The Campaign Workshop Blog

Our third installment of our picks for innovative nonprofit marketing campaigns is here to inspire  your creativity. This time, we have chosen four creative advertising campaigns that incorporate direct mail, video, and print advertising to convey important messages.

National Change of Address, NCOA, is a required process for all bulk mailing lists to qualify for bulk rates according to the USPS. NCOA checks the names on your mailing list against a current database of 160 million names and addresses maintained by the USPS.This process is actually of benefit to all especially your campaign.

The USPS can be confusing on many levels. One area where mail lingo gets confusing for people in direct mail is in dealing with the USPS mail forms.

Employee retention is hard. When an employee is leaving your business, as the proprietor, there is an instinct to feel rejected and think “I must have done something to make them leave."  When people leave my business, I have these thoughts as well. An employee moving on is never easy, but having good employees ultimately means opportunities will come knocking. With that said, here are a few tips I have used over the years when an employee is about to leave.

Below, you’ll find a complete list of campaign job descriptions that you might find in a race of moderate size.

CAP, Urban Institute, the Economic Policy Institute, and others are well-respected organizations that have a lot of authority with the press and on the web. We can learn a lot from big think tanks when it comes to your non-profit web presence.

If you have not read the opinions from last week’s Supreme Court rulings, you should check them out. You can read summaries of the opinions on marriage equality here, and excerpts on the Affordable Care Act ruling here. The opinions are amazing and the words of the majority opinion make me proud, but also sadden me, because there’s still a lot more work to be done and our opponents aren’t going to stop anytime soon.

Candidate campaigns have a number of options when it comes to their communications mediums. Which communication medium a campaign chooses depends largely on their strategic objectives, targets, and, of course, budget. Below is a very general overview of the most common modern candidate campaign communication mediums and their pros and cons.

Political campaigns have a number of options when it comes to political advertising. Which political advertising medium a campaign chooses depends largely on their strategic objectives, targets, and, of course, budget. Below is a very general overview of the most common modern candidate campaign communication mediums and their pros and cons.

Advocacy research is an important step in building a public affairs campaign of any size.  Advocacy campaigns come in all shapes and sizes from multi million dollar public facing campaigns to small grassroots community advocacy campaigns and many sizes in between. The advocacy research you need to build a good campaign strategy also comes in many forms and budget options.

For a long time we have worked with publishers like Change.org, Care2 and Daily Kos on cost per acquisition (CPA) campaigns. Often the ROI is good on those names for both fundraising and advocacy, but for some, a purely petition driven cost per acquisition strategy is not yielding the benefit it once did.

Candidate recruitment is a lost art form. There is a lot of lore and legend about candidate recruitment we are here to give a more realistic view of candidate recruitment. Contrary to popular belief, someone from the DNC does not appear one day, out of the blue on you doorstep, and say you should be the next representative from Omaha.

Two things off the bat to consider are costs and timing. First, die-cuts add costs, so it's not something to suggest on every campaign. Second is the time factor, die-cuts do add time to the production of the piece, so this needs to be worked into the schedule. If you have the budget and time for producing a die-cut piece, then the issues become production related.

When someone leaves your business, as the proprietor, there is an instinct to feel rejected and think, “I must have done something to make them leave."  When people leave my business, I have these thoughts as well. Having an employee leave your company is never easy, but having good employees ultimately means opportunities will come knocking. With that said, here are a few tips I have used over the years when an employee is about to leave.

One of the takeaways from that post was development – primarily fundraising. Beyond organizing, there is no better way to not only grow your County Democratic Party, but also wield it more power and influence than fundraising. This post will examine the steps to take to optimize your fundraising potential for your County Democratic Party.

Before we dive down into the dos and don’ts, of helping your County Democratic Party , let's take some time and talk about what a County Democratic Party should do.

Can public speaking with vulnerability be a good thing? Every time I do any type of public speaking, I get nervous. When I was younger and I was nervous, I would stutter. Even today, I sometimes hear myself repeating a word as I get animated. Throughout my life, I work hard to conceal these flaws, but the reality is that it is a part of who I am.

We are happy to announce that we are launching The Digital Advocacy Webinar Series sponsored by EveryAction. This four part webinar series will cover advocacy topics ranging from digital ad buying, developing a winning advocacy strategy, and goal setting for digital advertising campaigns. The first webinar in the series will be on content marketing for advocacy campaigns.

This may come as a shock to many people, but not every political campaign has people lining up to volunteer like President Barack Obama’s did. In fact, that was the rare exception, and for many campaigns, getting more than a handful of volunteers is a miracle. We know that high-quality, face-to-face canvassing is the best tool in our arsenal for both persuasion and turn out, but not every campaign has the footprint to cover a robust field operation using volunteers or campaign staff alone. In fact, many won’t. That’s where paid canvassing comes in.

Do you know what a negative keywords are? As anyone who has ever used Google can attest, what comes up in your search is not always relevant to what you were actually looking for. Negative keywords are very specific words or phrases that you want to block from your target keyword list in an ad campaign to ensure that your ads will not be shown around those specific words. These words often share grammatical similarities to keywords you would like to target, but have a vastly different meaning.