The Elly Report: State Committee

Setting Goals

Over the past couple of weeks my weekly emails have covered the purpose of the Republican Town Committee and their role in the overall Party structure as well as the Chairmen's duties and responsibilities.

As I discussed last week the primary role of the Chairman is to run committee meetings and set the agenda for the committee. Once you've evaluated your committee, the next step is to identify goals that your committee can focus on.

To rebuild the party it is critical that our local town & ward committees are constantly progressing. Regardless of whether your committee has only 5 members or if your membership is full, as Chairman you need to steer your committee towards realistic and achievable goals that work towards building the party and electing republican candidates.

Setting attainable goals
Setting challenging, but realistic, objectives is the first step. Depending on the current strength of the Republican Party in your community, goals may include:

Boosting committee membership above 35
Electing a majority of Republicans to the Board of Selectmen
Electing a Republican Ward Councilor
Increasing Republican voter registration by 2 percentage points
Electing a Republican state Representative
Donating a certain amount of cash or in-kind assistance to local candidates
Conducting Get Out the Vote activities for Republican candidates
Keeping the heat on local Democrat incumbents during non-election years

Whatever your goals are make sure everyone on your committee understands them and set up a system to track whether or not you are meeting your goals. Each month at your committee meeting you should review the progress of your previous monthly goals and set new goals to have completed by your next meeting.

For instance, if one of your committee goals is to raise $5,000 for the year you might ask a member to identify all Republican donors (Office of Campaign and Political Finance - OCPF) from your town by the next committee meeting. When that member shows up at the next meeting with the list of donors he/she will feel like they achieved the goal and your committee will be in better shape to start fundraising.

At the same time you can have other members focusing on equally small but important goals so that no one individual is doing all work but the committee as a whole is progressing and everyone is involved. Your meetings will become a place where members are updating the membership on their progress and you are setting the next set of goals to be completed by the next meeting.

It is not likely that your committee will dramatically change over night but it is very important that we begin as a party to set small goals for ourselves and constantly work to achieve those goals. As Chairman, you have a number of committee members at your disposal. They all have busy lives and are volunteers however if they each contribute on a monthly basis towards realistic and attainable goals we can make significant progress in rebuilding the Republican Party in Massachusetts.

Please contact me with any questions and let me know if there is anything I can do to help. Keep up the good work! -- Matt