The Campaign Workshop Blog

Lobby Day Tips: Make Your Virtual Lobby Days Impactful

How can you get the most out of your Virtual lobby day? 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. Bottom line: If you want to make virtual lobby visit count, you need to think ahead and have a real plan. COVID-19 UPDATE: Especially…

Political Advertising:  Choose The Right Medium for Your Campaign

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. Below is a very general overview of the most common modern candidate campaign communication mediums and their pros and cons. Remember, the key to success is often found in sending a cohesive message across multiple advertising…

Seth Masket: The Democratic Party & Learning from Loss

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. Professor Masket is a regular contributor to FiveThirtyEight and the Mischiefs of Faction Blog. His latest book is Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016-2020, which explores…

Texting for Advocacy: Issue Advocacy & Public Affairs SMS Tactics

Are you texting for advocacy yet? If you’re a nonprofit working in the advocacy arena, you should be thinking about incorporating SMS (or texting) into your issue advocacy communications program. If you are looking for texting tools for advocacy, check out our list of 100 campaign tools. Texts are, in many ways, a very personal mode of communication – a quick way to…

Campaign Walk Cards: What to Consider When You Write Walk Lit 

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. Below is advice on producing great political walk cards. How Do I Get Started?  For many voters, your campaign walk cards will be their first interaction with your candidate. As such, you want to make sure they stand out and…

Campaign Message: Make a Winning Contrast - Use the Seven Cs 

When I was a student at American University in the mid to late ’80s I had some remarkable teachers. Joel Bradshaw and Peter Fenn taught me about campaign message with a method I have never forgotten. They called it the Seven Cs. I am still a big fan of this method to remember the components of a good campaign message. If you can incorporate all seven Cs in your message you will be smooth sailing. 1. Clear Make your message easily…

Political Campaign Strategy: Read Up!

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. Below are five reads I recommend for any politico…

Digital Advocacy Consultant: Is It Worth the Cost To Hire a Online Campaign Consultant to Manage Your Digital Presence?

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. But don’t be so quick to count digital advocacy consultants out. Depending on your…

Patch-Through Calls for Public Affairs & How to Make Them Count

Organizations and campaigns use patch-through calls when they need a large number of people to reach out to elected officials. Using an outbound dialer, robots, volunteers, or paid callers, they make calls from a contact list. After speaking with the contact, they patch the call through to the concerned elected official. With the increasing need for advocacy and engagement in the age of COVID-19, we have seen a resurgence of patch-through calls. We are fans of the medium, but…

Political Blogs: The Best National & State Political Blogs 

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. If you are looking for national political newsletters…

Our Quick Post-election Campaign Shutdown Checklist

Is it time for the post-election shutdown for your campaign? 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…

It’s the Day After the Election. Now What?

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. You probably had volunteers working around the clock to help get your message out. You definitely haven’t slept enough since the whole shebang…

Election Stress Is Real, What Can You Do About It?

As someone who has been in the world of elections for 30 years, election stress has been a constant in my life and those around me. But this year it is even more  stressful - https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2020/sia-mental-health-crisis.pdf To be clear, I don’t consider myself an expert in election stress, but I have dealt with it for a long time and want to share strategies and…

List Matching: The What, Why, and How of Digital Targeting

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.   The What: List matching is a way to create targeted universes by combining an existing list with the online…

Hal Malchow: 7 Questions on  42 Million to One 

Hal Malchow is the former Chairman of MSHC partners, which was a political consulting firm that pioneered the use of statistical modeling and control group experiments in politics. His work in changing campaign politics is chronicled in Sasha Issenberg’s 2011 book, The Victory Lab, The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. Over his career, Hal has worked for five Democratic presidential nominees. His first political thriller, No Popes in Heaven, was published in 2018. His new book, 42 Million to…