How to Build a Candidate Prep/Policy Team Part 1 - Introduction

One of the things I am always asked is how did we get such a powerhouse policy team for the Sharpe campaign?

Well, the answer is simple: we started with a core of passionate policy-interested people, and then worked out from there.

But the more complicated part of it, is how do we get so much policy out of a volunteer team.

I'm going to break this series of articles down into smaller pieces, of which we'll cover various things

1. Structure
2. Recruitment
3. Agile Policy Development
4. Whitepapers
5. Candidate Prep

Structure is the structure of your team. This is important. My team also handles Oppo Research, and we'll cover that in a different set of articles later, but for now we'll focus on Policy and Candidate Prep.

Our team is split into 3 teams, each handled by a Director/Deputy Director

1. Social/Legal

2. Economic

3. Infrastructure

   and one more team for immediate issues that need to be handled within a day or so:

4. The Tiger Team

Some issues a Tiger Team may handle: speeches by a competitor, breaking news, or an upcoming interview.

Recruitment is who and what you are looking for when you look for both Subject Matter Experts and General Analysts for your team.

Agile Policy Development is something, as far as I can tell, completely new to this world, and it comes from my background as a software engineer. It applies theories used in Agile software development, and the project management skills that come with it to develop policy in cycle sprints. This is how we manage to do between 1-3 whitepapers per week.

Whitepapers are the finished product, a deep in depth analysis of the issue, and proposed solutions. Our whitepapers are more like scholarly papers, complete with references, in APA format. This allows us to know where the information came from inline to the paper, without having to reference footnotes.

Candidate Prep is the presentation of the information to the candidate. Sometimes, the candidate changes something. This is to be expected.

These are the 5 things that go into our Policy Team at the Sharpe campaign, in my next article, I will go into the intricacies of how teams are made and structured.