The Campaign Workshop Blog

We often talk about how one big advantage of digital advertising is the digital targeting available to the advertiser. The same is true on Twitter, if not more so. Twitter, along with other social media channels, has the benefit of users providing their own information, making the targeting easier. In addition, as users log on and engage on Twitter, their profiles are updated to reflect how they behave online.

Mentionmapp is a digital campaign tool that allows you to map connections between Twitter users to visualize who’s saying what and who they’re saying it to. Mentionmapp can help you keep track of your brand and figure out who’s engaging with your content. We talked to co-founder and CEO John Gray about his digital campaign tool Mentionmapp, as well as larger trends such as the proliferation of Bots and misinformation.

VoterCircle is a digital tool that elevates friend-to-friend outreach over traditional campaign-to-voter contact. VoterCircle has been featured in our 100 campaign tools lists can change the way any campaign does volunteer recruitment, grassroots fundraising, and GOTV. We talked with founder and CEO Sangeeth Peruri about leveraging personal networks and more.

A good habit can be the ingredient for success in running your personal life and your grassroots organization.

If you have never set up a Twitter account, consider this to be your crash course! Twitter is becoming increasingly important to both political and advocacy campaigns, but with its ever evolving features and unique vocabulary specifically for the Twitter Platform, it can be hard for some to jump on the bandwagon. Here is a simple guide to a fast twitter account set up:

List building is an art and a science. When you start a campaign your friends and family are pumped up, you have some committed volunteers, and maybe you even have an official campaign Facebook page.  One key question remains, can you raise the money?  This is where list building comes in.

Now more than ever, it's important to set measurable goals for success and to evaluate your campaign strategy against those goals. What may have worked for another campaign may fail miserably for yours, so keeping your benchmarks for success in mind will be critical. Let's look back at evaluating the success of your campaign strategy. 

Determining the size of a digital buy is a question many folks ask, but there is not a set formula for determinig a digital spend percentage. Politics is not cookie cutter. In order to build a winning digital budget, you need to make sure you create a strategy to define your goals and determine your tactics based on your goals and target- not just based on tactics alone.

Here at The Campaign Workshop, we always stress the value of storytelling with strong visuals in political and advocacy advertising. In other words, using photos or footage of authentic people looking straight into a camera and speaking candidly about things they’ve experienced, makes communications materials more compelling. There’s far more potential to persuade folks through testimonials than there is through wonky policy white papers – the question is, why?

Campaign mistakes force folks to learn and adapt – in a perfect world. In reality, plenty of campaigns fail to reflect on their flaws before gearing up for their next fight; they recognize that a problem exists, but don’t always take the time to address the bad habits that cause them to keep repeating their mistakes.

I am a big fan of nonprofit content marketing, but many folks who are new to the world of online content tend to skip blogging, or creating content on their websites and go straight to outside content sites. I look at outside content sites as more like renting an Airbnb than buying a home. You can enjoy a rental unit, but you should spend most of your time working on your house. There a few reasons for this: