The Campaign Workshop Blog

You’ve worked hard to run a strong campaign—now you can carve out some space for some post-election self-care ideas!

If you work in the campaign world, I’m willing to bet you’re deeply acquainted with post-election burnout. While that fatigue may be more acute after presidential and mid-term elections, never discount the exhausting pace of state and local races. No matter the election year, type, or outcome, it’s crucial to take care of yourself after you take care of your campaign.

Twitter announced that they will stop allowing political ads to run on its platform which has the potential to have further implications across the industry. Will other companies follow suit? Facebook has received a lot of flak lately from both the public and the government centered around political ads.

Gender equality matters.  Susan Markham and Stephenie Foster are the founders of Smash Strategies, a firm that provides strategic advice on gender equality and women’s leadership. Susan comes from a background of empowering women to participate in politics both in the U.S. and abroad, recruiting and training women candidates, and supporting the aspirations of thousands of women to be equal and active partners in leading democratic societies.

There are only so many hours in a day, but after knocking on doors and raising money, Facebook Live is something candidates should do on a weekly basis. The ubiquity of live-streaming digital video and Facebook’s drive to increase it on the platform has made it a necessity for campaigns to engage with. Here are some quick tips and a basic explanation of why campaigns should embrace Facebook Live and other online videos.

So, you’ve built a political campaign website—congrats! Now you want to make sure folks in your community can actually find it. The next steps to build on the momentum for your new political campaign website is to focus on SEO (search engine optimization) and work on a backlinking strategy.

Digital GOTV over the past couple of cycles has really moved into a must have for every campaign. In the past, GOTV tactics were limited to door-knocking, phone calls, and depending on the level of the campaign, maybe some TV spots. However, in the digital age, there is a whole new set of effective options that you can use to mobilize your supporters on Election Day. Whether you use mobile devices to track canvas crews, Facebook to mobilize volunteers, SMS to move core supporters to action, or IP targeting, geo-fencing and cookie targeting to reach voters; there are a ton of options for digital GOTV tactics. Below are a few ways you can utilize digital GOTV.

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all political campaign, but there’s one strategic element that no campaign can afford to leave out: GOTV. A strong get-out-the-vote (GOTV) program may get you the handful of votes you need to win your election, whereas failing to make that final push to get voters to the polls may hasten your demise.

This is probably the most meta blog post ever written. A blog post about writing a blog post. However, writing a blog post is not always intuitive for folks. Often, people who are asked to write a blog post for their organization don’t get the direction they need to write an effective post that yields traffic. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect! Become a master blog writer with these tips:

Every good campaign manager is always thinking about how to develop and grow the leadership skills on their team. Everyone dreams of retiring someday, but many campaign managers and organizers often think there will be no one to pass the baton.

Since the 2016 election, Facebook has been working on making sure that every political campaign that advertises on their platform is verified to do so in the United States and has made their ads more transparent in terms of who is paying for them.

A campaign manager contract is a important a step to write and sign before you start. Whether you are a candidate who decided to run for office and you quickly found out that you couldn’t do it alone or you are a campaign staffer hired to work on a campaign and you want to make sure you know your compensation, having a campaign manager contract or other agreements is critical. As the days get longer and the campaign picks up, it’s easy to forget to formalize the campaign manager and campaign staff roles. Make sure you have a campaign manager contract or campaign staff letter of agreement. Whether you are a staffer for a candidate, a treasurer, or you fill another role, you want to make sure you put it in writing.

Kelly Dietrich is the founder and CEO of the National Democratic Training Committee, the largest organization in the country singularly focused on providing free campaign training for Democratic candidates, staff, and local leaders. He’s spent more than twenty years in Democratic politics working campaigns all across the country at every level of government. His specialty is new campaign creation, strategy, and fundraising. After getting his start on a congressional campaign in Kansas in 1997, Kelly went on to work and advise dozens of candidates for U.S House, Senate, governor, mayor, and more.