Vision
What is a Campaign?
A campaign is any series of actions that is meant to achieve a particular result, with a particular audience. It can also be described as an organised, purposeful effort to create change.
You are already familiar with campaigns: whether it is a political campaign that tries to put a candidate in office, an advertising campaign that convinces you to buy the new gaming console or a social campaign like “Black Lives Matters” that raises awareness about institutional racism.
What is a Campaign Strategy?
Campaigners create a strategy, to guide them in planning, implementing, marketing, monitoring, improving and evaluating their campaign. A campaign strategy answers the following questions:
- Problem: What problem are you confronting?
- Vision: What is your vision of how the world will be, once the problem is resolved?
- Change: What change/s would bring about this vision?
- Stakeholders: Who is affected, positively or negatively, by the problem?
- Relationships: How are these people or groups related to the problem and to each other?
- Targets: If your campaign is successful, who will be affected?
The Mantra of Campaigns Know Them (Who is your target audience? Who are you speaking to?) Need Them (Audiences respond to emotion & storytelling.) Involve Them (Audiences want to feel part of something & respond to calls to action.)
Answering key questions repeatedly, at each stage of your campaign, about the problem, solution, stakeholders and targets as well as the tactics, message and tools you will use, will help develop your campaign strategy.
Define Your Core Problem
What is the key problem you want to address? Start by trying to define it. Elaborate all the adverse effects of this problem. What would a world without this problem look like? Feel free to use words, diagrams, illustrations. If you had unlimited resources (money, power, etc.) how would the world change?
What’s your single vision for the campaign? Which broad actions or changes would resolve the problem you identified: these are the main focus of your campaign.
