Advocacy Strategies

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.

The lion’s share of your political or advocacy campaign will be spent on message development and saturation. But as Election Day looms, you’ll have to start focusing your efforts on get out the vote/ GOTV. While you should make sure to include the rest of your online platforms in your GOTV efforts, a good place to start is social media. Not surprisingly, it’s a great digital platform for social pressure. You can use social media in a few ways to encourage your target audience to vote.

Member public affairs strategies can be an amazing way to move your issue forward. Membership organizations should have a head start when it comes to public affairs strategies, but that head start is often complicated. Membership organizations tend to have bureaucratic structures that make it difficult to work nimbly, especially when it comes to public affairs. Because of this, some member organizations have avoided using member-based public affairs strategies and they are missing out.

Searching for answers on the web has become a fixture in our lives. Want to go to a movie? Search the time and showings. Buying a house? Search for listings. Interested in a candidate or a local issue? Ask Google.

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:

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.

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.

There is a lot of talk these days about programmatic buying and how digital advertisers use it as the primary way to buy digital advertising.

We have written a lot about political fundraising but not on advocacy fundraising, so here we go. Whether it is for advocacy or for political campaigns, fundraising is largely similar and shares a number of characteristics. For both, the ask is a core component of your fundraising technique. Below is a look as some of these shared characteristics.

Advocacy strategies have changed a lot over the last 20 years. When I was a chief of staff in the New York State Legislature, I don't remember there ever being a real advocacy campaign around public support of an issue that focused on legislators. The main way groups moved legislation was to hire a lobbyist and that was really it.