As a former Obama White House Staffer, seasoned campaign organizer, former Harlem Children’s Zone team member, and now the Executive Director of Rust Belt Rising, co-author Paul Kendrick brings a fresh take to the idea that what’s past is prologue.

Pollsters shouldn’t be the only members of your team who understand how to build an effective survey for your advocacy or political campaign. Becoming a smart consumer of campaign polling data is a must.  this post will help you ask pollsters thoughtful questions. Good polling will help you utilize your budget efficiently, think strategically about your goals, and assess risks and opportunities in your electoral landscape.

During the time of COVID-19, getting together and sharing stories is an impossibility. So, when my mom turned 80, my sister came upon an easy user-generated content tool to organize friends to send a message to my mom for her friends and family. Five days and a few tutorials later, using Video Hug, we had organized a couple dozen 80-year-olds to send a message to my mom you can see the finished product here.  

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.

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.

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.