The Campaign Workshop Blog

We’re all about helping organizations navigate request for proposal (RFP) processes, and our advocacy RFP template is a great resource for folks who are looking to hire a consultant or vendor. Once you get the ball rolling on the RFP process, make sure you think through what you really want to learn from references in the final stage.

Political campaign jobs can be elusive to find. As someone who has gone through the daunting task of political job hunting not too long ago, I know how tough it can be to land a political campaign job—especially your first. With so many newly minted undergraduate, graduate, and even law school grads hunting for jobs in the same market, it can sometimes be an overwhelming and discouraging undertaking.

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.

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 Black History, Hardship, and Hope, and it’s home to documentaries like I Am Not Your Negro and The Central Park Five.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Political direct mail is one of the most effective ways to reach voters, but I’ll be the first to admit: all that paper takes a toll on our environment. At The Campaign Workshop, we’re passionate about protecting our natural world—luckily for us, so are a lot of the printers we work with.