Campaign Tips

Launching a community advocacy campaign can seem intimidating – where would you begin? There are countless campaign tools available to you, but they don’t mean anything if you don’t know what to do with them.

How do you leverage grassroots advocacy? Start with a cup of coffee.

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).

Looking for a good organizational campaign tool? Today I am going to explain why every political and advocacy campaign should use Slack to coordinate and streamline group communication.

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.

Deepak Puri previously worked at Oracle, Netscape and VMware, and is now the co-founder of the San Francisco, non-profit Democracy Labs. By deploying technology and creative innovation, Democracy Labs offers affordable business solutions for progressive groups and candidates across the country. We asked Deepak 7 questions focused on the intersection of campaigning and technology. Read his insights here!

After working with a few campaigns, you really do get a sense of what it’s like to work on a winning campaign. These campaigns share a few key qualities that ultimately contribute to their success.

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:

Walk cards are an important element to any field campaign. They give your canvassers something tangible to discuss at the doors and are a great way to introduce your candidate to voters. Unfortunately, a lot of campaigns create walkcards the wrong way.

Campaign best practices can make a real difference on your political campaign. Over the course of my career, I have pretty much seen it all happen on political campaigns. From the candidate’s brother dying mere weeks before Election Day to losing power at a staging location and everything in between. Murphy’s Law states “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Part of being a good organizer is always hoping for the best on political campaigns, but planning for the worst.