The smartest and most qualified candidate does not always win the Election. It’s the candidate with the SMART goals who often comes out on top.
Members of both major political parties have been keenly reminded of this in the last two presidential elections.
Candidates running for office of any type need to be focused on the essential tasks of their campaign if they intend to be victorious.
The key to having the focus needed to win a campaign is knowing your goals and how you intend to achieve them.
Every candidate will say their goal is to win the election.
Yes, the big goal at the end of the campaign is to be the winner at your Election Night Party.
But saying you want to win an election and actually winning it are two different things.
Winning candidates know this. They have campaign goals that when built one upon another lead to the overall goal of victory becoming a reality.
Your campaign goals cannot be simple theories or ideals. They need to be real and they need to be achievable.
Winning Campaign Goals Must Be SMART
If you’ve ever done professional and personal goal setting before, it’s likely you’ve encountered the acronym SMART.
As in the personal and the work realms, SMART campaign goals are:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-Bound
Let’s take a look at how you can apply this to your campaigning.
SMART Campaign Goals are Specific
Like I said, your goal is to win the Election.
But you need to get quite specific.
You must know specifically how many voters it takes to win.
This is based on voter turnout projections and the number of candidates in the field.
Once you know this, you need to know specifically how much money you need to raise to have a real chance of winning.
Your fundraising goal is based on knowing specifically how many mailers you need to send, how many signs you need to get placed in voters yards, how many digital ads must be created and ran, how many texts need to be sent, and so forth.
You also need to know specifically how many voters you must covert into supporters to win your race.
SMART Campaign Goals are Measurable
To measure your goals, you’re going to need to be able to quantify the result.
That’s why being specific also helps.
Knowing how much money you must raise to win your election will allow you to measure how much money needs to be raised on a weekly basis to meet your budget goal.
Knowing how many votes are need to win on Election Day will allow you to measure which voters to target with your outbound campaign marketing.
It also helps measure how many voters you need to convert into supporters on both a daily and a weekly basis to ensure your victory.
You measure how many people are solid supporters by getting them to sign an endorsement card or if they let you place a sign in their yard.
SMART Campaign Goals are Achievable
If you can’t realistically achieve a goal, then it’s not a goal. It’s a wish.
State your achievable goals with action verbs.
Here’s some examples of achievable campaign goals:
- Raise $3,000 per week to fulfill my campaign budget of $30,000.
- Knock on 50 doors of high propensity voters six days a week.
- Send five weekly mailers to high propensity voters starting five weeks before Election Day
You might be tsk-tsking this, but those goals are achievable.
If you think they are too hard and will require too much work, you might wind up making the concession call to your opponent on Election Night.
Lazy candidates don’t typically win elections even if they are the most qualified person on the ballot.
The candidate working the hardest often surprises everyone by winning.
SMART Campaign Goals are Realistic
A big part of goals being achievable is that they are indeed realistic.
I’ve had many candidates tell me that they intend to walk every precinct and knock on every voter’s before Election Day.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who ever has. The goal is not realistic.
It’s also a waste of time and will lead to candidate burnout when they realize the goal is too large and therefore unachievable.
A more realistic goal would be to knock on the door of every high propensity voter before Election Day.
However, based on that size of the district you’re running in and its geography, this still might not be a realistic goal.
A realistic option I provide my candidates is to knock on the door of every high propensity voter in precincts with the greatest voter density.
Voter density will put you into the neighborhoods where turnout is the highest and its likely easy to walk.
This will allow you to spend more time talking to voters you need to convert.
Your fundraising goals must also be realistic.
Don’t set a goal of raising $100,000 for your campaign if you know raising $35,000 is probably the realistic amount you can collect.
At the same time, if you set a goal of sending out six mailers but only have the money to send out four, be realistic about that too.
Either adjust the goal of the number of mailers you’re going to spend to match up with what you’ve actually raised, or adjust the size of the voter universes you’re mailing to so you can still send the full six.
That said, please do not use either of those examples as an excuse not to fund raise!
You need to work your butt off raising money for your campaign if you expect to communicate with voters, convert them into supporters, and win your election.
If your monetary target seems too daunting, then adjust your goal into something more realistic for you, like making fundraising calls three hours each day four days a week.
Trust me, you can do that.
Almost all of the people you know in elected office did not have a clue how to raise money when they first threw their hats into the ring.
But then they learned how to do it and raised the money needed to win their elections.
And you can learn how to fund raise by enrolling in this premium course: Jump Start Your Fundraising.
SMART Campaign Goals are Time-Bound
Campaigns are by nature time-bound. They end when the polls close.
Knowing this, everything in your campaign becomes a time-bound activity.
One of the first campaigns I ever worked on was unfortunately a losing campaign.
It didn’t feel like it was a loser when I was working on the race though.
We had a great campaign team, tons of volunteers, signs out everywhere, and mail landing in mailboxes daily for a month.
I said after the losing results were posted by the Registrar of Voters, “If the Election had been a week later we would’ve won.”
The person I told that too responded by saying, “If we’d had another week we’d still want another week.”
She was right.
Even though it felt like our candidate was coming on in the last days before the Election, another week wouldn’t have likely changed the outcome.
Election Day was set. The candidate and our campaign knew when it was and how many voters we needed to convert to supporters to win.
It didn’t happen.
The whistle blew. The clock ran out. Our candidate came in second.
It may not be “over till it’s over,” but when the polls close it’s over.
You are time-bound to that fact.
Knowing this, you need to set specific deadlines for your campaign activities.
Your fundraising goals need to be time-bound to when you need to send out mail and pay for other voter contact activities.
Your precinct walking and phone calling activities need to be time-bound to when people are voting, either by mail or at the polls.
Your mail and ad schedules must be time-bound to ensure that it’s delivered before the Election Day.
A mailer that lands the day after the Election is no damn good.
Are Your Campaign Goals SMART?
You’re in your race to win it.
To help make that happen, write out your campaign goals and make sure they are SMART.
Review the list and the examples above, apply the SMART goal principle to your campaign activities.
Ensuring your campaign goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound to a deadline may make the difference between being a winning candidate or not on Election Night.