12. What’s the Creative Action?

The purpose of this exercise is to determine the most effective actions to reach your goals.

At this point, you should have researched and mapped the history of your issue, identified goals, and defined the tone and headlines of your campaign. Now it is time to turn these ideas into creative action by determining how the campaign should be implemented. In this step, you will focus on identifying the top actions to accomplish campaign goals. Then, in subsequent steps, we will refine these actions against other considerations.

The Exercise

1. The entire campaign team should participate in this exercise, including all creative(s) involved in the planning of the project.

2. On a whiteboard, large piece of paper, or virtual collaboration tool, write your organization’s mission large enough for the room to read it. Below the mission add your five Issue Statements (aka “How Might We” from Ex. 4).

3. Split the room into groups, assigning one or two How Might We statements to each group depending upon the number of participants.

4. Next, each group will brainstorm creative actions to support the statements and answer the How Might We questions. The goal is to brainstorm as many ideas as possible within 10 minutes, with one idea per sticky note. Every two minutes, introduce a new prompt from the list below:

» Brainstorm as many creative actions/answers to your statement as possible. Don’t hold back.

» Consider the audience themes and campaign tone. What actions might intersect between your statement and the audience?

» Consider the history of the issue or previous, similar campaigns. What actions might apply to your statement?

» Consider the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (Ex. 1). What actions might build upon assets and mitigate risks?

» Imagine that your team has unlimited time, money, and resources for this campaign. Now, what ideas might you consider?

90-120 minutes

- Sticky Notes

- Markers

- Large paper

- Timer

Notes:

12. What’s the Creative Action? (continued)

5. After brainstorming is complete, have each group draw a horizontal line across the bottom of a large piece of paper. Along the X-axis line, write the words “Importance & Impact”. On the left end write “Low” and on the right end write “High”.

6. Have the groups rank their ideas across this axis, placing those items with low importance/impact on the left and those actions with the greatest importance/impact on the right side of the line. Force decisions to be made on ranking importance/impact. There should be no ties.

7. After all actions are ranked, ask each group to draw a new Y-axis up from the left side of the X-axis, labeling this new axis “Difficulty / Cost to Execute”. At the top of the line write “High” and at the bottom write “Low”.

8. Ask the groups to consider each action and move it up depending on the team’s assessment of its difficulty/cost.

9. After this ranking is complete, have each group bi-sect each axis with two new lines, creating quadrants. The groups should already be seeing which actions will be prioritized. The bottom right quadrant should have the highest-impact, lowest-cost actions, and should be considered the first priorities of the campaign. Let’s call this quadrant A. Above quadrant A is quadrant B. Quadrant C is located on the bottom left and quadrant D is above.

10. Aggregate all of the actions from quadrant A from each team. At this point, the catalyst should share a reasonable estimate for the budget, start and end dates of the campaign. This is the first time any potential budget should be discussed to allow for the most unbiased campaign development process possible.

12. What’s the Creative Action? (continued)

11. Looking at all of these potential actions, discuss with the entire group if the actions represented can be supported by the budget.

» If the actions can be supported, then great! Conduct another importance/difficulty exercise to gain a priority for your campaign actions (priorities will be quadrant A, then B, then C, then D).

» If the actions can’t be supported, then conduct the same importance/ difficulty exercise with this new set of actions as an entire group to narrow the focus of the plan (priorities will be quadrant A, then B, then C, then D). Along the way, only eliminate actions entirely from one or more of the How Might We statements if you have discussed as a group how an idea’s removal will affect the focus of the campaign.

» If you feel like your budget can support more actions, then begin taking strategically from the team’s quadrants in the B, C, and D order until you have an appropriate number of actions that the budget can support. Conduct another importance/difficulty exercise to gain a priority for your campaign actions (priorities will be quadrant A, then B, then C, then D).

Reflection

Discuss the following with your campaign team.

» Organize your identified priority actions in a logical order based on the importance/difficulty ranking (and considering any time-sensitive actions, like an upcoming community fair).

» Discuss whether each action is intended to inform, connect, inspire, mobilize, or resource. Force decisions towards one primary goal for each action. Label them accordingly.

» Do the goals identified for your list of actions align with the defined goals of the campaign? If not, should anything be adjusted or refined?

» Capture the work completed with a series of photos.

Update the Campaign Canvas

Build your plan by completing sections of the Campaign Canvas that have Ex. 12 next to the heading title.

» Creative Actions