Phase 2 – Your Team

(4 months prior to the election)

Of course, you can not do this all on your own. To succeed you need experts, advisors and supporters.

• Start with a list of people you need. This might include:
  • Political Scientists for advice and possibly in charge of the theses
  • Marketing Specialists, managing your marketing channels (e.g. social media, email, etc.)
  • Web Developers with technical skills to get the election compass online
  • Media Designers
  • enthusiastic citizens / people with good connections to the administration, newspapers and other institutions
  • people with great language skills (for wording and spelling)
• Think of people that might fit into these positions and contact them.
• Organize a kick-off meeting of your entire team to present your project, the plan, the structure and timeline.
• Establish your organization tools and communication channels.
• Get everyone to work, gather todos and assign them, set deadlines.

Tips

I don't know people suitable for these positions

First, if you're not part of an organization, find one that is interested in your idea. This might be a youth organization (maybe not a sport club, though) in your city or any other organisation serving the public good. Again – you should never run an election compass all on your own.

If you're part of an organization, they might know a lot of people or can use their communication channels to find them.

As part of an organization, you can also reach out to the public using newspapers. This will reach a very diverse and great number of people. Chances are high, you'll get a lot of interested contacts this way.

We have too many people for a position / our team is becoming too big

It's important, to keep the team well organized. The more people are part of it, the less responsible everyone will feel. Therefore, the team should not become too big. 5 to 10 people tend to be the most effective. 15 can still work okay. Above that it quickly becomes difficult. You don't have to "kick people out" though. Just talk to everyone openly about this problem and try to find a solution together. There are many ways of dealing with this. Some people might simply resign. Or you can find a more complex form of organization, where you build departments with one manager each and a core team. Whatever you do, there should be a single person as a head of the entire team. Not as a boss, but as a special role that is responsible for keeping track of the timeline, the goals, todos, team meetings and the general overview. A person who's sole task it is to generally keeping the ball rolling.

How do we make decisions as a team?

If you have never worked together as a team before, it's recommended to address this topic in the beginning. Of course, you can choose between many forms of organization. It's recommended, to let every expert / department make decisions of it's own. They report to the entire team and if some individual decisions turn out to be controverse, you can talk about it together. If you cannot reach a consens, you can vote or try to get a second opinion.