Welcome back, Saturday Campaign D-I-Y’ers! For those who tune in, welcome to the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. Each week, we discuss issues that help drive successful campaigns. If you’ve missed prior diaries, please visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide.
While this guide exists to cover a subject matter related to running large and small campaigns, in the beginning of the series, I wrote a companion piece “AARGH! Mistakes you should avoid.” This week’s entry goes back to those roots, and we’re going to have a little bit of fun discussing an easy mistake a lot of campaigns make that is equally easy to avoid.
In an effort to get things right, it is pretty easy to get tied up, overanalyze, overthink and just burn yourself out on small items which will have almost no impact on your small campaign. Sometimes, the best response is just let go—or to realize not everything has to be perfect all the time. While campaigns have to worry about making sure some items click together, and continual missing of small things can signal problems, the reason why these items become problematic often isn’t inbuilt dysfunction, too often it is because too much work on making sure you achieve perfection results in paralysis that slows everything down.
This week: don’t sweat the small tasks.
Campaigns face a lot of big decisions, policy profiles, advertising strategies, scheduling and how to spend money. These items rise to the top of every discussion within a campaign. Campaigns also run into small decisions that make almost no difference but can become so overwhelming that little happens.
Because Nuts & Bolts here is written with the small candidate in mind rather than a large, presidential campaign, realize that some of these items may scale differently in larger federal races, but the time associated is still in accordance to the level of staff and resources.
You aren’t Pepsi or Coke
Recently, a midwest campaign became a point of discussion with multiple consultants due to a fight that went on for more than a month within the campaign: campaign logo. With multiple design houses deployed, different designs put forward, a campaign ground to a halt for an extended period of time over the logo that would be presented for the campaign.
Now, the larger the campaign you have, the more access you have to high quality graphic artists and even time to take a look at multiple options. The smaller the campaign? Well, let’s just say spending a lot of your campaign time and resources on a logo is a great way to distract yourself from the things that will actually motivate voters.
The issue here, though, isn’t about a logo—it is about the process. When a campaign gets going, you work to surround yourself with some people you trust to give you a fair opinion and you work to act swiftly around their advice and put that advice into action. If you develop a campaign where you don’t trust the advice you are given, or you find yourself constantly second-guessing, you end up in discussions like this one, where second-guessing and doubt stall decisions and can bog down your campaign in minor details.
Part of not sweating the small stuff is thoughtful delegation—realizing that you are placing a level of trust in some individuals within your campaign and that you are prepared to act on them without a ton of second-guessing or micromanaging their decisions.
Not every decision needs a committee.
Campaigns are faced with hundreds of decisions they have to make every day. Most of these decisions can and should be made unilaterally. Where are we going to eat? Hey, do we need to buy more pens? How many volunteers do we need today? Hundreds of decisions face a campaign from big to small.
Having that campaign staff you trust means that the candidate and the campaign manager are wasting less time getting more actual work done. If you start out your campaign wanting to hold a meeting over every decision, you will get paralyzed very quickly. Smaller campaigns have a tendency to get stuck in this trap because they sometimes guard campaign resources in an overzealous manner, as though no more campaign funds will ever come in and they have to guard every cent in their campaign.
While making sure you don’t squander resources is important, remember donors gave you money to spend on your campaign in order to win. If you stall all decisions protecting resources or debating if a decision is the most effective repeatedly, you are going to slow down interest in donating to your campaign.
Simply put: trust people around you, and if you don’t, immediately find new people you do trust to make these decisions looking out for your campaign. Don’t get stuck micromanaging.
Mistakes are not the end of the world. Don’t become Eeyore
Throughout the course of a campaign, people will make mistakes. Volunteers will get lost. You’ll find a volunteer you can’t work with. You will have a fundraiser or house party that doesn’t generate the expected revenue for your campaign. While analyzing what worked and didn’t work around a situation can make sure you don’t repeat the same mistake, if you overly fixate on things that go wrong you never get anything done.
Set limits on your campaign about how you will assess mistakes and errors and be prepared to move on. After a certain point of time, mistakes need to just become something you’ve learned from and move on, rather than something you dwell on or fear.
Make decisions, evaluate how things worked or failed in the past, and move on. If you let yourself dwell on fears or failures, your campaign will be stuck and not move forward.
Final Thoughts
You’re going to make mistakes. Something will go wrong. You’ll be faced with questions you hadn’t considered beforehand, and every decision has a temptation to sound like a major campaign decision. Relax. Take things one by one, don’t dwell, panic or overblow every decision. Do not let the small items drag you down or monopolize your time. If you’re spending time on things that do not directly impact the turnout and casting of ballots, you are burning time you don’t have to give in a campaign.
Next week: I’ve been appointed/elected. And I don’t know what to do next!