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Rights. Respect. Responsibility.®—The Keep it REAL Campaign Toolkit [PDF]
Creating an Action Plan
Now that you have identified an organization with which to work and together have conducted outreach to allies and constituents, you need to create a plan of action. This includes determining your goals and your targets.
Identifying Your Goals
- The long-term goal of the REAL Campaign is passage of the REAL Act.
- The intermediate goal of the REAL Campaign is to obtain 25 additional U.S. Senate co-sponsors for the REAL Act.
Why Did Advocates for Youth Choose these Goals?
Advocates understands the importance of comprehensive sex education and realizes that only through legislation can we ensure young people have accurate, honest sex education. To help accomplish this vision, Advocates identified long-term and intermediate goals. Looking at goals this way permits us to break a larger vision (here, ensuring comprehensive sex education) down into smaller, more manageable, and winnable steps (here, increasing Senate support for this bill, then moving on to passage of the REAL Act). For example, think about what the Youth Activist Network wants to achieve through the Keep it REAL Campaign. The long-term goal of the campaign is what the Youth Activist Network would really like to see happen. The long-term goal is not the specific issue we are working on now, but one that helps us reach the larger vision for what can happen after we’ve won some victories. The long-term goal is passage of the REAL Act and federal funding for comprehensive sex education.
But first we have to identify more immediate goals that lead up to this long-term goal. Our intermediate goal is to get 25 senators to sign on as co-sponsors of the REAL Act. Twenty-five co-sponsors is a clear and attainable goal. Victory in achieving this goal can bring the long-term goal closer. The more Congressional support we garner for the REAL Act, the more likely the bill is to pass.
Your Goals
Now you need to determine how your efforts can contribute to reaching the Campaign’s intermediate goal. What can your organization do to contribute to the Keep it REAL Campaign? Think about what will be attainable for your organization. Be clear about your goal.
Examples:
- If you go to a school where most students live in the same state and your senators are not currently co-sponsors of the REAL Act, then your goal could be to have your senators co-sponsor the REAL Act. See the section below on “targeting” to determine if your senators make good targets for these efforts.
- If you go to a school where students are residents of many states and therefore have many different senators, your goal could be to get four senators to sign on as co-sponsors of the REAL Act. See the section below on targeting to determine which senators to focus your energy on.
- If you live in a state with senators who are already signed on as co-sponsors of the REAL Act or who are vocal supporters of abstinence-only education, then your goals could be to increase public knowledge of the importance of comprehensive sex education by getting five op-ed pieces and three letters to the editor published in local papers.
Determining Attainable Goals
When choosing an issue to work on and setting your goals, keep the following points in mind.
- Is the Issue or Goal Easy to Understand? The issue or goal should not need a lengthy or complex explanation in order for people to understand it and feel motivated to work with you. You should be able to point easily to the problem and explain simply how you are working to change things. For example:
- Explanation: abstinence-only education does not provide youth with the information they need to make healthy decisions about sex.
- Solution: We want to end censorship and give youth the information needed to make healthy decisions about sex
- Is this Issue or Goal Widely and Deeply Felt? Determine whether people believe this is a real problem and if they feel strongly enough about the problem to do something about it.
- Is this Goal Worthwhile? Everyone involved should feel positive about the goal and what you are trying to achieve. If not, you haven’t articulated the goals clearly enough or you have chosen the wrong allies.
- Is this Issue or Goal Something You Can Win? Learn whether a similar goal has been achieved in the past, and if achieving it had the desired effect on the issue. Decide where the issue or goal is just right or too big or too small for your organization to tackle.
- Will Attaining Your Goal Help Achieve Real Improvement in People’s Lives? You should be able to experience the improvement. For example, increasing support for comprehensive sex education should result in policies that respect young people’s right and responsibility to make healthy decisions about sex.
Identifying Campaign Targets
Targets of the Keep it REAL Campaign are senators who have not yet signed on as co-sponsors of the REAL Act. Names of selected targets can be found in the Overview section.
How Did Advocates for Youth Determine These Targets?
A target is a person or people who can give you what you want. In any campaign there can be more than one target. The important thing to remember, here, is that the target is always an individual or individuals and never a board or institution. For example, our targets are specific senators and not the Senate as a whole. Individuals are far easier to move than any institution. The Senate and House of Representatives, for example, may have fixed policies and/or ways of doing business; but each member has his/her own interests, aspirations, likes, and dislikes. For the Keep it REAL Campaign, our specific Senate targets are those people we feel we can move to co-sponsoring the REAL Act because they have demonstrated support for our issues in the past or are senators with which Advocates for Youth has a relationship.
Your Target(s)
Determine whether your senators are already co-sponsors of the REAL Act. Go to http://thomas.loc.gov and enter bill number S. 368. If your two senators are not co-sponsors, you may plan to target them. If your senators are co-sponsors, you may instead target senators from other states or focus your energies on building public support for the REAL Act through the media. You may select targets using different criterion, of course. These are just a few examples of how to select targets:
- If you go to a school where most students live in the same state and your senators are not yet co-sponsors of the REAL Act and you have decided that your goal is get your senators to become co-sponsors, then your targets will be those Senators.
- If you go to a school where students are residents of many states and, therefore, have many different senators and you have decided your goal is to get four senators to co-sponsor the REAL Act, then those four senators will be your targets. You can use Advocates’ target list, found in the Overview section. Or, you can choose to target senators representing the most liberal areas where students in your organization or coalition live, or senators from areas where you can reach the most registered voters.
- If you live in a state with senators who are already co-sponsors of the REAL Act or who are vocal supporters of abstinence-only education and you have decided to focus on increasing public knowledge about the importance of comprehensive sex education by getting five op-ed pieces and three letters to the editor published in local papers, then your target will be those individuals who work at the local papers and make the decisions about publishing your letters.
What if My Senators Are Not on Advocates’ Target List?
Just because your senators are not on Advocates’ current priority target list does not mean that you shouldn’t reach out to them. We want to build as much support as possible for REAL Act and contacting your senators will play an important role in achieving this goal.
If you have one or two senators who definitely will not co-sponsor the REAL Act, you can participate in other ways. Work with students in your organization or at your school who live in states with more friendly senators to gain Senate support. Or focus on increasing the public’s knowledge of the need for the REAL act, by using community forums and other educational tactics. Finally, you can work on getting published op-ed pieces and letters to the editor on the importance of comprehensive sex education.
Contact Advocates’ YAN Program Manager or your Regional Organizer to get help in identifying useful tactics.
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