Three Make-or-Break Pillars of Influence Strategies Ahead of the Next European Term
Three Make-or-Break Pillars of Influence Strategies Ahead of the Next European Term
Goals, Objectives, Action, Events... Are you sure you set everything a campaign needs in your influence strategy for the next five year? Let's review it together.
With the European Parliament geared for a complete reshuffle, many organisation are preparing their influence strategies for the coming years.
But are you sure that your strategies won’t fail before you put them in practice?
These days, I’m reading the excellent “How to Win Campaigns” by Chris Rose, after postponing it for unknown reasons.
So far, the book gave ground to intuitions that I had for a long time, and in particular the importance of clarifying goals and the absolute necessity for achieving tangible results in campaigning.
Today, let’s start with the begining: how is your strategy doing? Do you have a clear goal in mind? and how can you transfer these goals into effective actions on the ground?
Aims, goals, and objectives
Aims, goals, and objectives are synonyms — but they are not the same.
Your campaign should start with a broad aim (save the climate, create an enabling environment for civil society, ensure the industry’s growth…). That’s the ideal situation your campaign will bring about.
Goals are the path towards this aim:
Save the climate → Make Europe climate neutral by 2050
Create an enabling environment for CSOs → improve funding capacities for CSOs
Ensure the industry’s growth → Advocate on the industry’s benefits for the EU economy
Finaly, objectives are the numbered and specific targets your campaign will achieve to make all of this possible. Remember, objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound).
Most campaigns, I realised, fail on the definition of objectives. By chasing broad and ill-defined aims and goals, organisations fail short of their potential for change, becasue they cannot put their resources to work for a specific objectives.
Objectives are fine, but they’re noting without action
Now that we identified the first pitfall, let’s look at the second issue most campaigns are faced with: action.
It’s easy to spend too much time on reflection and definition of the campaign. I’ve certainly failed there on many occasions. But remember that nothing beats action.
I would argue that a campaign with no strategy but with people commited to publish content and create events would do more than a perfect strategy but no follow-up.
So start creating.
Events, events, events
Events lead campaigns forward.
Having a steady and regular flow of events for your campaign will bring positive outcomes, both towards the goal and to the campaign itself.
Events forces the agenda. A debate organised by your organisation wil force participants to position themselves. Opponents will have to react to it, giving visibility to your campaign. Events are your chance to sway infleuencers to your cause.
What do I mean by “event”? Anything happening in or around your campaign that is noteworthy enough. It can be “traditional” events such as conferences, webinars, political debates, but also demonstrations, happenings, or even publications, papers, social media activities, etc.
Closed-doors meetings can count as events if you make them visibles. A tweet “Just met Commissioner XYZ” won’t be enough.
Create more events.
Thanks for reading!
I’m Alexandre Météreau, EU lobbyists and campaigner.
The Beubble is a side project where I share insights and practical advice on EU policymaking and influence.
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