What a Ward Coordinator Should Be Measured On, Every Week

Kenyan campaigns appoint ward coordinators generously and measure them on almost nothing.

The typical arrangement: a respected person in the ward is given the title, added to a WhatsApp group, and contacted when there is a rally to fill. Nobody ever asks them for a number. Six months later the campaign has forty coordinators and no idea which twelve are actually working.

Here are five numbers that fix that.

The five

1. Households visited this week. Not "we campaigned in Bahati". A count, from actual recorded visits. This is the core productivity measure of a ground campaign and it is the one nobody tracks.

2. Active volunteers this week. Not recruited-ever. Active — as in, was given a task and completed it in the last seven days. The gap between these two numbers is the single most diagnostic statistic in any campaign, and it is usually enormous.

3. New party members registered. Because in a direct primary only members vote, and because the certified membership list closes in March 2027.

4. Polling streams still without an agent. A countdown to zero. Not agents recruited — streams uncovered. The distinction matters, as we set out in the coverage piece.

5. Open complaints. Issues picked up in the field — water, garbage, street lighting, bursaries — that have not been closed out. A rising number means your team is listening and nobody is acting.

Five numbers. A coordinator can produce them in two minutes if the recording happened as the work happened, and cannot produce them at all if it did not.

Why weekly, and not monthly

Because a month is long enough for a coordinator to do nothing and then reconstruct a plausible story, and short enough that four wasted months is a third of your remaining time.

Weekly is also the rhythm at which people notice. A coordinator who knows a number is due on Friday works differently on Wednesday. This is not surveillance; it is the ordinary thing every functioning organisation does and that campaigns exempt themselves from because the work feels informal.

The comparison is the point

A single ward's numbers tell you little. Twenty wards ranked side by side tell you everything.

When you can see that Ward A visited 240 households and Ward B visited 12, you know something you could not have known from any conversation, because the coordinator in Ward B has been reporting enthusiasm all along and believed it.

That comparison is what a campaign manager should be looking at every Monday morning: which wards are behind, and what is being done about it this week. It is also, exactly, what BallotWinners is built to show — every ward scored on agents, doors knocked and issues raised, so the ward that is behind is visible while there is still time.

What to do with a coordinator who is behind

Not sack them, at least not first. Three questions, in order.

Do they have volunteers? A coordinator with nobody to deploy is not a performance problem, it is a recruitment problem, and it is yours as much as theirs.

Do they know what to do? "Campaign in your ward" is not an instruction. "Visit these 60 households this week and record what they say" is.

Is the ward hard? Some wards genuinely are — hostile, remote, expensive to move around. A ward that is 40 per cent behind on a like-for-like basis is different from one that is simply larger.

Only after those three does under-performance become a personnel question. Most Kenyan campaigns skip straight to the personnel question and replace a coordinator who was never given a task list.

The one thing that makes all of this possible

The numbers have to be captured when the work happens, by the person doing it, on the phone they already have.

Any system that requires a coordinator to fill in a form at the end of the week produces fiction, because at the end of the week they are remembering. Any system that requires a laptop produces nothing, because they do not have one.

Recording a household visit should take fifteen seconds at the door. Then the weekly number is a fact rather than an estimate, and the Monday review is a conversation about reality.