Too many goals tend to weaken a campaign's focus, especially in the crucial early months. Indeed, paying close attention to an organization's capacity to get things done is vital. Too often, new citizen organizations overreach, promising more than they can deliver. Develop messages, and a program to disseminate them. There is only one way for grassroots groups to compete with the money, insider influence, and power of wealthy opponents.
Citizens have to build a large public constituency to support their goals.
And the only way to build that public constituency is to define and communicate urgent and simple messages. Public policy debates are essentially a competition over ideas. Thus, the heart of a successful campaign is how effective a group's messages are. For a community group to mount a successful challenge to unwelcome or poorly conceived development, it must have better data, stronger ideas, and a more capable public information and communications strategy than its opponent. It also must be persistent, and able to sustain the challenge.