecting their day to day experiences with broader analyses of power and visions for society, even helping them to shape and envision what else might be possible. Facing an identifiable target — someone with a name, face, and interests — and observing the lengths they go to preserve the status quo clarifies how power works on a visceral level. In this way, campaigns are also containers for education, leadership development, and experiments in power building.
Campaign victories — and losses! — can build *movements* larger than any one organization, issue, or constituency. By using tactics others can do or replicate, having demands that go viral and catch the attention of the masses, and sharing lessons on key targets, campaigns can catalyze social movements. Campaigns can shift the narrative on an issue, like putting the “done deal” pipeline contract back under regulatory scrutiny or challenging the moral legitimacy of cash bail through “Black Mama’s Bail Outs.”
Sometimes campaigns reach a “dead end” but carry lessons into another campaign or an entirely new movement formation, like when leaders in the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network moved from campus campaigns to launch the Sunrise Movement. In this way, the laboratory of a campaign develops key skills in ways that build organizations and long term leaders.
How do campaigns win? There’s no blueprint as campaign conditions vary widely. However, past campaigns and legacies of organizing traditions offer insights. Winning campaigns…
The left and social justice movement ecosystem is hungry for issue-based campaign strategy resources. This assessment is based on surveying our network, support requests we receive, and dialogue with peer training organizations. Alongside our Craft of Campaigns podcast, strategy workshops, and coaching programs, this workbook pulls together practical tools and templates to increase access for our trainers and coaches, alongside organizers and strategists broadly.
The purpose of this workbook is to increase access to campaign planning tools, popularize campaign organizing traditions, and share other resources in the field.
This is a living resource, which we aim to update, periodically. And of course, it doesn’t have everything. We’ve included what we consider key concepts and tools useful to a range of campaign contexts, pulling from many peer organizations and organizing traditions. This workbook does not aim **to offer a brand new or “grand theory” of campaigns. It focuses on oppositional strategy - the choices and actions related to waging collective struggle against opponent forces. We don’t distinguish here between “digital” and “offline” tactics or campaigns, nor do we offer generalizations about digital campaigning, since we think many of the strategy tools are still applicable.
Some areas we don’t focus on in this workbook are: base building (organizing conversations, leadership development, etc.); organizational and leadership structures; how campaigns build social movements, including how to engage ‘whirlwind moments’ when there’s widespread attention or activity on your issue; and tactical skills for particular protests and direct action tactics (how to do a sit-in, how to plan for civil disobedience, etc.). These are all very important, so we try to include many in our Other Resources page. This resource is also less focused on how to train or facilitate groups around strategy content, although we include relevant resources where we have them.