The Campaign Workshop Blog

If you don’t think TikTok is valuable, think again. Young voters made up a good portion of 2020 voters on a national and regional scale, increasing by 10 percentage points from the 2016 to 2020 elections. This upward trend is promising since only 30% of young people report being contacted by a campaign or party. Engaging young voters, especially on TikTok and other social media platforms, could make young voting rates go even higher.

If conventional wisdom holds that young people are uninterested in politics, then the past two election cycles have been anything but conventional. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University, young people are more interested in politics than ever before.

This is often the time of year when folks think about updating or building a new advocacy website. You may have a had the same website for years now, the look is stale, the platform is old, integrations are bad, and your site is not achieving the goals you would like it to. If your team is thinking it is time to update or redo your website but is unsure where to start, this is the resource for you.

Field strategies are an important part of campaigns, especially for voter contact, data collection, GOTV, and persuasion. Whether you are running a public affairs campaign or a political campaign, field strategies won’t get the yield you were hoping for if you don’t have the right planning, preparation, and field strategies behind them.

Running an effective advocacy campaign takes skill and planning. No matter how big or how small your effort is, having some basic structure can make a huge difference in your assets and results. Here are fifteen tips to run a winning advocacy campaign

Red tag political mail is a mystery to some. You may wonder how the United States Postal Service (USPS) treats the massive amount of campaign mail that moves through the postal system each election. The "secret" is red tag political mail US postal service tag 57 – a container tag that is designed to give more visibility to political mail, so it is given expedited status but sent as bulk mail. We write about this in our direct mail e-book.

Every good political communication strategy should include a plan for speechwriting. Even if your campaign doesn’t anticipate churning out a ton of speeches, make sure you have a process ready to go for writing and finalizing speeches. 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 you’re intimidated by the speechwriting process, don’t panic—you can follow a simple formula to write a good speech.

Incumbents are hard to beat. Campaigns start out with great intentions, but if you want to beat an incumbent, 94 percent of the time, challengers- (non -incumbents) will fall short. Many folks try, but on average, only 6 percent succeed in their quest to beat incumbents.

Lame duck session should not come as a surprise. After election season is over, it’s easy to just want to hole up, make sour dough bread, chicken soup and shut off your political brain for a while. But across the country, as well as in Congress, we are about to go into the legislative season and lame duck sessions.

Every year groups go to Washington, D.C. or their state Capitol to try and impact legislation. At the same time, they are there with a dozen other groups doing lobby visits and it’s even hard to get nonprofit lobby days on the calendar. Lobby days can be a complicated business, but we’re here to help.

Choosing the right political advertising for your political campaign can make the difference between winning and losing. Which political advertising medium a campaign chooses depends largely on their strategic objectives, targets, and, of course, budget.

Seth Masket is a professor of political science and the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. His academic and research interests include political polarization, state and local politics, and campaigns and elections.

Campaign walk cards are an important element to any field strategy. They give your canvassers something tangible to discuss at the doors and are a great way to introduce your candidate to voters. Unfortunately, a lot of campaigns create walk cards the wrong way.

To build an effective political campaign strategy, you need to understand the landscape your campaign is operating in. While talking to voters is always going to be the best way to get to know the issues that drive your community (and the larger American electorate), books are another great resource to inform your approach to politics.

Digital advocacy seems to be the term of the moment, but achieving real online advocacy results can be tough in both execution and budget. If you are at a nonprofit where money is tight, (when is it not?), spending money on hiring a digital advocacy consultant to manage your digital and online presence can seem like an easy line item to cut.

Political blogs as a news source seems very and 2004 but finding local and state specific perspectives on politics and communications matters. As quaint as it seems Try reading national and state political blogs. Here at The Campaign Workshop, we enjoy reading national and state-based political blogs to learn about local politics in states across the country and stay up to date on cutting edge campaign innovation.

Your campaign is finally over and you might be feeling a bit of that post-campaign emptiness inside. We understand that feeling and have a lot of insight on what to do after a win or a loss. Like for most things in your campaign you’ll want to be thinking about a plan for your campaign shutdown at the beginning of the campaign as part of your overall campaign plan.

It’s the day after the election — you finally made it. Whether you won or lost your political campaign, your operation won’t end as soon as the results are in. You ran an organization for months that hopefully bore semblance to a well-oiled machine. You likely had people on your payroll, whether it was one campaign manager or a whole team of dedicated staff.

Political advertising can be expensive, so it is imperative to make sure that every dollar is well spent. A big chunk of that change will go towards figuring out who you want to serve your ads to and where, whether for conversion or eyeballs. Over the past few years, methods for creating ad universes have evolved to become more precise and granular – enter list matching.