Eric McGoey, Campaign Manager, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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1. What did your campaign manager role consist of?
So my role in the early days helping my friend Alex was really talking to him about options and really making sure that he was clear in his own mind about what his motivation was. One of the questions that I put to him quite early was how do you win without winning? What are the things that you will be proud to have accomplished on this campaign that you can look back and say it was worth it because I did XYZ? Because if you need to win for the investment of time and energy to have been worthwhile, that's a really high bar and you probably shouldn't run because beating incumbent to me as well politics is extraordinarily difficult. So, I think the most value I provided to Alex in the planning stages before he was committed to running was getting him to think about what you wanted to do and getting them to think about what the techniques we were going to have to use to do our voter contact. Once you get into the campaign stage then it's just about having a plan and executing it. I'm a big believer in the idea that a decent plan executed to perfection will outperform a brilliant plan executed sloppily every time. So rather than looking for something perfect, you just think about the fundamentals: How many votes do you need to win? How are you going to contact those voters? How are you going to persuade them? How are you going to identify the vote? And how are you going to get the vote out? Everything else that you do on your campaign should be in service of those principles. Fundraising on its own doesn't mean anything unless you're fundraising to do those things. Same with literature; same with your website; same with your volunteer recruitment. Unless you are fundraising and recruiting and contacting people in order to identify, to persuade and to get out the vote, you're wasting your time and you're not focused on what really matters. So my job was to make sure that the team stay focused everyday on executing the fundamentals of the campaign.