Political Influence Operations
Date: January 13, 2007
Full Text:
Strategy
Over the long term:
- By December 31,2010 we will be supporting a $12,000,000 budget, $5,000,000 at national. We will have a presence covering all states, with at least 28 state chapters, and 35 strategically located offices.
- We will have grown to at least 60,000 members, looking to represent over 75,000 people.
- We will impact local congressional districts with each chapter influencing at least two legislators through strong grass roots responses. We will focus on influencing congressmen responsible for policy that directly impacts the American Muslim conununily. (For example congressman on the judiciary, intelligence, and homeland security committees.) We will develop national initiatives such as a lobby day and placing Muslim interns in Congressional offices. We will work to add at least 30,000 new voter registrations.
- We will support Muslim activists through education and training with guides/tools and annual national projects/campaigns coordinated with chapters, in concert with local chapters we will sustain an ongoing media campaign to change hearts and minds of Americans. The program(s) would be fine tuned to the sensitivities of each community. We will measure the effect of the media programs, with the goal of significantly shifting public opinions: move favorable opinion from 1.6% to 20%, building on 2006’s neutral of 67% and 31.4% unfavorable.
- We will continue our advocacy, adding the capacity to handle more civil rights cases with an increase of in-house lawyers and systems to monitor progress. We will have a direct influence on Hollywood.
- Collaboration – HR commission boards/state; sister organizations; other Muslim organizations.
- We will leverage technology with items such as enhanced web site, intranet, and centralized database. We will develop the ability to quickly target segments within our database. (For example, to quickly access registered Muslim voters in a Congressional district)
- We will establish branding standards and maintain a common look and feel across national and all the chapters. We will continue to invest in building recognition of CAIR.
- We will support the organization with 30 employees at national – 75 organization-wide. We will institutionalize systems and processes. We will define an idealized chapter and work to have each chapter meet or exceed that quality model.
Over the mid-term:
- We will align the organization with our strategic plan, filling new Director positions, reengineering processes for efficacy, and focusing of our core mission. We support efforts with marketing, including deploying consistent branding.
- We will hire a dedicated Development Director, develop a development plan, and launch a fund raising program that has at least paid for itself. The development plan will have creative elements such as $6,000 donors. We will develop a grant writing capability.
- We will hire a dedicated Chapter Development Director. We will enhance national’s value to chapters with specific training and materials, coordinated action, membership drives, etc. We will affect a cultural shift, with more emphasis on local action. We will propagate the chapter handbooks. National will sustain ongoing chapter visits. We will align the organization to more fully support the strategic pian. (Evaluation of the success of the organization will be ongoing.) We will optimize the national office.
- We will launch the ‘hearts and minds” campaign jumpstarting the first production overseas. We wilt tap into the ‘new media’ with contests foryoung potential film makers. We will launch an formal educational initiative. (We will look to educate 100 speakers, 50 writers, transform 50 islamic centers to model outreach cultural centers, establish a scholarship for graduate students, publish points-of-reference material, initiate TV/radio shows, create ideal presentations, a national forum, and Amazon.com like source of all published material on Islam.)
- We will complete the installation, training, and deployment of a full range of productivity tools. (Outlook, Sharepoint for document management, eMail, Wiki for management of free form text, CRM, and civil rights database.} We will use an intranet, and Wiki, capturing our best practices. We will centralize our databases to manage contacts, relationships, membership tracking, and civil rights. We will complete the revamping of our website and integration with our systems and processes.
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