Summer Reading – How to Win Campaigns  

This month, Spitfire Strategies continues its summer reading recommendations with How to Win Campaigns: 100 Steps to Success, by Chris Rose -- a useful tool for any non-profit seeking to start or revamp a campaign.

Published this past spring, the book offers an analysis of campaign successes and failures, as well as a litany of helpful hints, ideas and resources to improve any current or future campaign effort. Rose argues that there is dearth of available information about why particular campaigns failed, or how a successful campaign can be replicated; he attempts to bridge this divide in How to Win Campaigns and through his Web site, www.campaignstrategy.org.
 
Rose calls campaigning a "mongrel craft" that draws from many other disciplines, "so it's no surprise that lawyers tend to think that campaigning hinges on making arguments, scientists want to progress campaigns by research, writers and academics by publishing, and teachers may believe education is how to change the world." He writes that each has a role in campaigns, but those that are most effective usually happen because of "showing rather than arguing, by motivation rather than education, and by mobilization rather than accumulation of knowledge." Earthworks, an organization that protects communities and the environment from the impacts of mining, digging and drilling, has effectively used some of Rose's ideas in its work.

Some chapters target a particular issue area - from working with news media, to making a campaign plan, to keeping up momentum. Other sections help readers put their campaigns within a larger context. There is even a discussion of "jigsaw problems" - when proposed solutions don't complete the "puzzle," or problem. Whether you choose to read from cover to cover or peruse a single section for a specific planning purpose, How to Win Campaigns will benefit any reader.

Take a look at excerpts from How to Win Campaigns on www.campaignstrategy.com and order it online at Amazon.com.