The Campaign Workshop Blog

Learn effective legislative advocacy strategies with our step-by-step guide and discover how to influence policy in your community. 

Starting a campaign is a unique challenge. From getting digital running to prioritizing fundraising and self-care, here’s what every staffer, campaign manager, and candidate should know.

As we move past the first 100 days of the Trump presidency, it’s important to be focused on growing grassroots actions for the upcoming years.

When you’re a part of an advocacy campaign, spotting issues and fixing them are not always easy. In the realm of advocacy, there will always be bumps in the road, that is the nature of making change. Identifying common advocacy hurdles and proactively planning for solutions is a good strategy that can improve your campaign. 

Campaign training can make the difference between a winning and losing campaign—especially training for volunteers. Although it’s important that you have a good candidate, campaign manager, or volunteer coordinator who can gather the volunteers, if those volunteers are not provided with training, they might not be of any help. When volunteers can provide much of your people power on a campaign, it’s important to make sure they know what they’re doing. A simple and effective way to get your volunteers up to speed is to send them to a campaign training!

When we started building training programs, we had a limited training tips to work from. However, after connecting with great mentors, going through various training programs, and learning through trial and error, we have accumulated tools to run effective training session.

Executing a successful and impactful advocacy campaign requires time, dedication, and organization. In today’s day and age, there is strong competition from various advocacy issues fighting for attention, so to run a successful campaign, you will need to be ready to hit the ground running.

As we move into 2025, more people will be dedicating time and resources to creating digital political advertising plans. The Campaign Workshop has been actively involved in digital political ads for over a decade, and each year we have seen a growing emphasis on the importance and effectiveness of digital advertising within political campaigns. 
Why spend money on digital political advertising now?

When it comes to your independent expenditure strategy, earned media doesn’t need to be your enemy, it can be your friend. Earned media can actually help you raise awareness for your independent expenditure campaign and improve engagement with your campaign amongst the general public. Whether you attract positive or negative attention, well, that’s on you!

While they share a number of similarities, independent expenditure mail and candidate campaign mail also have quite a few differences. Both independent expenditure mail and candidate campaign mail may have the same primary goal (i.e., getting a candidate elected), but the means that they use to get there can vary.

What information independent expenditure (IE) campaigns can use depends on who you ask, and what set of laws you’re covered by. In recent years, you may have seen candidate campaigns that appear to bend over backward to make photos and b-roll videos publicly available on their website (a classic example of this being “McConnelling,” which went viral in 2014). Why? What are voters going to do with all this stuff? Well, it turns out that in most cases, the audience isn’t the run-of-the-mill voter at all. These campaigns may instead be trying to make information publicly available for independent expenditure campaigns to use.

We find it disheartening that as Democratic political direct mail consultants, the mail we see is often very undemocratic and lacks any direct response engagement tactics. Whether for politics or advocacy, it’s difficult to get real engagement from voters or constituents if you never  engage them. Political mail has traditionally been a one-way conversation With our political climate and media-saturated landscape, fostering engagement makes a ton of sense and is an overall good strategy. Here are some direct response tips on increasing voter engagement in your campaigns, fostering 2-way communication tactics/sign-ups, and making real democratic direct mail.

Independent expenditure campaigns play a unique and vital role in many elections. They can support candidate campaigns by filling the gaps that they may have in their strategies, resources, or messages. These independent campaigns can use digital advertising to target different audiences, convey different messages, and use different tactics than candidate campaigns. This can help the candidate campaigns reach, persuade, and mobilize more voters.

Direct mail may not sound like an exciting medium for your independent expenditure at first blush, but if used correctly it can be one of the most effective ways to make a difference. Research regularly shows that when it comes to persuading and increasing turnout in elections, direct mail is one of the most tried-and-true methods in the campaign toolbox.

Building a strong independent expenditure direct mail program isn’t that different from some of the tips and tricks we’ve included in other posts. At the end of the day, it’s about being strategic and finding ways to think outside the box. But there are a few key things to think about when you’re running a direct mail program for an independent expenditure:

We wanted to answer some basic independent expenditure frequently asked questions (FAQs). From simply defining what an independent expenditure (aka IE) is to discussing contribution limits, this article aims to provide background and clarity on IEs and how they work.

Whether you want them or not, those election predictions are back. Every election cycle, we are asked to get off the pollercoaster and predict the future of politics. When it comes to presidential election forecasting, working in politics can make us poor judges of the outcome of an election: after all, we are determined to help our candidates win, which can make us less objective in predicting electoral odds than we should be. In other words, wanting to win is not always a predictor of winning. Check out our podcast on presidential election predictions. 

Here at The Campaign Workshop, we have written a lot about independent expenditure strategy in the past, but the key takeaways never change:

1. Know your goals.
2. Do no harm.
3. Don’t duplicate efforts.

What is direct employee feedback, and how can it help you? Building a cohesive, effective team requires effort and intentional communication at every level. As we strive to improve our skills and abilities, expand our knowledge, and strengthen our teamwork, we rely more and more on open and clear communication. To boost our efforts, we have instituted a new set of guidelines for giving and receiving internal feedback, and we’d like to share a bit about it with you.

An essential component of a good political communication strategy is the integration of effective speechwriting. Even if your campaign doesn’t plan to deliver a ton of speeches, it’s crucial to have a structured process in place for crafting and refining them.

If you’re running for office even at the local level, chances are you’ll want to have a speech prepared at least for Election Night. If the thought of writing a speech seems intimidating, don’t panic–you can follow a simple and straightforward method to create impactful speeches.