How to (hopefully) prepare for an election debate with 15 candidates

Oh man, what have I gotten myself into?

With the nomination period now closed, I’m in election coverage mode at work.

I’m organizing an event close to the beginning of the campaign, which is useful in that it will be the first out of the gate, but challenging in that it gives me a pretty short time period to prepare. Until Friday, I didn’t even know if there would be a mayoral race (there is, now) so the decision was made to make it an all-candidates forum so we could start inviting candidates with a little bit of lead time.

The other challenge of that is we now have 15 people — 13 council candidates and two for mayor — to introduce people to in a relatively compressed time period of two hours. That’s eight minute of talk time per person if you have literally no pauses, introductions or questions.

More realistically you’re looking at maybe four to five minutes per person. I asked around and was given a format from colleagues in another office that I’ve adapted in a way that I think will work.

The Format

We’re going to have a pile of questions, and a pile of candidate names. Additionally, each candidate will have two cards. After the introductions (1.5 minutes per candidate), a question card will be drawn. If a candidate wants to answer that question, they have to play a card. As many people who want to answer can, but then they are down to one card– one more answer. If no one answers, a candidate name will be drawn and they will answer (but they don’t lose a card).

The mayoral candidates will be given specific questions, in addition to their cards, and whenever one answers, the other will have a chance to, as well.

The Prep

Of course, it’s not enough to come up with a format. You also have to:

Invite the candidates

Invite the public (Facebook, Eventbrite, emails)

Invite other media outlets

Research/source the questions (I’ve reached out to a variety of community groups to come up with issues they want answers to, spent time brainstorming a bunch today based on the past four years of news, and will be going out to some neighbourhoods to get ideas from the public)

Hone those down to priority questions

Design posters (I’m pretty happy with it!)

Print posters

Distribute posters

Make sure you have supplies, pens, signs, etc.

Make sure you have audio equipment

Write scripts for intro/extro

Create promos

So that’s where I’m at this week– plus reaching out to candidates for other coverage over the course of the election.

Oh, and I also did an election set-up piece this morning. You can listen to it here.