Branding and Messaging

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!

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:

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. 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. 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

Campaign Calendar

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.

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.

Additional Resources