Advocacy Strategies

When you are setting up your digital campaign budget for advocacy, how much should you spend on digital advertising? Per unit, digital advocacy advertising is comparatively cheap – while you may spend several hundred dollars (or more) per point on TV, your cost per thousand impressions (CPM) can be as little as a dollar or two for digital advertising. That means that digital advertising can be a fantastic way to reach out to supporters and promote your advocacy campaign when you’re working with limited dollars.

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).

In all likelihood, when you’re hashing through communications tactics available to you for advocacy campaigns, someone will raise the idea of running a print ad (or three). With all of the options out there, it’s important to determine whether print is a smart use of your dollars. While I hesitate to say that print ads are never a useful complement to an overall advocacy program, I would urge careful consideration before deploying one. Here are a few questions you may want to walk through before signing an IO.

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. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for an email campaign, but a solid email campaign management strategy can make all the difference for your organization or political campaign. Cultivating a fruitful relationship with your supporters takes time, planning, and strategy. Check out our email campaign management tips below to get the process started!

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.

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:

Video storytelling is an “it” topic in advocacy and advertising circles. The strategy of delivering a story in the digital age that will get people to engage seems to be the latest goal for many nonprofits. But how can you do it in a consistent, scalable way that achieves your goals? Here are our tips to make an impact with advocacy video storytelling:

Digital advocacy in Trump’s America means (for many of us) a near unending need for Trump photos. Unfortunately, buying rights managed photos of our fearless Commander in Cheeto means running up an epic tab pretty darn quickly. But fear not (at least with regard to photos… I can’t make any promises regarding the rest of what’s going on at this point) – compelling photos of Trump are still available to those of us who don’t have deep pockets and an unlimited Getty account.

Digital advocacy is about engagement and capacity building—likes are just a starting point. Over the last few years, Facebook’s algorithm has evolved, as has its advertising options, making it easier than ever to capitalize on the audience you’ll find there and turn likes into actions that advance your advocacy goals.

With Trump as president, nonprofit organizations have an opportunity to use digital advocacy to grow engagement and reach donors and constituencies. This doesn't make it any easier to get legislation passed, but it does present an opportunity for growth that may not have existed in the past for your organization.

There are many grassroots strategies out in the world, but not all of them work. So when it comes to grassroots, what actually works? The most effective strategies are built around personal relationships with legislators. When organizations build real relationships between their members and elected officials, their engagement lasts longer and their phone calls get returned.