Choose tactics that support your strategy

Strategy involves identifying your group’s power and then finding specific ways to concentrate it in order to achieve your goals. Organizing a rally, for example, should never be thought of as a strategy. It’s a tactic. Before you can identify appropriate tactics, you need to identify your target (see: PRINCIPLE: Choose your target wisely) and figure out what power(s) you can bring to bear against it (see: METHODOLOGY: Theory of change).

Developing a strategy requires:

• analyzing the problem;

• identifying your goal/formulating your demands (see: METHODOLOGY: SMART objectives);

• understanding your target — who holds the power to meet your demands (see: METHODOLOGY: Power mapping); and

• identifying specific forms of power you have over your target and how to concentrate that power to maximal effect.

If your target is a city councilor whose vote you need in order to pass a living wage ordinance, your tactics should involve or influence voters in her district in some way. If your target is a bank that is carrying out foreclosures, your tactics should involve or influence their customers or regulators.

Also consider that it’s often important to identify “secondary targets.” These are individuals or corporations who have significant power over your target and over whom you may have more power than you have over your primary target (see: STORY: Dump Veolia Campaign) and (see: TACTIC: Boycott).

Once we understand the forms of power we can deploy, we are ready to develop our campaign plan.

Within this framework, tactics are specific actions that:

• mobilize a specific type and amount of power;

• are directed at a specific target; and

• are intended to achieve a specific objective.

Tactics can be more effective when they’re scalable, i.e. capable of being reproduced anywhere and by anyone like Distributed action or Phone banking.

In choosing a tactic you must always be able to answer the questions: “What is the power behind the tactic?” In other words, how does the tactic give you leverage over your target? And how can you build on this tactic in implementing your overall strategy (see: PRINCIPLE: Escalate strategically)?

We use tactics to demonstrate a certain form of power. For example, when we carry out an action against a particular company, our underlying power is economic — it must cost them time or customers. That’s why disruption matters. If we target an elected official, our underlying power is political — our tactic must cost them contributions or votes.

In community organizing, power can be broken down into two broad categories:

• Strategic power: Power that is sufficiently strong to win the issue.

• Tactical power: Power that can move you along toward a goal and help you gain ground, but is itself not decisive.

Once we understand the forms of power we can deploy, we are ready to develop our campaign plan.

A campaign is a series of tactics deployed over a specified period, each of which builds the strength of the organization and puts increasing pressure on the target until it gives in on your specific demands. A campaign is not a series of events on a common theme; it is a series of tactics, each one carefully selected for its power to ratchet up pressure on a target over time. All tactics are connected, and each one is chosen on the basis of how much work it requires to pull off and how much pressure it will bring to bear.

Finally, a strategic campaign is never endless; it has a beginning, middle, and end. It ends, ideally, in a specific victory achieving the demands of the campaign.

The author wishes to acknowledge Midwest Academy and Northeast Action, both of whom assisted in developing the curriculum that this module is based on.

Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.