Apply Lessons Learned the Right Way
Success invites imitation. Great success invites even more. We are always looking for new best practices or success stories about how an organization, campaign or project was successfully conceived and implemented. Many of us have pulled what we thought were the best practices from a previous experience or case study and, when implemented, were not able to achieve the expected results. It’s always difficult to determine why this happened? Poor execution? A bad read of the environment? It could be that we just learned the wrong lessons. And that brings us to this week’s three things.
Three Things to Ensure You Learn the Right Lessons (from success and failure)
1) Apply lessons learned to the appropriate problems. A lesson learned about fundraising is not necessarily appropriately applied to a advocacy problem. A communications strategy to help influence or move public opinion may not work for when you’re trying to motivate constituents to take action. Before reviewing best practices, clearly identify the problem you’re trying to solve and be clear about the ways it differs from the examples you’re modeling.
2) Be clear about the difference between tactical lessons and strategic lessons learned. Sending emails without fancy HTMLs is a tactical lesson; sending a much higher volume of emails to different segments of your list is a strategic lesson. Some successes are based on innovative strategy, others are examples of tactics will applied. Knowing the difference is critical.
3) Do savvy situation analysis. Are your lessons learned from an eighteen-month campaign, but you’re applying them in the context of a six-month campaign? Perhaps the the application of your new knowledge will be different in the compressed timeframe. Campaigns to fund a Presidential campaigns for a rock star candidates and campaigns to fund local non-profit operations are so different so as to make application of lessons learned very tricky. Be savvy about your environment, audiences, goals, and resources to accurately identify what’s applicable and what’s not.
Did we miss something? Do you have an example of learning the wrong lesson? Share them in the comments!