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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.
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.
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!
Happy Holidays,
Matt Shinners
https://home.forwardparty.com/
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