Campaign Management

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.

Starting a campaign is a huge challenge and will prove to be much different than any other job you've ever had. It is hard work and you don’t get to clock out like you would a regular 9 – 5. Starting a campaign means being fully committed and putting the rest of your life on hold. Below are a few other things that every staffer should know before starting a campaign.

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.