Who should I hire? A candidate’s guide to staffing your campaign.

Dylan Cate is a movement consultant with more than 10 years experience with the labor movement, community-based organizations, and political campaigns. His firm, Dylan Cate Strategic, works with organizations and campaigns to build strategies that build power and win campaigns.

I’ll start with a confession: there’s no one answer to the question “who should I hire to run a successful campaign?” Anyone who tells you there’s a single staffing mode that applies to every campaign is either misguided, or trying to sell you something. You can safely ignore the fancy org charts that are based on multi-million dollar presidential campaigns. A mayoral campaign in a town of 10,000 voters needs to accomplish a very different set of goals from a targeted state legislative campaign, or a Congressional campaign. Your strategy, scale, and needs are unique to your campaign — and you need a staffing plan that fits your campaign specifically. Instead, this article will walk you through some best practices and clear processes for figuring out the right staffing model for your campaign. By the end of this article, you’ll be familiar with some core questions you need to answer, and some processes to make staff hiring decisions on your campaign. We’ll start with some first principles:

1. Candidates should never run their own campaign. A campaign is an organization, not a person. The candidate may have their name on the ballot, but they are just one of the network of people who all must play very specific roles in order for the campaign to be successful. Candidates — along with their staff — all work for the campaign in the sense that they have a specific role to play within the organization. For candidates, that role should never involve actually running the campaign. Why? There are a few things that candidates are uniquely effective at (sitting for endorsement interviews, calling potential donors, speaking at events) — and managing the campaign isn’t one of them. In fact, the whole campaign organization can be thought of as a machine to take care of all the activities and processes which allow the candidate to do what they do best. Candidates should focus 100% of their time on the activities that they only they can do most effectively, and let a manager, staff, and volunteers take care of the rest.
2. You should build your campaign plan and strategy before you start looking at resumés and designing your staffing plan. You need to know what capabilities your organization requires, and the amount of work you need to produce in each capability, before you can start looking at resumés for staffers or full-time volunteers. Don’t have a campaign plan? Don’t worry. If you’re in Washington State, you can access a TON of free campaign planning and training tools via the Washington State Democratic Party’s Rise and Run program (your humble author helped design this program and would love you to use it).
3. Finally, a few definitions of terms we’ll use throughout this article:

“Capabilities”: Types of tasks or work that your campaign might need in order to be successful. Fundraising, voter contact, and all the small tasks that make those things possible, are capabilities.

“Capacity”: The amount of work your campaign is able to do. So, two campaigns might have the capability to knock on doors and talk to voters, but one has built the capacity to knock 10,000 doors in the next three months, while the other has capacity to knock 3,000 doors. “Capacity” isn’t a value judgement — it’s a sober assessment of the amount of work your campaign organization can accomplish, and an indicator about whether you need to bring in additional resources to build your capacity.

Running a Capabilities Inventory

Once you have your plan, you can build a basic inventory of the capabilities your campaign will need to be successful. You might brainstorm a chart like this to list all of the tasks your campaign needs to be able to accomplish, and group them into broad categories:

Sample campaign task chart (this is just a small sample of all the tasks you might want to include)

Feeling overwhelmed? That’s ok; this should be a long list, and entail a lot of work. After all, that’s why you’re reading an article about how to bring on folks to help with your campaign, right?

This capabilities list is a great start, but it doesn’t tell us how to organize our campaign to get all these things done. Now, we need to prioritize these categories of work, and start figuring out how much capacity we’ll need in each one. A pie chart is actually a pretty good way to think about this. I call these “Campaign Capacity Charts;” their goal is to track how much work you need to accomplish in each category on your campaign. Why do we use a pie-chart? Because it forces us to acknowledge trade-offs — if we want to do more of one thing, we either have to do less of something else, or build a bigger pie (ie more capacity).

Here are some sample campaign capacity charts for three different types of campaigns.

Small Mayoral/City Council Campaign:

On a campaign where you can reach most of your voters via direct contact (like doorknocking those 10,000 voters for your mayoral campaign), your campaign’s needed capacity (measured in terms of staff time) might look something like this:

A sample campaign capacity chart for a small mayoral or city-council race

Because you’ll be taking your message directly to voters at their doors, on their phones, and via their friends using relational organizing techniques, you’ll want to budget a LOT of capacity for voter contact. Events, scheduling and endorsements are important too; in a small town where lots of folks know eachother and there are a limited number of trusted media outlets, the endorsement of local outlets and groups can carry a lot of weight. How do we make room for those two capacities? We dial down the amount of time we spend on fundraising (knowing that we won’t be spending lots of money on TV ads, digital advertising or mail).

Downballot Countywide Campaign:

If you’re running for something like Water Commission, where you’ll have a small budget but have to cover a full county’s worth of voters, you might have a strategy that’s more focused on contacting voters via paid and earned media, and your capacity chart might look like this:

A sample capacity chart for a downballot county-wide campaign

In a county with a hundred thousand or more voters, a race like water commission usually won’t attract enough volunteers and money to reach voters via traditional methods. You probably won’t have enough money to put ads up on television, and you’ll likely have engage voters via a digital advertising program, mail, and perhaps some digital and relational organizing. So, you ramp up the focus on communications, digital, and fundraising to pay for those tools, and ramp down your focus on direct voter contact. You still want to budget plenty of time for endorsements though — in downballot races where voters don’t have a lot of information about the candidates or the role, voters will look to trusted organizational endorsements for guidance.

Rural Legislative Race:

If you’re running for the state legislature in a rural area, it’s less efficient (but still important) for you to reach voters at their doors. Your field program might focus more on phones, and less on doors, and have smaller goals. Instead, more of your campaign’s capacity will be taken up by scheduling for and appearing at public events, doing endorsement interviews with as many local papers as possible, and driving time (not to be underestimated). The candidate will have less time to do nightly call time because they’ll be attending lots of events, So, your capacity profile might look more like this:

Disclaimer: none of these charts are actual advice about how you should spend your time and money on your campaign; that guidance can only come from a strategic planning process. Instead, this is meant to help you think through what your campaigns needs are, and how you’ll staff them. Which brings us to our next point.

What roles do I need to recruit for on my campaign?

So, you know what basic capabilities your campaign will need, and you’ve prioritized each capability to help you decide how much work you’ll need to do in each area. How do you figure out which roles can be accomplished by volunteers and which you need to hire for?

Let’s return to our favorite chart, and add a few columns to help us discover what work should be done by the candidate, what work should be done by a trusted, full-time volunteer or paid staffer, and what work could be done by part-time volunteers. Go back to your original chart, and add two columns for the following questions:

1. Is this something the candidate is uniquely effective at doing (i.e. does the candidate have a “competitive advantage” at this task?)

2. Is this something that involves liability, sensitive information, or otherwise requires a paid staffer or highly trusted, accountable volunteer to accomplish?

So, how do we translate this chart, and all our possible roles, into the capacity pie diagram we did originally? Let’s look back at our first example campaign, where you’re running for mayor or city council in a small race with about 10,000 voters. You probably can’t afford to hire a full-time campaign manager, but you do have someone who you really trust and who has some spare time to be a full-time volunteer. You might set up a structure like this:

Small Mayoral/City Council:

So, what’s made possible through this campaign structure? We’ve optimized the candidate’s time to focus on fundraising and voter contact by doing the following:

• Reduced the candidate’s time spent on scheduling, events, and endorsements by recruiting a full-time, trusted volunteer Campaign Manager (“CM”) who can manage the candidate’s schedule, set up endorsement interviews and event appearances, fill out endorsement questionnaires, etc.
• Moved all data and admin functions (cutting checks for rent, exporting donation history and in-kind contributions and sending to the treasurer, etc) to our volunteer CM.
• Shifted all communications functions (responding to press requests, maintaining facebook page and posting content, etc) to the CM
• Recruit several volunteers who only do field work; preferably doorknocking with the candidate. They can knock the opposite side of the street from the candidate, and if they find someone at home, call the candidate over to talk to them. You can essentially double the candidate’s contact rate and number of conversations using techniques like this. They can also help recruit other volunteers to join them.
• Hired a full-time treasurer to take on all the compliance tasks. Don’t skimp here; it will take them 1/4 the time to file compliance reports that it will take a volunteer Campaign Manager, with fewer errors and risk of fines or violations. This frees up your CM to do what they can do well, and it’s a worthwhile investment for any campaign.

So, what does the full-time CM’s role look like in this situation?

• The bulk of their time is spent managing the candidate’s schedule, events, and commitments. They are the super-scheduler, organizer, coordinator, and reminder-in-chief who makes it possible for the candidate to attend more events, set more followups, and talk to more donors and voters.
• They do some field work — but mostly just cutting turf for the candidate and other volunteers, and training and recruiting volunteer canvassers or phonebankers. They could also train up one of their field volunteers to recruit and train other volunteers, thereby working themselves out of a job (which is a really good thing — that’s how we build capacity and train new leaders)
• They do some data + admin — but just enough to keep the field operation running and support the treasurer with compliance duties.
• They spend some time on fundraising — likely helping the candidate prep call lists, track pledges, and address thank you cards.

So, who should I hire?

Now you know all the core functions your campaign must be capable of executing and how much emphasis you’re placing on each function, and you have a sense of which types of work to do and what kind of person should fill them — so how do you find the right people? Well, let’s revisit our chart from earlier, and add a final column to answer this question: what skill-set or personality type is required to do this job effectively?

Putting it all together

Great work! Now, our last step will be easy: look at the last two columns of your chart, and group the tasks that require similar types of people together into a “task group.” Each group is a role on your campaign — think of it as a job description that you’ll go out and recruit a volunteer or staff member to fill. Depending on the amount of work and each individual volunteer’s time capacity, you may need to hire or recruit more than one person to fill each role.

Conclusions

If you were to find a bunch of pre-made org charts, I’m sorry to disappoint you! But hopefully this set of exercises, and this process for systematically uncovering your campaigns true needs and who can fill those roles, ended up being much more valuable. I hope I’ve convinced you that it’s worthwhile to invest some time in building a solid staffing plan; your campaign is a machine, and if you don’t put it together correctly, it won’t run at peak efficiency, and that means lost votes and missed opportunities. Your campaign is unique; use these best practices, and you can build an all-star team that will help you run your best possible campaign. Good luck out there!

PS: If you’d like to talk more about how to run your best possible campaign, let’s talk! You can schedule a time to chat at www.dylancate.com/contact.