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.
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.
Whether you are a non-profit, labor union, independent expenditure organization, issue group, or political campaign, taking the time to evaluate the success of your program is a necessary step for future success.
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.
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.
