Making Things Happen – the Center for Artistic Activism

Whether you’re building a national advocacy campaign, working to keep your local school system welcoming of diversity and inclusion, or organizing your friends to call your representatives, it’s a great time to build the most creative, effective campaigns.

We want to help. We’ve led hundreds of workshops around the world with organizations large and small and individuals across backgrounds. These are the key elements we’ve found critical to a successful campaign.

Top Three Catalysts
for Creative Campaigns

In the next few weeks, we’ll dive a little deeper into each of these. In this newsletter, we share some tips on that first catalyst: creating clear objectives.

It may seem obvious that when you want to get something done, you need to be clear about what that is. But one of the most surprising things we’ve learned over the past 15 years is that many advocates don’t  define objectives that are clear and specific enough. And what we’ve found is that clear objectives are the number one key to winning.

We help advocates move from vague and unhelpful aims to specific and strong objectives. For example: 

Why Strong Objectives Are Critical for Creative Campaigns

When you’re planning a campaign, they’re a critical and first step. Often times, people start with a tactic. “Let’s get a bunch of clowns on the steps of the Town Hall!” It’s a fun idea, but to what end? Bringing in clowns might end up being a great tactic, but without knowing very specifically what you want to achieve, it’s very unlikely that you will succeed.

• Strong objectives help you articulate exactly what you want.
• They help your team know precisely what they’re trying to accomplish.
• They get other people excited and get their brains thinking of inventive ways to win.

Such a specific, predetermined outcome may at first seem confining. However,  constraints breed creativity. When someone knows, for example, exactly how many people need to be reached, in what way, by when, and why, they can think of novel ways of hitting all those clearly defined requirements. It may seem counterintuitive, but we’ve seen again and again that an objective that is well defined is a key factor in enabling creativity and innovation to thrive.

In our workshops, when we teach about objectives, we sometimes show this clip from the classic movie Family Vacation:

Trying to make change in the world without having a strong objective is like trying to get somewhere without a map. Don’t let yourself get lost! Define your objective, give yourself a map, and you’ll come up with great ideas for how to get exactly where you need to go. 

Use Our Toolkit to Craft Your Campaign

If you want to try this yourself, use our Unleashing Creative Campaigns Toolkit. It’s a resource we provide because we want to help you do your best work.  We’ve crafted it based on the artistic activism workshops we’ve done around the world. Use it in your next meeting for fun and productive campaign planning.

Here’s one of our favorite objective-setting exercises from the toolkit:

Keep doing the good work! And let us know if we can help.

In Solidarity,

All of us at C4AA
Center for Artistic Activism