Here’s today’s tip: Every candidate should have daily and weekly goals for fundraising calls and door knocks. What are yours?
Galileo, the famous scientist and astronomer once said, “Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not so.”
When we set goals without a plan for easily tracking progress, failure is all but guaranteed. Lack of a success metric leaves us, at best, with a guess as to the status of our mission, and that’s far from the assurance you want when your political career is on the line.
One of the first measures you establish, even before you launch your campaign, should be your vote goal. This is the number of votes you believe you’ll need to win your campaign.
From there, you need to set a goal for the number of contacts it will take you to identify, persuade and turn out those voters. A significant number of those should be by door-to-door canvassing. Next break down that goal down to the weekly and daily levels.
This isn’t going to to be a function of simply dividing your door goal by the number of weeks before Election Day. In most cases, you should execute about two-thirds of your canvassing in the last couple months of the campaign, so weight the goals heavily towards the end of your race.
Similarly, break down your budget. Just like we weighted canvassing, you’ll need to spend most of your money in the last two months of the campaign, so you’ll weight your fundraising calls towards the early and middle part of the campaign.
These daily and weekly goals will become part of your regular tracking of the campaign’s key performance indicators. Talk about them in your weekly team meeting and push yourself to hit or surpass them.
Checking your actions against those goals won’t always be fun, but keeping your performance front of mind will make it more likely that you make real progress. It’s like weighing in every day while you’re on a diet. You may not always like the number but the fact you measure it will help improve your results.
