Strategy

Can you spot mistakes in your campaign? As a trainer and consultant for over 20 years - Here are some warning signs to help you spot and course-correct a losing political campaign.

During this midterm election season, the media landscape is an important place for campaigns and organizations to look as they plan for the fall.  As we continue to see, all elections in the US have become more and more nationalized.

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. 

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.

As someone who has recently gone through the daunting and tough task of job hunting, I can completely understand and attest to the fact that it’s tough to find political jobs in DC and even tougher to find a job that is the right fit for you. With so many newly minted undergraduate, graduate, and even law school grads hunting for jobs in the same market, it can sometimes be a very overwhelming and discouraging undertaking. But in the end, all your efforts will be worth it. Here are the tips I learned along my journey to finding a great job with wonderful people, and how you can do the same.

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.