John --
Hi all, I’m Matt Shinners, the Chief Strategy and Operating Officer here at Forward Party.
Over the next week, while we’re on break, I’ve had each member of our team write up the takeaways from their internal debrief. These debriefs involved a conversation about what went well in 2024, where we learned lessons to improve in the future, and what projects they are thinking of engaging in in 2025 to advance our goals.
Please don’t just read these debriefs—follow the link below to submit your own takeaways from 2024 and suggestions for 2025.
<[link removed]>Give Us Your Feedback! <[link removed]>
We will look at and consider all submissions as we plan out our quarterly goals for 2025. We’ll even feature 10 of our favorites as our New Years Resolutions!
I’m going to start with a review of our 2024 strategic focus.
What Went Well
In 2024, we started with the objective of running down-ballot candidates in key races to boost non-extremist candidates at the top of the ticket. However, as we engaged in that work, we found out that we had a lot of candidate recruitment, endorsement, and support processes to figure out.
While we looked for races that fit that profile, we didn’t limit ourselves to them. Our next email will discuss that work, but the takeaway from a strategic perspective is that we spent 2024 building out our Minimum Viable Product. We now have systems and processes in place to recruit candidates, put them through an endorsement consideration pipeline, and then support the ones we choose to endorse. That’s a huge accomplishment that we’re proud of in 2024.
Lessons Learned
A big lesson learned is that we need to perfect these systems and build them to scale, so that’s going to be a big focus of 2025.
We also know that we have the market share of party members who are passionate about electoral reform. If you’re someone who believes in open primaries and/or ranked-choice voting, you’ve heard of Forward, and joined if you’re going to. We need to poll our membership to find out who they are outside of their reform advocacy, and figure out who else will want to join a new party based on our values.
Finally, we need to be super targeted in all the work that we do in 2025. We used ‘24 to stress test the systems we built, and we feel good about them. As noted above, we need to iterate on them. To do so, we’ll take advantage of the smaller list of elections in the ‘25 off-cycle to really test some of our hypotheses. We need to know what the profile is of a district where Forward can take off. Is it a district where one party dominates? Where Independents outnumber party-registered voters? Where Dunkin’ is more popular than Starbucks? We don’t know, but we will by the end of the year.
These are our thoughts from 2024, but we want to hear from you! Please head to this link and fill out your thoughts on lessons learned, the direction the party should head in, and projects we should tackle! We will read them all, and we will highlight our top 10, along with the people who submitted them, in early January as our New Years Resolutions. <[link removed]>
2025 Projects
- Debrief with all states to learn what we can from their work and experiences
- Regularly poll our membership, and drive engagement in social media surveys
- Build out our target personas - the people out there who would be interested in Forward, with the right message and messenger
- Use the 2025 off-cycle elections to engage in a Proof of Concept phase to figure out the most fertile ground for party building
If you're still feeling the season of giving, consider donating to Forward this season!
<[link removed]>Chip In $25 Today! <[link removed]>
Happy Holidays,
Matt Shinners
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Forward Party - 1701 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036, United States
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