The Campaign Workshop Blog

Twitter Video is a growing trend, especially as networks and individual users have started streaming live content. Videos can deliver complex messages and persuade individuals, as they often have an emotional component that static images and text-only tweets generally do not have. 

Just like first impressions, your Twitter campaign strategy can go a long way. After setting up your account, it’s time to actually tweet! Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts to keep in mind, and keep your tweets optimized all while focused on the overall goal of your campaign.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and president of Lake Research Partners, is one of the top political pollsters and strategists of our time. Celinda Lake weighs in on what happened in 2016 and how Democrats can be thoughtful about polling and strategy in 2018 and beyond.

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.

When it comes to social media, some folks are really active, some aren't. Some have a following and some don't. But if you want to use social media to advance your organization or campaign's goals, connecting with your key influencers is a great way to grow your following, and expand the reach of your message. 

We've all had our run-ins with internet trolls on a variety of different platforms. Here are our tips on how to deal with internet trolls.

If you are anything like us here at The Campaign Workshop, you are still reeling from the effects of November 2016. There is only one way to help us heal from America’s worst-case scenario. Don’t get mad, get organized! To that end, we have put together an ongoing series called the Resist Tool Kit.

When it comes to a digital advocacy campaign Twitter is a great platform. Unlike more traditional platforms, there aren’t budget minimums you need to worry about and you can reach a lot of people very quickly. There are also a lot of great targeting options based on Twitter’s user data. 

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.

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.

After working with a few campaigns, you really do get a sense of what it’s like to work on a winning campaign. These campaigns share a few key qualities that ultimately contribute to their success.

When you first file your candidacy for office, in many jurisdictions your paperwork will ask you to declare a campaign chairperson. You expected that you’d need to hire a campaign manager at some point, but why do you need a campaign chair? Anyway, you think, I’m sure Cousin Larry could do it.

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?