The Campaign Workshop Blog

Advocacy campaign testimonials have a unique ability to highlight the human impact of your issue. By recruiting community members who have been directly affected by your issue to share their stories, you can make the seemingly arbitrary stakes of policy decisions more tangible for people.

If you're running a campaign on a tight budget and have an important story to tell, Instagram can help. Not only is it completely free, but it’s also easy to use. With more than one billion monthly active Instagram users, it would be wise to get on the “Instagram train” now!

We often find that a digital advocacy campaign is expected to meet multiple organizational goals at once. Unfortunately, you can’t really have it all. So how do you choose an objective and what digital strategy is likely to achieve it?

When you are setting up your digital campaign budget for advocacy, how much should you spend on digital advertising? Per unit, digital advocacy advertising is comparatively cheap – while you may spend several hundred dollars (or more) per point on TV, your cost per thousand impressions (CPM) can be as little as a dollar or two for digital advertising. That means that digital advertising can be a fantastic way to reach out to supporters and promote your advocacy campaign when you’re working with limited dollars.

Sure, we’ve all seen an engaging advocacy video online and we know how effective can be in leveraging support. It’s an effective advocacy tactic that can help bring more engagement around your issue. But what can a smaller nonprofit with an even smaller budget do to create an online video that will really stand out? The great news is that developing an engaging video for advocacy doesn’t need to be hard or expensive. In fact, you can even create a strong video for your advocacy organization from your iPhone. All you really need is a good story to tell.

Today, we’ll talk about a little-known but very powerful tool for advocacy campaigns - the Youtube Brand Lift Study. Standard metrics such as views and clicks are great ways to track how many people have viewed and interacted with your video ads online.

The art of crafting a well-integrated advocacy strategy is akin to making a great book-to-film adaptation. When you find out a book you love will be made into a movie, you hope the story, characters, and message won’t be lost in translation across mediums. A good adaptation will capture the theme and boil the plotline down to its most important elements—after all, few among us have time to catch a twelve-hour movie (though I personally would be on board with a marathon re-cut of The Shining).

I have yet to encounter a client that doesn’t need to grow its advocate and/or donor bases, and letter packages are here to help! (Yep, I’m shouting about letter packages.)  advocacy mail letter packages are not the answer to every advocacy campaign’s needs, but in the world of direct mail, they can pack a pretty great one-two punch. They are statistically proven to be effective (people open them), and they can be formatted with a reply device, so you can actually list build with them.

As folks make the trek back home for the holidays, family politics can create even more conflict. This week we took a different turn; instead of talking about political strategy which is the main focus of this blog, we asked for help on navigating family politics from the professionals. Our final interview is a deep dive into family politics with Edward Honnold; a therapist in D.C.

In all likelihood, when you’re hashing through communications tactics available to you for advocacy campaigns, someone will raise the idea of running a print ad (or three). With all of the options out there, it’s important to determine whether print is a smart use of your dollars. While I hesitate to say that print ads are never a useful complement to an overall advocacy program, I would urge careful consideration before deploying one. Here are a few questions you may want to walk through before signing an IO.

Campaign unionization, is it right for your campaign? It seem obvious that Democrats should be supportive of campaign unionization… right? Not necessarily.

Digital political ad transparency has been an elusive thing. In a world of fake news, hacked sites and independent expenditures from groups you have never heard of, actionable information on digital spending is important. For years, you have been able to find out what opponents are spending on television and radio. Now, digital publishers a re starting to focus on  digital ad transparency. They are making it easier to see what folks are doing with paid digital political ads.