Nathaniel Pearlman hosts The Great Battlefield Podcast where he talks to political entrepreneurs and other leaders in the world of progressive politics. He also founded Graphicacy, a company that helps organizations present their data in informative and persuasive ways; Timeplots which sells informative graphic products; Leverfund, a nonprofit fighting poverty in the DC area; and, NGP Software (now NGP VAN), which provides much of the Democratic Party’s technology for fundraising compliance and voter engagement. Nathaniel Pearlman served as the chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. We chatted with him recently.

Donald Green is an expert on campaigns and elections whose research helped pioneer the voter mobilization tactics that serve as conventional wisdom for political campaigns today. In August, Green released the latest edition of his book Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout with his co-author Alan Gerber. Get Out the Vote provides the latest insights from new experiments to help campaigns engage voters more effectively in 2020 and beyond. Green shared his thoughts on the trends campaigns, consultants, and organizations should keep in mind as they work to build better voter contact programs.

This is probably the most meta blog post ever written. A blog post about writing a blog post. However, writing a blog post is not always intuitive for folks. Often, people who are asked to write a blog post for their organization don’t get the direction they need to write an effective post that yields traffic. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect! Become a master blog writer with these tips:

Every good campaign manager is always thinking about how to develop and grow the leadership skills on their team. Everyone dreams of retiring someday, but many campaign managers and organizers often think there will be no one to pass the baton.

Since the 2016 election, Facebook has been working on making sure that every political campaign that advertises on their platform is verified to do so in the United States and has made their ads more transparent in terms of who is paying for them.

You want to make a great candidate video. But hiring a video crew, even for a few hours, can be expensive. Video shoots also often take longer than expected and it can be hard to manage all the moving pieces. Get organized with some of our tips below and make sure you get the most out of your candidate video shoot.

Political direct mail What does it cost? How can I do it for less? This is a question that is often asked but the answer is not always as clear as it should be. To answer the question, think about political direct mail cost drivers: printing, mailing and postage costs are the major driving factors when it comes to campaign mail costs. 

A campaign manager contract is a important a step to write and sign before you start. Whether you are a candidate who decided to run for office and you quickly found out that you couldn’t do it alone or you are a campaign staffer hired to work on a campaign and you want to make sure you know your compensation, having a campaign manager contract or other agreements is critical. As the days get longer and the campaign picks up, it’s easy to forget to formalize the campaign manager and campaign staff roles. Make sure you have a campaign manager contract or campaign staff letter of agreement. Whether you are a staffer for a candidate, a treasurer, or you fill another role, you want to make sure you put it in writing.

Running for political office is a daunting task that can be exceedingly taxing without a campaign manager at the helm to help run the show. For first-time candidates in particular, getting a viable campaign off the ground is more than a full-time job. Fundraising call time alone is all-consuming, taking up to three to six hours per day of your time five days a week. With so many moving parts to a campaign, there’s no harm (but rather, lots of value) in investing in a campaign manager. A full-time manager is worth the expense.