The Campaign Workshop Blog

Telephone Town Halls: Do Political & Advocacy Campaigns Need Them?

What are  telephone town halls? Think of a telephone town hall as a cross between a radio talk show, an old-fashioned town hall, a member meeting, and a conference call all done in the comfort of your home or office.  Why host a tele-town hall: It seems like everyone is looking for ways to engage their organization, membership, and voters in a quick and compelling way. A telephone town hall is a way to move your audience.  How to recruit for telephone town halls:  …

Canvasser Safety: What You Can Do to Stay Safe

Now more than ever, canvasser safety really matters. When COVID-19 hit, canvassing pretty much stopped everywhere and is only now slowly starting to reemerge. Canvassing can be dangerous, as it requires that you approach strangers in what is often unfamiliar terrain, even when we aren’t in the midst of a pandemic. There are very prominent dangers to the grassroots canvasser, loose dogs, confrontational people and now COVID-19. Below is a short list of suggestions to protect candidates, canvassers…

Movies, Shows, and Documentaries to Engage in Social Activism

Amplifying Black voices is always important, and streaming services are helping to do just that. Now, if Netflix users search “George Floyd,” they’ll be taken to a curated list for their Black Lives Matter Collection, which has over 40 movies, T.V. shows, and documentaries. Amazon Prime’s collection is called…

Social Media Activism - 7 Qs with Erick Sanchez

Erick Sanchez has successfully orchestrated multiple online campaigns from convincing Chef José Andrés to pull out of the Trump International Hotel, to organizing a rally for Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place under attack from the far-right. His social media activism and previous involvement in politics has led him into his current position as the spokesperson for former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and his wife, Evelyn Yang. He is also the co-founder of a communications and digital firm called…

Campaign Endorsements Are Critical to a Win

Campaign endorsements can make or break a race for a candidate. But how do you get them and what do you do with them? Below are tips on how to determine which endorsements to go after and what to do after you get them to get as much mileage as possible out of your campaign endorsements. Choose which endorsements to go for: First, do your homework to understand which organizations or individuals are potential endorsers in your race. The easiest way to find this out is to see which organizations have…

Campaign Advertising Harnessing Geofencing For Digital Ads

Whether you’re running a political campaign or an advocacy program, geofencing can be an incredibly useful tactic within your larger campaign advertising toolbox. Geofencing is a method of targeting mobile ads to people within a tight geographic area. Essentially, this means creating a virtual fence around an address and serving ads within that area. Instead of targeting a congressional, or even state house district, you’d set a radius around a particular address. In a political or…

Being A Campaign Manager in the Time of COVID-19

Keith Rosendahl is the past campaign manager for Henry Cuellar for re-election as Congressmen for the 28th Congressional District in Texas. We asked Keith some questions about how COVID-19 has changed the way campaigns run, especially in the lead up to the 2020 election. 1. How has your experience being a campaign manager prepared you for campaigning during a pandemic? At the national level – a campaign manager is a five tool athlete. With many campaigns facing smaller staff sizes and reduced…

So, you want to do relational organizing? Well, here is how you can start.

Relational organizing is the process by which campaigns, groups, or individuals harness their personal relationships to effect community change. It is a form of organizing that is specific to an individual’s personal network in which they mobilize those relationships into taking action. The relationships can be as close as immediate family members or as broad as followers on social media. The key is some relationship already exists. But where should you start if you’re…

ActBlue: Increase Your Campaign Fundraising

ActBlue is a nonprofit organization that aims to increase public participation in politics primarily through grassroots campaign fundraising. Their grassroots political fundraising tool allows Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations to increase their individual donations and build a grassroots-funded movement. This political campaign fundraising tool allows your campaign or organization to do its own interaction and engagement while taking away the stress of fundraising logistics. On…

How Do I Know Which Nonprofit Consultant Is Right for Me? 

Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit industry for long enough will tell you that it is full of quirks and choosing the nonprofit consultant that is right for you is no easy task. Time and time again, we have nonprofit clients come to TCW after hiring the wrong firm. Every nonprofit is different, and you want to make sure you are hiring a consultant that is best suited to deal with your particular set of needs.  Here are some tips for how to hire the right nonprofit consultant for you…

Grassroots Movement During a Pandemic - Build for the Future

We originally wrote this blog post on how to build a grassroots movement in 2016, and it’s amazing how much things have changed in the last four years. For most campaigns in 2016, canvassing was still the go-to way to build your grassroots movement and was a tried and true way of connecting with people. Some smaller campaigns had built their entire programs around a relentless canvass strategy and talking to every voter in their turf. But due to the onset of the global pandemic,…

Legislative Advocacy Kickoff 

For many issues, legislative advocacy is the best and only way to bring about real change. But there’s a lot of different ways to engage in legislative advocacy. There’s the traditional “inside game” where you work to provide resources and information to lawmakers. There’s also the “outside game” where you work with a network of volunteers to provide pressure on legislators from the outside. And…

Measure Your Impact with Direct Mail Testing

Direct mail testing can strengthen your voter contact efforts in the long run by revealing what works and what doesn’t through concrete data. If you want to glean insights from your program, setting up an experiment is worth the time and resources, no matter the size or scope of your campaign. The worst-case scenario from testing is that your results are inconclusive—that’s a pretty great outcome when the alternative to testing is learning nothing at all. So, let’s talk about why you should test,…

Campaign Job Descriptions To Build My Campaign Team.

Once you’ve decided to run for office, one of the first things you’ll have to do is think about campaign structure. Define your campaign roles paid and unpaid and write out campaign job descriptions that will help you build a winning campaign team. A candidate’s campaign staff is incredibly important in making a campaign not only successful but also more manageable and fun for the candidate and everyone else involved. Depending on what office you’re running for and the size of your campaign,…

Membership Surveys: 7 Questions with Pollster Ruth Bernstein 

Ruth Bernstein is president and CEO at EMC Research, a national polling and opinion research firm. Ruth leads polling on a wide variety of political, policy, and marketing projects. She is especially proud of her work helping to elect women and people of color to office and securing voter approval for education, transportation, minimum wage increases, and environmental protection. We asked Ruth 7 questions on membership surveys and how they can benefit your organization. 1. What are…