Campaign Planning

Get ready, I’m about to crack advocacy budgets wide open (pun intended, and it won’t be the last). I know you’re on the edge of your seats, but this is really no chicken and the egg conundrum I’m about to solve for you. When you’re looking to develop an advocacy program, your budget should always come first. This may seem counterintuitive when you begin talking to consultants (like you’re tipping your hand and about to get taken for a ride), but it’s really important for a few reasons:

Running for political office is a daunting task that can be exceedingly taxing without a campaign manager at the helm to help run the show. For first-time candidates in particular, getting a viable campaign off the ground is more than a full-time job. Fundraising call time alone is all-consuming, taking up to three to six hours per day of your time five days a week. With so many moving parts to a campaign, there’s no harm (but rather, lots of value) in investing in a campaign manager. A full-time manager is worth the expense.

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 process for finding good political candidates doesn’t involve filling out a job application. When a candidate decides to run for office, they may not realize that the time commitment requires hours of work and many more hours in the day. Sadly, the time commitment it takes to be a political candidate is not changing anytime soon.

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.

As Election Day approaches, I thought it would be a good idea to share some best practices for your GOTV Plan- Get Out The Vote Plan. These are tried and true GOTV tactics —we know they work.

Political campaigns have a number of options when it comes to political advertising. Which political advertising medium a campaign chooses depends largely on their strategic objectives, targets, and, of course, budget. Below is a very general overview of the most common modern candidate campaign communication mediums and their pros and cons.

This may come as a shock to many people, but not every political campaign has people lining up to volunteer like President Barack Obama’s did. In fact, that was the rare exception, and for many campaigns, getting more than a handful of volunteers is a miracle. We know that high-quality, face-to-face canvassing is the best tool in our arsenal for both persuasion and turn out, but not every campaign has the footprint to cover a robust field operation using volunteers or campaign staff alone. In fact, many won’t. That’s where paid canvassing comes in.

A campaign logo is something that many candidates obsess about. The color, the font, the stressing of the first vs. the last name, incorporating a candidate photo or a sprit animal, we’ve heard it all. I like a good campaign logo, but this is a time in which many first-time candidates get taken advantage of. Yes, the campaign’s brand is undoubtedly important and it is worth some conversation, but it should not be a long, arduous, drawn-out process. With that said, here are a few important items to consider when you’re designing your campaign logo.

One of the roles I enjoy most is teaching folks how to run for office and run campaigns. Any campaign training we run usually starts with essential political consulting advice on the three key resources of a campaign. The three main resources you have in any campaign are people, time and money. Below are descriptions of each of these three critical campaign resources.