Candidate Training - Phase #1

Running a campaign by yourself is a lot of work. It can be done, of course, but you’ll be far more successful if you can build a team of volunteers around you to help. In this section, we’ll talk about how to structure and organize your team.

Campaign Organization

What are the roles in a political campaign?

• Candidate

• Campaign manager

• Fundraising director

• Communications director

• Networking director

• Events director

Depending on the size and scope of your campaign, you might fill several (or all) of these roles on a daily basis. Larger campaigns might have the capacity to fill some or all of these roles with volunteers and/or paid professionals.

So how do you build out a support network to help contribute to all of these campaign roles? Here are a few suggestions:

• Friends and family are always a great place to start!

• Put together a steering committee of friends, family, and supporters who can provide advice and network on your behalf.

• A finance committee is also a great asset. Obviously, having someone who has experience with raising and/or managing money involved or running this committee is a bonus.

• Building a rapid response team is extremely useful in our 24/7, social media environment. If you have a small team of folks who know your campaign messaging, they can tag-team responses to news story comments, social media trolls, constituent complaints, etc.

• The most important advice we can give you is never to turn away a volunteer! Find out what their strengths are and use them but don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole. For example, if you know someone who is an introvert but wants to help, they probably won’t feel comfortable knocking on doors or making phone calls. Instead, find out if there are other tasks he or she can do that are better aligned with their skills and personality.

Budgeting

How much do you need to budget for your run for office? That’s hard to know, especially if you’re running for the first time. One good way to get a ballpark estimate is to look up campaign disclosures for previous campaigns. How much have other candidates raised and spent in the past? If this is your first run, you might have first-time expenses you wouldn’t necessarily need in subsequent elections, like your website or yard signs (if you have enough left over).

So, what should you spend it on? The short answer is, “Stuff that will help you earn more votes.” Hats and t-shirts, for example, may seem like a fun way to gain some exposure but they’re not nearly as effective as other methods. Likewise, expensive events can drain a lot of time and money from your campaign for relatively little benefit. Conversely, investing in traditional lawn signs and targeted direct mail are very cost effective, traditional ways to earn name recognition and exposure. Think about it this way: A $1 lawn sign on a busy street can easily be seen by thousands of people every day. How many people will see a $20 t-shirt?

What to Include In Your Campaign Budget

Here’s an outline of items that would be contained in a complete campaign budget. Keep in mind that your campaign probably won’t include or require everything on this list.

• Operations

  • Salaries

  • Voter files and databases

  • Website

  • Gas

  • Office space (include internet, rent, heating, etc.)

  • Fees (bank, payment processing)

  • Office supplies

• Voter Contact

  • Direct mail

  • Radio ads

  • Radio production

  • Digital advertising

  • Live & automated calls

  • Palm cards

  • Business cards

  • Yard signs

  • U-posts, poles, and zip ties for road signs

  • Banner

  • Newspaper ads

  • Volunteer expenses

  • Canvasing (door to door)

  • Community meetings

  • Get out the vote (GOTV) operation

• Fundraising

  • Fundraising events

  • Printing

  • Postage

  • Letterhead and envelopes

  • Donation cards

You can download a campaign budget template (MS-Excel file) by clicking on the image below:

Communications

We think it’s useful to think of communications in terms external and internal. External communications mean delivering your message to the outside world, while internal communication means keeping your message straight and consistent within your team.

External Communications

Paid media is the first external communication channel to consider. There are lots of options available here; newspaper, print, digital, radio, television, etc. Be very careful when considering paid media and mindful of the cost per thousand impressions, or CPM. That’s a measure of how many dollars it takes to reach 1,000 people. Those costs can vary widely between medium and some of them have ways to get free coverage.

Free media coverage is typically referred to as “earned media.” This frequently comes in the form of news stories in television, radio, and/or newspapers. But there are other ways to acquire earned media. In television, there may be community access cable shows that you can tap. Similarly, reach out to local talk radio stations to see if they will do interviews with candidates. And letters to the editor in newspapers are a great way to get your message out to voters.

Social media is a must for any political candidate. We recommend that you create a Facebook page, first and foremost. Pages are different from your personal profile in that they are public and have no limits on how many people can “like” your page. You’ll also need one if you want to do paid Facebook advertising. In addition, you should make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date and optimized.

Internal Communications

We may be repeating ourselves, but this is important: If people are going to volunteer their time to your campaign, it’s critical that you value and respect their time. One way to do that is to keep them in the loop and stay on top of activities. The last thing a volunteer wants to learn is that they’ve wasted their time because of duplicated effort, misplaced priorities, etc. So make sure you’re in regular communication with your team and the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

Staying on message is also important! We’ll talk more about branding and messaging later in this article. But once you do understand what your campaign message is, everyone needs to know what it is. Ideally, you’ll want to have a communications director who can vet any work done by the team before it goes public.

Building a Database

The ability to send emails to supporters, donors, and voters is crucial! You don’t want to use your personal email for many, many reasons. You’ll want a professional, third-party email provider for this.

There are two solutions we recommend.

The first is ActiveCampaign. There’s no free version, so you ‘ll have to spring for a minimum of $9 per month. The price goes up as you add more contacts to your database. The reason this is our first choice is that in addition to sending emails to your contacts, it can also serve as your campaign database. Most candidates will use spreadsheets for this, but this far from ideal. It’s too easy to corrupt the data and it’s not particularly easy to do anything with the information. If you utilize ActiveCampaign instead, in addition to sending your contacts email you can also track all of your calls, any donations they’ve made, events, they’ve attended, etc. This is all powerful information and it’s not very expensive.

If you can’t afford ActiveCampaign, then our second choice is Mailchimp. They have a free version that allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers. That’s going to be plenty for most campaigns but you’ll sacrifice the ability to use it as a campaign database. Even the paid version won’t support that type of functionality.

Regardless of whether you use one of those solutions or just a spreadsheet, the list is only as good as the care you put into it. The more detail you can collect about each contact in your database, the more valuable it will be. Keep track of who is a volunteer, has donated, displays a yard sign, attended an event, etc. This will allow you to send more targeted messages to your contacts.

Now that you’ve asked all of the right questions and have an idea of what goes into a run for office, the exploratory phase begins. You’ll want to complete all of the steps in this phase before actually announcing because you only get one shot at announcing!

Filing for Office

Be sure to understand exactly what the requirements are to file for your seat. You can usually find this out by checking with your town clerk or Secretary of State. Make sure that you meet the requirements for the office. Make a list of any and all paperwork required to file along with the deadlines. Find out if you need to collect signatures and/or pay a filing fee.

Finance Laws

Reporting requirements for political offices vary widely from town to town and state to state. The Campaign Finance Institute has a handy set of links for you to research the laws in your district. Find out when reports are due, what donation limits are, what information you need to collect, and the time frames in which you can accept donations.

Issue Profile

I remember watching a local community access television show two days before a recent primary election. They brought in six candidates for state office and asked them all the same questions. One of those questions was, “Why are you running for office?” Stunningly, two of them replied by saying, “That’s a good question.” These candidates hadn’t even answered the most fundamental question and it was 48 hours before the election!

It’s a good idea to analyze the top-three issues your campaign is going to focus on. Make a list of the most important issues you can impact as an elected official. For each issue, answer the following questions:

1. What are some of the prevailing solutions and/or plans for this issue?

2. What are some of your solutions and/or plans for this issue?

Next, take stock of your own personal and professional background. What are three areas in which you have unique skill sets or specialized experience? How do these skills/experience assist your ability to solve or add value to the three issues most important to you? How do these skills/experience assist your ability to solve or add value to the three issues most important to the public?

Narrow these lists down to the top 2 or 3. Of the remaining issues, which do you also have the greatest skills/experience to bring about a solution? If your skill sets do not connect strongly with any of the reaming issues, which issue remaining is most important to the public? Finally, in 1 or 2 sentences, explain your opinion, thoughts, and opinion for each issue.

Know Your Strengths

Some people are their own worst critic. Others, shall we say, have a slightly more flattering view of one or more personality traits than other might think. Either way, understanding your true strengths and weaknesses can be a tremendous advantage!

Here are some of the areas to think about and rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 5:

• How strong are you at public speaking?

• How well can you tell a joke?

• How well can you tell a story?

• How honest are you?

• How compassionate are you?

• How confident are you?

• How strong are your writing skills?

• How easy-going and flexible are you?

• What kind of leadership skills do you have?

• What is your overall temperament?

• How are your organizational skills?

• Are you approachable?

• Are you involved in the community?

In addition to those ratings, answer the following questions:

• What is your best quality?

• What is your number one area in need of improvement?

• What would you consider your biggest pet peeve?

• Do you consider yourself to be generous?

• Describe yourself in three words.

• How do you describe your job?

• What charity or community area is most important to you?

• Do you have the necessary life experience?

• Would you vote for yourself?

It’s even more valuable to get this information from your friends, family, and colleagues. But they probably wouldn’t be 100% honest to your face so we’ve created an online tool you can use to collect this information anonymously. Ask them to go to our Know Your Strengths online survey (https://candidatebootcamp.com/know-your-strengths/) and be sure to have them enter YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. This way, you’ll receive an automatic email with each set of answers and it’s completely anonymous.

OK, now it’s time to announce you’re running for office, right? Not quite. There’s still more planning to do if you want to get your campaign off to the best start it can!

Branding and Messaging

At the center of nearly every successful campaign is a consistent and identifiable brand and message. Political branding and massaging in many ways represents both the tangible and intangible “aura” of a campaign.

In 2008, then-Senator Barak Obama’s central campaign messaging was one of change to the status quo and hope for a renewed America. This central campaign message was effectively repeated and reinforced throughout his campaign in nearly every political platform from speeches to social media and online marketing. This message was then bolstered with a brand of youthfulness and a bold color of blue.

Presidential Barak Obama’s 2008 campaign for president is just one of countless examples of how effective branding and messaging can pay substantial dividends to victory on election day. Although you may not be seeking the office of U.S. president, establishing your political brand and messaging can be vital to your campaign success.

The branding of a candidate for local office can take on many different shapes and sizes. Perhaps your brand and messaging are of a successful small businessperson who is looking to bring your experience to your local Aldermanic Board. Another example could be that you are a hard-working community member that has a focus on constituent service. Whatever the case may be, identifying your brand and messaging can help keep your campaign better focused and manageable.

Political Brand

A good political brand has three key components:

1. Authenticity – A strong brand needs to be one that is believable and natural to the candidate. The start of an election is not the time to become a profoundly different person.

2. Relevance – Being closely in line with the matters at hand are vital t a successful brand image. Voters want to know that you not only understand what is important in the community, but also that you are relatable to themselves and their families.

3. Differentiation – Part of your brand should reflect what you offer or what makes you and your candidacy a better value proposition for the voter.

Political Messaging

We define good political messaging as the art of conveying or highlighting successes, failures, differentiating factors or the need for change in a way that is beneficial to the candidate.

That may seem like a lot, but when we break it down it is a little more manageable.

In order to understand what your successful political messaging may be, one good underling principal to understand is that not everyone is as interested and involved in politics or local matters as you are. Just by being interested in running for elected office, you have already placed yourself above a great number of your peers when it comes to interest in political matters.

Additionally, it is important to note that many people do not even vote. Just about 60% of the eligible voting population votes during presidential election years, and about 40% vote during midterm elections. Turnout is often even much lower during local elections.

What does this all mean? It means that when you craft your messaging it is important to keep it simple, clean, and concise. You should be able to convey your core message without having to present a policy briefing or assuming that the voter has a deep background on the topic. The painstaking details of your solutions should not be contained in the context of your messaging. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to speak to the details, but those are more complex conversations that are outside of numerous four to five-minute voter interactions on the campaign trial.

Where do you start? We recommend that you take the top issues you narrowed down previously with the issue profile worksheet and use those as the foundation of your message. Ask yourself what the undying concept is that unites these policies or issues. Is the underlying concept one of taxes, infrastructure, overall change, better transparency, greater teamwork or the continuation of positive policies already in place? Whatever the overarching concept might be, make sure that your message is clear, simple and easily understood by the general voting public.

Putting It Together

The last key to making sure your branding, messaging and designing all work in conjunction is by consistent reinforcement. For your brand and message to “stick” to the voting public, you must make sure you are repeating and reinforcing the same items throughout the entire campaign. This means making sure that all your campaign materials, ranging from palm cards to yard signs to your website and social media presence, all have a similar feel, look, color scheme, design properties, and content.

The key points on your palm card should be consistent with what someone sees when looking at your website or hearing you speak at a community event. In the same way, the main color scheme on your yard signs should also be consistent on your website, social media and press releases.

To build a notable, effective and successful brand and message a heavy reliance on simplicity, consistency, and reinforcement are key to your success.

Planning Your Announcement

What are you going to say and where are you going to say it? Those are the two main things to think about regarding your political campaign announcement.

Think about answering the following questions in your announcement:

• What is your message?

• Why are you running?

• What do you want to accomplish with your announcement?

• What is the look/feel you’re going for?

• Should this be an event?

Finally, decide which medium makes the most sense for your announcement: Should this be a video on social media? A press conference? A local radio show interview? A newspaper opinion editorial?

Setting Goals

Setting goals for your campaign is critical. There are two areas in particular that will help you to constantly benchmark yourself and make sure you’re on target for victory.

Fundraising Goal

Hopefully, at this point, you’ve figured out how much you will need to spend on your campaign and created a budget. Now it’s time to set your fundraising goal and mapped out a path to achieve it. If your campaign is 5 months and you want to raise $5,000, is your goal to raise $1,000 per month or do you want to raise $2,500 in the first two months? There are no right or wrong answers here: It’s a matter of your own campaign plan and budget. Either way, it’s useful to create a plan and set goals so that you can track the performance of your campaign and make adjustments before it’s too late.

Vote Target

Curiously, many candidates for local political office never bother to estimate how many votes they’ll need in order to secure a victory. We recommend looking up the results for the last three or four elections. Look at the total voter turnout and how many voters from each political party voted. It’s important to note the political environment of those elections. For example, turnout will be much heavier in Presidential election years.

Campaign Calendar

Creating a campaign calendar and timeline is an extremely useful tool. It’s not simply a calendar of events, though that’s certainly part of it. It should also include your goals and other tasks, milestones, and deadlines in your campaign. Where do you want to be in terms of fundraising? How many voters do you need to contact in order to reach your vote target? What local events can you attend? Mapping all of these tasks, milestones, and events ahead of time is a great way to organize your campaign and keep the entire team on the same page.

Campaign Infrastructure

The Internet has changed everything from the way we consume news to the way we buy stuff to the way we interact with one another. It has also changed the way we elect our political candidates. Presidential and Congressional campaigns are now hiring digital gurus and spending millions on data mining and advertising.

But here’s the thing: The Internet can be the Great Equalizer. If you understand the rules and know some of the tricks, you can get big results for small dollars. Some of the infrastructure components you’ll want to consider include:

Website – If you do nothing else with digital infrastructure, make sure you have a website as the home base for your campaign. It’s the single best digital tool available.

Accepting Donations – It’s hard work to convince people to donate to your campaign. Why would you make it even harder by not making it dead-simple for them to give you their money?

Social Media – Yes, social media is easy to do. No, social media is not easy to do well.

Contact Database – Smart campaigns keep a detailed list of supporters, volunteers, and constituents. Email is also a vital component of successful campaigns. We’ve already discussed a couple of tools you can use for this component.

Communication and Collaboration – In today’s connected world, word travels fast and the nimbler your campaign, the better equipped you are to deal with that. Using the latest messaging and collaboration technologies will help you do that.

Analytics – You can’t manage what you’re not measuring. If you go the trouble of building a website, engaging on social media, and paying for digital advertisements you need to be able to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Technology Stack

You have a lot of moving parts to manage in a political campaign. Like most things in business and everyday life, there are inventions for every necessity. In the Internet age, there’s no shortage of technologies available to help with any challenge. But the chances are you’re not an expert in any of those areas, let alone all of them!

Which technology is best? How to do you get them to work together?

Each campaign need has multiple solutions. That means there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of different combinations that can do the job. A “technology stack” is a collection of technologies that work together. In this section, we’ll share our recommended technology stack and explain the components.

Our technology stack presents a (more or less) complete digital solution for most small to medium campaigns. You don’t need to implement everything in this stack and you can substitute in most instances.

Let’s walk through these components one at a time. These are presented in relative order of importance.

Website

We’re going to sound like a broken record: Every candidate should have a website. It’s inexpensive and not terribly difficult to do yourself. Some of the benefits include:

• Visibility: Getting on the world wide web will give you much more visibility than just a Facebook page, for example.

• Ownership: You will own your website and all of its content. Forever.

• Functionality: As your campaign grows, your website can grow with it and support more and more features.

Donations

Your campaign will have a difficult time reaching voters without spending money for advertising, infrastructure, and in some cases staff. You’ll need donations to fund those activities and if it isn’t extremely simple, easy, and safe to give you money, you’ll be losing valuable donations.

Using a third-party solution removed several headaches you’d otherwise be forced to deal with.

• Credit Card Processing: Many donations are impulse decisions and you need to make the transaction quickly before the urge disappears.

• Online: These online services allow supporters to donate on their website and/or easily embed donation forms on your own website.

• Reporting: Depending upon your campaign size, you may be required to file reports with your state and/or the FEC. These services quickly and easily generate those reports for you.

Contact Database

See the earlier discussion about creating and using a contact database.

Social Media

I think by now all candidates understand the power of social media for their campaigns. But which channels should you use? And how should you use them? We’ll talk in more detail about this in a future chapter. However, we do want to mention another tool in our stack that we think can help organize your social media presence.

Some of the challenges with social media include:

• You’re likely active on more than one platform, so how do you share the same content efficiently?

• The times when you are online and posting content may not be the best times in terms of your audience presence. How do you address that?

• If you have a campaign calendar, how to you ensure that notifications and reminders go out at precisely the right times?

Analytics

Once you have a website running and are working on social media, it’s important to understand how much traffic your website is seeing and where it’s coming from. Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) is a very powerful, free tool that will monitor this traffic and give you the insights you need to adjust your digital strategies accordingly. It’s very easy to integrate with your website and since it’s free, why not take advantage?

If you plan on using Facebook extensively, we also highly recommend installing the Facebook tracking pixel. It’s similar to Google Analytics but it provides a much richer demographic profile of your visitors. It’s also free (you need to have a Facebook Page for this to be available).

Advertising

The great thing about digital advertising is that it’s easy for the novice to use! The bad thing about digital advertising is that it’s easy for the novice to use! What does that mean? It means that while it’s very simple for anyone to boost a post on Facebook or create Google AdWords campaign, it’s difficult to get great results.

That’s one of the reasons why our technology stack prioritizes analytics over advertising. If you don’t have the resources to implement decent online analytics, you shouldn’t be wasting your money with digital advertising because you’ll be flying completely blind. You’ll have no idea what’s working and what isn’t.

Digital advertising is a pretty big topic itself. We’ve written a whole ebook that will teach you how the basics plus a few insider tips and tricks.

Elevator Pitch

Arguably, nothing will serve you better in your run for office than a well-crafted, much-rehearsed elevator pitch. If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to a hypothetical scenario in which you’re in an elevator with someone important and have 30 seconds to make an impression. This is something you’ll want to revisit throughout the campaign and consider revising when and if circumstances dictate that you should.

Here are a few things to include in your elevator speech:

• Your name

• The office you’re running for

• One key topic or issue and how you plan to address it

• Close with a compelling reason why someone should support you

Bonus points if you can come up with multiple versions of your elevator speech for voters, donors, volunteers, etc.

Stump Speech

Hopefully, you’ll be making lots of public appearances throughout your campaign. On those occasions, it’s quite handy to have a stump speech prepared, practiced, and ready to go. A stump speech should be 3 to 5 minutes long and include:

• A clear open

• Explain who you are

• Explain why you’re running

• Present your ideas

• Close with an “ask” (e.g. vote for me, donate, volunteer, etc.)

Announcement Strategy

Finally, you’ll need to figure out your announcement strategy. You’ve already planned what you’re going to say and where you’re going to say it. Now is the time to create an action list based on that. What is your announcement date? Who exactly will receive your announcement? This is the point at which you will want to create a press list. Make a note of all of the local reporters and influencers (newspaper, television, radio, bloggers) who may cover your story.