The Campaign Workshop Blog

In all likelihood, when you’re hashing through communications tactics available to you for advocacy campaigns, someone will raise the idea of running a print ad (or three). With all of the options out there, it’s important to determine whether print is a smart use of your dollars. While I hesitate to say that print ads are never a useful complement to an overall advocacy program, I would urge careful consideration before deploying one. Here are a few questions you may want to walk through before signing an IO.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… to help the politicos in your life step away from their screens after a crazy election cycle! Give me your tired, your email-fatigued, your news-raddled—there’s something for everyone on this list of book gift ideas.

Campaign unionization, is it right for your campaign? It seem obvious that Democrats should be supportive of campaign unionization… right? Not necessarily.

Digital political ad transparency has been an elusive thing. In a world of fake news, hacked sites and independent expenditures from groups you have never heard of, actionable information on digital spending is important. For years, you have been able to find out what opponents are spending on television and radio. Now, digital publishers a re starting to focus on  digital ad transparency. They are making it easier to see what folks are doing with paid digital political ads.

GOTV! We are officially in the last 30 days of the 2018 election cycle. It's time to knuckle up and carry your campaign over the finish line. I wrote earlier about the best songs for a mental break, but now is the time to power through! Time is rapidly passing and it is now or never to increase voter turnout. This list will channel whatever ounce of energy you have left by providing a soundtrack as we get over this last hump. Here are 5 songs to get you through GOTV.

Election meddling has made national news starting with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect in Europe this summer. In response, many folks in the states took a look at their own privacy policies and laws surrounding political digital ads to see what they could do better to be more transparent. Companies like Google and Facebook created their own policies to verify users and target who was actually paying for political digital ads. Lawmakers in states across the country also started to pass laws to push for more transparency.

Social pressure, Does it work? We care deeply about social norms. Our desire to be liked and accepted by our peers shapes our behavior more than we’d like to admit. We lie about our bad behaviors and exaggerate our better tendencies to fit in. What’s more, we do things when we think other people are watching that we’d otherwise never bother with. That’s why social pressure is such an effective tactic for campaigns and organizations when it comes to getting folks to turn out and vote. Check out our tips for incorporating social pressure into your GOTV mail program this fall.
 

BallotReady is an online voter guide for local, state and national races. This week, we interviewed Alex Niemczewski to discuss how BallotReady can be used to amp up your GOTV campaign strategy.

In the world of politics, there is an array of confusing and random terms that folks use to describe trends. Voter roll-off is one of them. It is a term that is very important for down-ballot races to understand and fight against. More importantly, voter roll-off can make a difference for your GOTV campaign strategy. Find out how!  

For the longest time you could not call cell phones in an efficient way but now Stones Phones has some exciting new technology to make it easier to call cell phones using volunteers or paid phone banks. We asked Marty Stone 7 questions on calling cell phones for GOTV. 

A good digital GOTV plan, is not your father’s get out the vote effort. It used to be that GOTV was driven by walk lists, yard signs, door hangers, coffee and doughnuts. But as folks start to focus more on digital GOTV, having an actual plan to push turnout digitally is a must in our interconnected world. You still need the doughnuts and door hangers, but digital will add a layer of outreach that you did not have before.

Looking for a winning digital ad campaign? These days every campaign has some kind of digital ad component to it, but how does that result in electoral outcomes? Results vary and really depend on what kind of campaign you’re running. Here are some clear steps to develop a winning digital ad campaign.

When you launch a new campaign, advocacy or nonprofit website make sure you're ready to put in the work. The actual process of transferring the website is not the backbreaking work, it's the diagnostic tests and reports you'll need to run to test your site's functionality.

Digital political targeting can be tricky to navigate, but when done right, it can make digital ads work effectively and efficiently.

On any campaign, having access to good voter file is important. For good reason, the trend on most modern political campaigns has been to be data driven. But there are many pitfalls to avoid when using political data and a lot of ways that political data can go wrong. So it’s important that there’s always a human on the other end of that data asking questions and using reason instead of just taking the data at its face value. Below are a few top tips on how to successfully use political campaign data.