It's not yet seven months since the territory's last trip to the polls but the Canberra Liberals have begun to outline their strategy for winning the 2020 ACT election.
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Four years out from their next shot at the Legislative Assembly's top floor, the party has started looking at ways to address the shortfalls that saw them once again consigned to Opposition.
A month after their defeat at last October's election, the Canberra Liberals asked assistant federal director Stuart Smith to undertake an external review of the party's election campaign - although president Arthur Potter said it was a normal part of the post-election mop-up and not a reflection on the drubbing they received.
After more than 50 face-to-face meetings, post-election polling research and analysis of financial information, Mr Smith handed down 30 recommendations, which appear to point to problems with understaffing, poor budget allocation, patchy communication between candidates and party officials, and candidates going off-message.
His recommendations indicate an absence of grassroots engagement and poor organisation which could have cost the Libs their first shot at office since 2001.
Instead, the Liberals were hit by a 2.2 per cent swing against them, despite a series of factors playing against the incumbent Labor government.
In the weeks after the election, Canberra Liberals leader Alistair Coe said the citywide result was close - Labor winning 92,000 votes and the Liberals 88,000 - but Labor's targeted communications with households bested the Libs' "Canberra-wide campaign" and they needed to learn from that.
To this point, Mr Smith called on the Libs to appoint a coordinator for each electorate from March 2020 onwards, to monitor candidate activity, resolve disputes and provide advice on which areas or demographics to target.
Mr Smith said the party should also analyse all of ACT Labor's failings since the 2001 election and create a dossier on both a chronological and portfolio basis of their stuff-ups.
He said all candidates needed to be armed with a complete and regularly updated set of talking points across all policy areas.
Candidates needed to make better use of social media and other "modern communication tools" and keep their corflutes simple with as little text as possible to make a maximum impact on people driving by too.
The management committee needed to come up a fundraising campaign for 2017, 2018 and 2019 to bankroll pre-campaign research, staff and advertising.
Mr Smith advised that a bigger slice of the overall expenditure cap in 2020 should be set aside for advertising and messaging.
He said individual candidate's expenditure caps should be lowered and each candidate given a costed model campaign budget template upon preselection with suggestions on how much they should spend.
Television ads should be syndicated on social media with a portion of the digital advertising budget set aside for sponsoring posts to reach a broader audience.
The Canberra Liberals also needed to hire more campaign staff, including those with design and publishing skills, as soon as possible after the Federal Election.
An extra bookkeeper should be brought on from August to October 2020 to help with internal accounting during the peak period and money should continue to be set aside for research during the whole election campaign.
A sub-committee should be formed next year to identify and approach candidates for the next election and a 'candidates expression of interest' period should be set up, so potential candidates can be trained up before pre-selection in February 2020.
All candidates and MLAs should meet with the campaign director once a month between March and August 2020 and after that have a daily teleconference through to election day.
The Liberals have already moved on at least one of Mr Smith's recommendation - they launched a dedicated community engagement website last week.
