Young Leaders Develop Campaign Skills

April 9, 2004

March 24-28 – IRI's Regional Program for Central and Eastern Europe partnered with the Dutch Labor Party's Alfred Moser Foundation to organize the fifth seminar in its Leadership Institute for Central and Eastern Europe (LICEE) seminar series for young political leaders in Tallinn, Estonia. Drawing together 18 participants from center-left political parties and youth organizations from the Baltic States, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, this three-day seminar focused specifically on developing campaign skills among young people who are either running for office themselves or are running campaigns for the European Parliamentary elections in June or are working in various national campaigns.

Participants started with intensive sessions on the design and use of political opinion research – both quantitative and qualitative – in campaign design and strategy. Taught by former IRI Serbia RPO Jamie Fisfis, these sessions laid the groundwork for developing target demographic groups and targeted message development. This was followed by a hands-on, low-budget polling exercise in which participants were sent onto the streets of Tallinn to assess the public's response to a series of questions related to the coming European Parliament elections in Estonia. They later used this information to design a mock campaign strategy. Further sessions concentrated on developing a campaign plan, a budget, and techniques for fundraising.

IRI's Dutch partners presented a number of very interesting and applicable examples from parliamentary election campaigns over the last ten years in the Netherlands, and therefore combined with IRI to present a comprehensive approach to campaigning that drew upon the best of both American and Western European experience.

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