Campaigning Wiki

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Summary

Campaign planning is the work of converting a theory of change into an executable arc — sequenced phases, named objectives, owned workstreams, contingencies and decision rules — so the team can run the campaign as an operating system rather than improvise week to week.

Body

Campaign planning sits one step above campaign-project-management: it sets what the campaign will do, when, against whom, and how it will adapt, while project management sets how the team will get the work done. The People Power Manual structures the Campaign Strategy Guide as a funnel — start broad (vision, context, power) and narrow to tactics and action — and treats planning as the explicit hand-off from analysis to delivery [source: people-power-manual]. The Community Tool Box builds its “action planning” sequence on the same hand-off: situational analysis → goals and objectives → audience → tactics → evaluation, with each step feeding the next [source: community-tool-box].

The Green European Foundation’s Campaign Handbook organises the campaign arc into three large phases — Campaign Preparation, Running the Campaign, After the Campaign — and pairs each with worked best-practice examples at local, regional, national and European levels [source: gef-campaign-handbook]. The Commons Library repeats the same arc and stresses the discipline of writing the campaign plan once, then maintaining it: every weekly meeting should be able to read its current state and revise it [source: commons-library].

The most useful planning discipline borrowed from project management is the decision rule: state in advance what the campaign will do if a key assumption proves wrong (the opposition launches early, the funder pulls out, the coalition splits). The Commons Library treats these “if-then” branches as more important than the Gantt chart: the chart shows what the campaign hopes will happen, the decision rules show how it will respond to reality [source: commons-library]. The People Power Manual embeds the same idea in its “Creating a tactical timeline” exercise, which pairs each planned tactic with an explicit condition for revision [source: people-power-manual].

A common failure mode is to plan the first action and call the document done. The Community Tool Box’s action-planning chapters explicitly warn against partial plans — a campaign that has only its launch mapped will improvise from week two onward, and the cost of improvisation compounds [source: community-tool-box]. The Green European Foundation’s Campaign Handbook recommends a written, time-stamped plan with one named owner per workstream, on the principle that an unowned plan is an unwritten one [source: gef-campaign-handbook].

Use it for

Converting a theory of change into an executable plan; aligning a coalition before launch; producing the document a funder or board needs to see; running a structured mid-campaign re-plan.

Open Questions

None yet.

Sources & verification

  • sources/people-power-manual — grounding: secondary — RAW (7977 chars)
  • sources/community-tool-box — grounding: secondary — RAW (833 chars)
  • sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)
  • sources/gef-campaign-handbook — grounding: secondary — RAW (1359 chars)

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.

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