Advocacy Ads

We are happy to announce that we are launching The Digital Advocacy Webinar Series sponsored by EveryAction. This four part webinar series will cover advocacy topics ranging from digital ad buying, developing a winning advocacy strategy, and goal setting for digital advertising campaigns. The first webinar in the series will be on content marketing for advocacy campaigns.

Do you know what a negative keywords are? As anyone who has ever used Google can attest, what comes up in your search is not always relevant to what you were actually looking for. Negative keywords are very specific words or phrases that you want to block from your target keyword list in an ad campaign to ensure that your ads will not be shown around those specific words. These words often share grammatical similarities to keywords you would like to target, but have a vastly different meaning.

There is a lot of talk these days about programmatic buying and how digital advertisers use it as the primary way to buy digital advertising.

We have written a lot about political fundraising but not on advocacy fundraising, so here we go. Whether it is for advocacy or for political campaigns, fundraising is largely similar and shares a number of characteristics. For both, the ask is a core component of your fundraising technique. Below is a look as some of these shared characteristics.

Advocacy strategies have changed a lot over the last 20 years. When I was a chief of staff in the New York State Legislature, I don't remember there ever being a real advocacy campaign around public support of an issue that focused on legislators. The main way groups moved legislation was to hire a lobbyist and that was really it.

We understand what it’s like to operate a campaign on a tight budget, so we’ve found some free tools to include in your campaign toolbox to help you along the way.  We hope you will find them useful as you launch your campaign or look for ways to better organize it. to ve clear no campaign tool will solve all of your campaigns problems.  Whether fundraising for a nonprofit, managing an independent expenditure campaign, or seeking office, a few of these tools will surely help you along your way.

Recently Facebook launched cross-device reporting for Facebook ads, which will help in measuring conversions of all of an individual's devices. We have grown beyond just using desktops. Now folks are using multiple devices and advertisers and publisher are adjusting to connect with consumers.

Last week we released our first ebook: Political Direct Mail In The Digital Age. The book explains why with all the technology we have, political direct mail in the digital age is still relevant. We explain how you should decide on direct mail and targeted communications strategies for political and advocacy campaigns. We also discuss the cost of direct mail, micro-targeting strategies and how to use direct mail for GOTV.

Advocacy campaigns get inspired by GOTV.  Get Out The Vote, has come a long way. A good GOTV program can give a political campaign a big lift and those tactics are now being used for advocacy. you can read more about GOTV techniques here and here. GOTV techniques have transcended their former use as “valued election tools”, and are now the core component of modern GOTV Tactics.

Last week, The Campaign Workshop hosted a interview training event for Code for Progress at our office that included a stellar cast of entrepreneurs, TCW staff, and an amazing group of fellows that are about to take the job market by storm.

These days, everyone is online. And if your nonprofit isn’t online, it should be! It’s easy, cheap and one of the best ways to stay engaged with your supporters. Here are five things we think every nonprofit should be doing online.