Everyone in the organization wants the campaign to succeed. The management, the employees, the board, the movement: they all hope for success. There is knowledge, there is budget, there are good ideas. And yet it runs aground. You might expect the cause to be the opponent or something in the outside world, but that is not always the case. What if your organizational structure is the greatest enemy of your own campaigns?
What is a campaign, actually?
When I talk about a campaign, I do not mean a classic communications campaign. Not a poster, not a series of ads, not an action month. For me, a campaign is a process of building power through a sequence of tactics: you want to force a concrete change from those who decide on it, and to do so you build the support, the pressure, and the movement that are needed.
That definition has an important consequence. A real campaign brings together all facets of an organization: content, policy work, communication, movement and volunteers, fundraising. It only comes to life when those pieces together put one product out into the outside world. But that coming together, that collaboration from all the different corners of your organization, is not self-evident.
From departments to islands
The way NGOs operate has changed drastically over the past ten or twenty years. Often for the better, let that be clear: things were not better in the past. The sector’s professionalization brought with it a new way of management. Every service and every role with its own measurable objectives, project management systems, and dashboards to keep track of everything neatly.
Professionalization can have its benefits, but in many organizations it has gone too far, turning into genuine island-like working. Each department has its own goals and manages accordingly. People still know which cog their job is, but not how it fits into the whole machine or what that cog contributes to. So everyone mainly defends the goals of their own service, not those of the organization.
In practice, it often looks like this. Communications still needs to bring in a number of leads and proposes a particular campaign. The policy officer gets to work on it and looks for how the idea connects with their own work. With that input, communications goes to a marketing or communications agency. It comes back with a nice pun. It is already quite far removed from the content, but according to communications it will generate the most leads. So they look for an added concession on the substantive side. Meanwhile, the movement service asks what will happen with those leads, because they need them too. Fundraising wants to know when they can ask for a donation. Before you know it, there is a tangle of conflicting interests on the table. Every interest is legitimate, but what comes out of it is a lukewarm compromise. And a campaign that starts from a compromise is doomed to fail.
Behind that tangle there is often something else as well: services do not really know what the other services do. They do understand their own work. They see its impact, and therefore they consider it the most important. The result is that services look down on one another. Policy knows the dossiers and believes the rest should serve what they come up with. Communications achieves high reach figures day in, day out and sees itself as the face and voice of the organization. To them, policy is in an ivory tower, and the impact of movement work is hardly measurable. Movement, in turn, wonders how legitimate a demand still is if no one is behind it. In fundraising and other services, you see the same pattern. They are clichés, but anyone who works in an NGO will probably recognize them all too well.
A circle emerges in which each service imagines itself to be the most important. Out of a lack of understanding of what the other does and because the organization is not experienced as an integrated whole. Then not everyone is working toward the same goals; everyone is working on their own little island.
“Campaigners who drop out with burnout rarely do so because of too much work or pressure. They drop out because of their passion: the moment they are reined in, something in their resilience breaks.”
Saving on what you don’t yet know
The cuts in civil society make this issue more urgent. Fewer people means less capacity, and the logical reflex is to attach that capacity to what you know for sure you are going to do. The fundraising activities, the movement-building work, the substantive work: we have been doing it that way for years, so that is where the hours go. That seems sensible, but it comes at a cost in two places.
First, innovation disappears. While renewal is often precisely the only way to avoid losing impact with fewer resources. Those who, when faced with cuts, only keep the existing work afloat, become a little smaller every year.
Second, the room for momentum disappears. Good campaigns respond to the moment. They recognize when something sticks and then make themselves bigger at lightning speed. In January, you have a rough idea of which campaigns you are going to run, but you do not know what the year will bring. The less free capacity there is, the smaller the chance that you will seize that opportunity when it arises.
You can try to capture that in job descriptions and task packages. But anyone who has ever seen a campaign explode knows that momentum cannot be planned. Moreover, the tighter the KPIs of departments and individual employees are monitored, the less room for movement remains. And the harder it is to drop a KPI, the less room there is to make a campaign truly big.
A third knot is decision-making: who decides, and how quickly? Campaigns take place in the outside world. They affect the organization’s reputation, relationships with policymakers and partners, and what members and donors think of you. What goes out into the world has to be good. So a campaign is rightly decided strategically at management level.
The risk is that implementation also gets stuck there. A campaign requires daily follow-up and quick choices by people who are close to it. If you place that too high, the campaign competes with everything else on the management table. It is never truly a priority, and so it falls flat. If you place it too low in your organization chart, a campaigner makes decisions without a mandate and is called back at every turn. Then you lose exactly the speed you need. And not only speed. Campaigners who drop out with burnout rarely do so because of too much work or pressure. They drop out because of their passion: the moment they are called back, something breaks in their resilience.
Five ways to do things differently
One campaign objective above departmental objectives. Formulate one objective per campaign in terms of power and change, not leads or reach. Departmental objectives become derivatives of that, not competitors. The question shifts from "what does this deliver for my department?" to "what does the campaign need from my department?"
Let the structure follow the campaign, not the other way around. The existing departments are not automatically the best form for every campaign. Sometimes a temporary campaign team works, sometimes a lead with a mandate across departments, sometimes something else. There is no blueprint. The question is what form this campaign needs, and whether your structure allows that form.
Frameworks at the top, decisions below. Management sets the frameworks: the objective, the red lines, the risks you do and do not take. Within those, the person leading the campaign decides, and quickly. Agree in advance what needs to go back up.
Keep capacity free for what you do not yet know. Do not allocate all hours in January. A deliberately reserved buffer is not a luxury, but the condition for being able to respond to momentum and current events.
Make the little cog visible. Map out together how each department contributes to your organization’s theory of change. Mission, vision and strategy must be truly internalized by everyone. How you campaign and how you organize it is part of your organization’s DNA. Anyone who understands that DNA and sees which little cog they are will automatically focus more on the whole.
NGOs are good at analyzing systems that block change. When it comes to our own organization, we sometimes look less critically. Yet the question is the same: what in the way we are organized is holding back the change we want?
Those who ask that question honestly do not have to restructure immediately. Often it is enough to work differently for one campaign: one objective, one team, a clear mandate and some breathing space in the planning. What you learn there tells you more than any organizational chart.
