The Campaign Workshop Blog

Using Testimonials in Your Advocacy Campaign

One way to move the needle in your advocacy campaign is 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. As author Tayari Jones put it in speaking about the experiences of the families of incarcerated individuals at a recent…

The Power of Instagram: Telling Your Campaign Story

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! In this day and age, we are flooded with so much information on our social media channels – whether it’s the must-have product or the next place to vacation in 2019. One way to get your story out on Instagram and cut…

Power Mapping for Advocacy:  Define Targets and Achieve Your Advocacy Goals.

What is power mapping? Power mapping is a very useful advocacy tool especially when you and your organization have limited time and resources. Power mapping can be used to target the key decision-makers or influencers needed most to achieve policy wins, allowing you to map those with voting and decision-making power over an issue you are advocating for. The origins of the power map are hard to pinpoint, but organizers have been using it for decades to run more…

Can Your Digital Advocacy Campaign Have It All?

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? Setting an Achievable Goal An achievable digital advocacy campaign goal is something you can assess with the metrics available. For example, your organization’s end goal might be to get a ballot measure passed or to put pressure on a legislator, but those objectives…

Digital Campaign Spending: What to Include in Your Digital Advocacy Budget

When you are setting up your digital campaign budget for advocacy, how much should you spend on digital advertising? How much should I allocate for digital campaign advertising? When people are setting up a digital campaign, whether it’s political or for advocacy, one big question that comes up is how to set up the budget and how much money to allocate to each aspect. Of course, the answer will drastically vary from campaign to campaign, but here are some things to…

Creating an Engaging Advocacy Video that Showcases Your Issue

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…

Let’s Find Out Just How Impactful Your Video Ads Are with Brand Lift

Introducing the Youtube Brand Lift Study 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. However, they don’t always give you the best insight into how your ad campaign has impacted…

Mail and Digital Belong Together in Your Advocacy Strategy

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…

Advocacy Mail That Builds Capacity

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.) 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. In the event that you’ve outlined your…

Do you know the difference between advocacy strategy and advocacy tactics?

You and your organization have worked hard to create a great policy book. Now, how do you get Congress or your state legislature to turn policy recommendations into policy reality? You need to advocate for it. Advocacy can come in many shapes and budget sizes. But whether it’s round or square, big or small, you need to have a plan; you need an advocacy strategy that outlines your overall goal and effective tactics that will help you cross the finish line. Let’s take a…