The Campaign Workshop Blog

If you have not read the opinions from last week’s Supreme Court rulings, you should check them out. You can read summaries of the opinions on marriage equality here, and excerpts on the Affordable Care Act ruling here. The opinions are amazing and the words of the majority opinion make me proud, but also sadden me, because there’s still a lot more work to be done and our opponents aren’t going to stop anytime soon.

Candidate campaigns have a number of options when it comes to their communications mediums. Which communication medium a campaign chooses depends largely on their strategic objectives, targets, and, of course, budget. Below is a very general overview of the most common modern candidate campaign communication mediums and their pros and cons.

Political campaigns have a number of options when it comes to political advertising. Which political advertising medium a campaign chooses depends largely on their strategic objectives, targets, and, of course, budget. Below is a very general overview of the most common modern candidate campaign communication mediums and their pros and cons.

Advocacy research is an important step in building a public affairs campaign of any size.  Advocacy campaigns come in all shapes and sizes from multi million dollar public facing campaigns to small grassroots community advocacy campaigns and many sizes in between. The advocacy research you need to build a good campaign strategy also comes in many forms and budget options.

For a long time we have worked with publishers like Change.org, Care2 and Daily Kos on cost per acquisition (CPA) campaigns. Often the ROI is good on those names for both fundraising and advocacy, but for some, a purely petition driven cost per acquisition strategy is not yielding the benefit it once did.

Candidate recruitment is a lost art form. There is a lot of lore and legend about candidate recruitment we are here to give a more realistic view of candidate recruitment. Contrary to popular belief, someone from the DNC does not appear one day, out of the blue on you doorstep, and say you should be the next representative from Omaha.

Two things off the bat to consider are costs and timing. First, die-cuts add costs, so it's not something to suggest on every campaign. Second is the time factor, die-cuts do add time to the production of the piece, so this needs to be worked into the schedule. If you have the budget and time for producing a die-cut piece, then the issues become production related.

When someone leaves your business, as the proprietor, there is an instinct to feel rejected and think, “I must have done something to make them leave."  When people leave my business, I have these thoughts as well. Having an employee leave your company is never easy, but having good employees ultimately means opportunities will come knocking. With that said, here are a few tips I have used over the years when an employee is about to leave.

One of the takeaways from that post was development – primarily fundraising. Beyond organizing, there is no better way to not only grow your County Democratic Party, but also wield it more power and influence than fundraising. This post will examine the steps to take to optimize your fundraising potential for your County Democratic Party.

Before we dive down into the dos and don’ts, of helping your County Democratic Party , let's take some time and talk about what a County Democratic Party should do.

Can public speaking with vulnerability be a good thing? Every time I do any type of public speaking, I get nervous. When I was younger and I was nervous, I would stutter. Even today, I sometimes hear myself repeating a word as I get animated. Throughout my life, I work hard to conceal these flaws, but the reality is that it is a part of who I am.

We are happy to announce that we are launching The Digital Advocacy Webinar Series sponsored by EveryAction. This four part webinar series will cover advocacy topics ranging from digital ad buying, developing a winning advocacy strategy, and goal setting for digital advertising campaigns. The first webinar in the series will be on content marketing for advocacy campaigns.

This may come as a shock to many people, but not every political campaign has people lining up to volunteer like President Barack Obama’s did. In fact, that was the rare exception, and for many campaigns, getting more than a handful of volunteers is a miracle. We know that high-quality, face-to-face canvassing is the best tool in our arsenal for both persuasion and turn out, but not every campaign has the footprint to cover a robust field operation using volunteers or campaign staff alone. In fact, many won’t. That’s where paid canvassing comes in.

Do you know what a negative keywords are? As anyone who has ever used Google can attest, what comes up in your search is not always relevant to what you were actually looking for. Negative keywords are very specific words or phrases that you want to block from your target keyword list in an ad campaign to ensure that your ads will not be shown around those specific words. These words often share grammatical similarities to keywords you would like to target, but have a vastly different meaning.

While there has been a lot of hype that says Democrats have the 2016 Presidential Election in the bag and the electoral map is stacked in our favor, a simple look in the history book says otherwise. In the history of the modern presidency, after being in power for two terms, the party in power has flipped more often than not, with a couple notable exceptions.

Here at The Campaign Workshop, we’re always on the lookout for innovative direct mail and marketing campaigns to inspire our creativity. We often look to the commercial world for ideas that could translate to the political or advocacy direct mail world. Here are three campaigns we love:

A campaign logo is something that many candidates obsess about. The color, the font, the stressing of the first vs. the last name, incorporating a candidate photo or a sprit animal, we’ve heard it all. I like a good campaign logo, but this is a time in which many first-time candidates get taken advantage of. Yes, the campaign’s brand is undoubtedly important and it is worth some conversation, but it should not be a long, arduous, drawn-out process. With that said, here are a few important items to consider when you’re designing your campaign logo.

Here at The Campaign Workshop, we do a fair amount of member communication. Whether it be for labor unions or advocacy organizations, there are some basic do’s and don’ts we try to follow. Here are some tips:

There is a lot of talk these days about programmatic buying and how digital advertisers use it as the primary way to buy digital advertising.

It was a great year to go to Vegas for BISC's Road Ahead conference. It’s always a good time to visit Vegas when its 12 degrees in DC. As we leave BISC, it is clear that progressive campaigns have some real challenges. While proactive ballot measures are an important tool to help change the dialogue on issues we care about, they are only one part of a broader set of tactics that progressive campaigns need to engage in.