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Strategy Chart (Midwest Academy)

Summary

The Midwest Academy strategy chart is a one-page planning grid with five columns — Goals · Organisational considerations · Targets · Allies & opponents · Tactics — that forces every tactic to trace back to a target and a goal [source: midwest-academy].

Body

The strategy chart is the Midwest Academy tradition’s connective tissue between analysis and tactics. The Midwest Academy describes its training method as designed to “give organizers the tools to turn their passion into actions that build power and result in progressive change” [source: midwest-academy]. The chart is filled in left to right, so the team cannot pick a tactic until it has decided who it is trying to move and what change it intends to cause.

A canonical strategy chart has five columns, filled in order:

  1. Goals — long-, intermediate-, and short-term. Each goal is a concrete change in the world, not an activity.
  2. Organisational considerations — what the organisation gains from the campaign, what it risks, and what it needs (resources, allies, decisions) to pursue it.
  3. Targets — primary and secondary. Each target is a person with the authority to give the campaign what it wants; not an institution, not an abstraction.
  4. Allies and opponents — and the specific thing each can do. Allies are not a generic category; they are scored by what action they will take.
  5. Tactics — matched to each target. The discipline is that every tactic in column 5 must trace back to a target in column 3 and a goal in column 1.

The midwest-academy source page records the institution but the locally fetched RAW is homepage-only and does not contain the strategy-chart template in detail. The page is therefore shipped as a stub awaiting a covering source.

Use it for

Forcing the team to connect tactics to targets and goals before picking any; aligning a coalition on the same “who, what, how” before launch; diagnosing why a stalled campaign is producing activity but no movement (usually: column 1 and column 3 are missing or decorative).

Open Questions

  • 2026-06-23 — The locally fetched RAW for [[midwest-academy|sources/midwest-academy]] is homepage-only and does not contain the strategy-chart template. Re-fetch a Midwest Academy chapter, the Blueprint for Change handbook, or a Commons Library page that covers the five-column strategy chart before promoting this page to emerging or established.

Learn more

FAQ

What is the strategy chart?

The strategy chart is the Midwest Academy’s one-page planning grid with five columns — Goals · Organisational considerations · Targets · Allies & opponents · Tactics — that forces every tactic to trace back to a target and a goal [source: midwest-academy]. The chart is the Midwest Academy tradition’s connective tissue between analysis and tactics.

How is a canonical strategy chart filled in?

A canonical strategy chart has five columns, filled in order: Goals — long-, intermediate-, and short-term. Organisational considerations — what the organisation gains, what it risks. Targets — primary and secondary, each a person with the authority to give the campaign what it wants. Allies and opponents — and the specific thing each can do. Tactics — matched to each target. The discipline: every tactic in column 5 must trace back to a target in column 3 and a goal in column 1.

How does the strategy chart relate to other Midwest Academy material?

The Midwest Academy describes its training method as designed to give organizers the tools to turn their passion into actions that build power and result in progressive change [source: midwest-academy]. The chart is filled in left to right, so the team cannot pick a tactic until it has decided who it is trying to move and what change it intends to cause. The chart is the operational form of the Midwest Academy’s broader commitment to disciplined tactic selection.

What is the strategy chart useful for?

The strategy chart is useful for forcing the team to connect tactics to targets and goals before picking any, aligning a coalition on the same who, what, how before launch, and diagnosing why a stalled campaign is producing activity but no movement. The midwest-academy source page records the institution but the locally fetched RAW is homepage-only and does not contain the strategy-chart template in detail; the page is shipped as a stub awaiting a covering source.

Sources & verification

Last verified: 2026-07-07