The Campaign Workshop Blog

Your political campaign Twitter account is a free and easy way to engage with supporters online. As a candidate, you’re going to get a lot of advice on how you should run your campaign and engage with voters. Some of this advice will be solicited, some of it, not so much. But one of the top political campaign tips we give candidates is making sure they embrace social media, namely Twitter. 

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to crafting a winning campaign strategy, there are a couple rules of thumb when it comes to building a budget with communications tactics that will set you up for election night elation (and of course, some broad fundamentals to keep in mind for running to win). Let’s dig into the thought process that will drive you toward the tactics that are right for you.

Eight years ago, we started The Campaign Workshop blog to share our knowledge with an online community of advocates, nonprofits, labor unions, staffers, campaign operatives, political candidates, and progressive groups and organizations. Today, we have over 1,000 blog subscribers and 20,000 monthly unique page views to our website, which has far exceeded our expectations.

When should I start building my coalition? In short, yesterday. but to find your way coalition mapping will help.

There are so many different types of ads that it can feel overwhelming to choose which ones to use for your digital advocacy campaign. You can certainly use all of them, but there are some that are likely better suited to your campaign than others, depending on your goals.

It’s been 2 turbulent years since the Trump administration took office and people continue to voice their frustration by carrying protest signs at marches. Grassroots movements are popping up everywhere. Individuals influencing action is what will move our nation forward. Even a scrawled cardboard sign can make an impact.

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 mail does not always get the credit it deserves. Part I of this post takes you through the basics of putting together a letter package for your advocacy mail campaign. Part II walks you through making the most of a letter package that includes a reply device (buckle up!).

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.

If you're running a campaign on a tight budget and have an important story to tell, Instagram can help. Not only is it completely free, but it’s also easy to use. With more than one billion monthly active Instagram users, it would be wise to get on the “Instagram train” now!

We often find that a digital advocacy campaign is expected to meet multiple organizational goals at once. Unfortunately, you can’t really have it all. So how do you choose an objective and what digital strategy is likely to achieve it?

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.

Sure, we’ve all seen an engaging advocacy video online and we know how effective can be in leveraging support. It’s an effective advocacy tactic that can help bring more engagement around your issue. But what can a smaller nonprofit with an even smaller budget do to create an online video that will really stand out? The great news is that developing an engaging video for advocacy doesn’t need to be hard or expensive. In fact, you can even create a strong video for your advocacy organization from your iPhone. All you really need is a good story to tell.

Today, we’ll talk about a little-known but very powerful tool for advocacy campaigns - the Youtube Brand Lift Study. Standard metrics such as views and clicks are great ways to track how many people have viewed and interacted with your video ads online.

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).

I have yet to encounter a client that doesn’t need to grow its advocate and/or donor bases, and letter packages are here to help! (Yep, I’m shouting about letter packages.)  advocacy mail letter packages are not the answer to every advocacy campaign’s needs, but in the world of direct mail, they can pack a pretty great one-two punch. They are statistically proven to be effective (people open them), and they can be formatted with a reply device, so you can actually list build with them.

As folks make the trek back home for the holidays, family politics can create even more conflict. This week we took a different turn; instead of talking about political strategy which is the main focus of this blog, we asked for help on navigating family politics from the professionals. Our final interview is a deep dive into family politics with Edward Honnold; a therapist in D.C.