Advocacy Strategies

Advocacy campaign testimonials have a unique ability to highlight the human impact of your issue. By recruiting community members who have been directly affected by your issue to share their stories, you can make the seemingly arbitrary stakes of policy decisions more tangible for people.

The art of crafting a well-integrated advocacy strategy is akin to making a great book-to-film adaptation. When you find out a book you love will be made into a movie, you hope the story, characters, and message won’t be lost in translation across mediums. A good adaptation will capture the theme and boil the plotline down to its most important elements—after all, few among us have time to catch a twelve-hour movie (though I personally would be on board with a marathon re-cut of The Shining).

When you get into politics, it’s hard to resist the all too common tunnel vision of focusing only on politics. But be careful – binge watching Veep or The West Wing is not going to help you run a better campaign or organization; nor will reading solely political books. So Here are some of our favorite non-political books. 

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:

In our last blog post, Digital Advocacy: Advertising Campaign Goal Setting Part I,  we talked about how to develop digital advocacy strategy, cost per acquisition (CPA) campaigns, email programs and the best ways to utilize ad testing. In today's post, we take a closer look at using tactics like paid digital advertising, social media and analytics for digital advocacy. You can also read more about this in our latest ebook, Guide to Digital Advocacy.

In my 20 years working in politics, I have seen a lot of things change. Technology in particular has done a lot to change the way that we communicate with voters. Yet somehow, we in politics have access to more information about our audience than ever before, but our audience engagement is at an all time low.

Your nonprofit facebook ad will need an image to display on users newsfeeds or right-hand rails. In a platform like Facebook, where viewers are accustomed to scrolling continuously, you’re going to need an image that is arresting enough to stop the scroll. Make sure the photo or illustration you use has a clear focal point that is either intriguing or easily recognizable and relevant to a viewer’s interests.

Races are heating up, but there are a number of exciting opportunities for Democrats up and down the ticket. Here are some tips to jumpstart your Democratic campaign:

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.