How do you know if you have the right strategy?

In our February newsletter we made the case for investing in strategy.  We got a number of replies suggesting that the concept rang true, and asking for more help with the diagnostic – not just whether you have a strategy, but whether you’re operating according to the right one.

We love feedback, and are here to help, so this week’s three things is three more strategic diagnostic questions:

1. Answer the “what if” question.

What if all of your communications activities are successful?  What will have happened?

With respect for the smart, good people at 350.org, their experiences around the 2009 Copenhagen Climate talks is instructive here.  Their communications were a tremendous success – they had a “front page takeover” of the major newspapers around the world, their campaign images were featured on every billdboard in Times Square for a few minutes, and they got 50,000 people from around the world to submit pictures with the number “350″ (for 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere).  But we’re no closer to a global climate accord than we were in 2009 – if anything we might be a bit further from it.  So, big communications wins were disconnected from even small actual wins.  That’s a sign that perhaps the strategy was off, at least for that goal at that time.

Can you draw a straight line between your communications successes and hoped-for policy or political successes?

2. When you have to cut something from your plan, how do you decide what to cut?

When capacity, budget, or timeline forces you to reconsider your plan, how do you make decisions about what to jettison? Is it what you like to do, what your executive director thinks is interesting (sometimes the unavoidable route), or what’s most complicated?  What do you measure your decisions against?

3. How do you define progress?

What are your benchmarks?  Most of our clients starts with benchmarks that are purely tactical – number of email subscribers, number of online actions taken, etc. Do you have benchmarks that can be justified as strategic – things like list growth in target Congressional districts or amongst target demographics – that are clearly along your larger path to victory?

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