Campaign Management

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to crafting a winning campaign strategy, there are a couple rules of thumb when it comes to building a budget with communications tactics that will set you up for election night elation (and of course, some broad fundamentals to keep in mind for running to win). Let’s dig into the thought process that will drive you toward the tactics that are right for you.

ID-ing your supporters is an important part of any field campaign especially for GOTV. There are a variety of ways for Voter ID to help Get Out The Vote. One common method of voter ID using a 1-6 scale to measure each individual’s support score, with 1 being a solid supporter, 3 undecided, 5 firmly opposed, and a 6 not home.

Whether it is your first or last advocacy or political campaign, one thing never changes—numbers matter. Learn what campaign metrics you need to track.

When thinking about whether or not you’re ready to run for office, one important step in the process is figuring out who will make up your team. A candidate’s campaign staff is incredibly important in not only making a campaign successful but also more manageable and fun for the candidate and everyone else involved. Obviously, larger campaigns will require a more robust team, but even a small campaign will need a few essential staff members.

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.

Running for office, campaign management, and working on campaigns for that matter, are really about making quick, informed decisions and a lot of them. Particularly at the beginning, there are a lot of things to decide on right away in your campaign management process: what office, what party, who to hire, who to target, what medium, who to call for money, how much to ask for, etc. The whole process can get away from you and turn into a paralyzing rumination if you’re not careful.

Is Graduate School of Political Management worth it? In a word: Maybe. It depends on what your goals are, like just about everything else in life. There are ever increasing opportunities to get master’s degrees in non-traditional ways and, depending on what you want to do with this degree, it may make sense to devote the time and resources to school.