After-Action Review
What do we do now?
YOU WON! NOW WHAT?
You have answered the call to service. You exercised your right to vote or to peacefully assemble for a cause and you fulfilled your commitment to serve your campaign or cause. The race has ended, and the voters have chosen you. Now what? The marathon begins.
Six keys to enduring success: review your campaign, prepare for the transition, do the job, stay close to your people, keep your word, and pay it forward.
Review your campaign. Review the following in terms of quality, timeliness, and usefulness:
1. Personnel and networks
2. Process for defining, refining, repeating, and refreshing message, including campaign pledges, promises, and commitments made on the trail
3. Ambassadors and allies
4. Communications strategy and media plan
5. Criticisms raised by citizens, local media, and opponents (Note what the responses were at the time and in retrospect what they should have been.)
6. Plan for budgeting and raising money
7. Process for mobilization—recruiting, training, and retaining—of volunteers
Prepare your transition. Keep campaigning and governing separate. The people who helped you get elected are not necessarily the best people to serve in government, so be very careful about automatically transferring personnel. People need policy credentials and management skills before you assign them the work of legislation and casework.
Do the job. Your community elected you to do something. Do it. Throughout your campaign, you articulated the type of leadership that the job required, and you put yourself forward as the leader who could do it best. That may mean conducting yourself differently now. You are no longer a challenger or candidate; you are the representative of your constituents. Represent them.
“People need to know that you will provide full representation to everyone, including those who openly acknowledge that they did not vote for you,” says Willie L. Brown Jr. He advises incumbents: “Define and perform your job so well that no one but you can do it. Whether you define the job as constituent contacts and services, perfect voting attendance, or complete knowledge of a particular subject, do your job in a unique and excellent way.”1
Stay close to your people. Remember, everything you do or don’t do, everything you say or don’t say communicates to your community. Start your term in office with a listening tour. If your ballot initiative passes, update the public—and your supporters in particular—when the new law goes into effect or when its benchmarks are reached. Maintain your feedback loops and your community networks in person and online. People should see the results of your work.
As Bay Area Democrats’ cofounder Wade Randlett says, “Winning the election is just the first day. Now you have to do the thing you believe in. You need to have the people with you to do the thing you said you would do. Campaigning is creating that connection. If you lose that connection you did yourself a disservice because you are not keeping the power to make the change you ran to make in the first place.”2
Keep your word. When you launched your campaign, you committed to serve your community, and you promised to improve the future of your constituents. Keep your word. If you promised to forgo certain perks, forgo them. If you promised to show up at all the meetings, show up prepared. If you promised to post your schedule on your Web site, post it. If you promised to hold public meetings, hold them. Nothing un-elects people faster than breaking their word.
Pay it forward. Throughout your campaign, people gave to you. They gave you their time, their money, their talent, their vote. Give back. Mentor others. Somewhere in your community, future leaders already walk in your footsteps.