As you get your campaign off the ground, these are five advocacy strategies that’ll help keep you aligned to your goals and help you get the most out of voter engagement.
Keep them in the loop
Make sure that your voter contact remains consistent. Your supporters have other things going on in their lives and there’s a good chance they’ll push your campaign to the back of their mind, unless you reach out to them at consistent intervals. It can be weekly email update, a text message fundraising appeal, or a phone call inviting them to an event. Any form of voter contact is sufficient, as long as it’s personal and not just a series of call to actions for donations.
Multi-channel engagement
Do not assume that you know the best outreach channels to reach your supporters. Expand your channels of outreach to identify where you get the best response rate. Email is a solid tool to cover a wide audience base, peer to peer text messaging is suited to a younger audience and phone banking can help you connect with older demographics. Identify your goals and experiment with different messaging in each of these outreach channels to find the best way to get through to the voter base.
Be clear and specific
With any actions that you want your supporters to take, be it signing a petition or calling their rep, make sure your instructions are clear and specific. Although supporters are passionate about your cause, they can be alienated by the campaign if there is no proper communication about campaign activities and goals to be achieved.
Make a timeline
Before you get started with your campaign, prepare a timeline that details all the events and campaign activities that are required to meet your goals. Having a timeline helps you align campaign activities to your final goal. It’s okay if you don’t have the entire campaign strategy figured out yet. But sit down, and make a rough layout of campaign activities, events, volunteers needed, people to be contacted, tasks to be delegated, and assign a time period when these actions have to be achieved.
Targeted outreach
Your messages to voters should vary based on whether they are supporters, swing voters, or opponents. Each of the three segments differ in terms of the value they assign to your campaign. While a fundraising appeal to an opponent may end up in the trash, a swing voter might glance through it, and a supporter might respond. Targeting your outreach helps you allocate campaign resources and tailor messages for the best responses.
Related: Guide to Devising Great Community Outreach Strategies That Win Big
Planning your advocacy campaign? Check out phone banking, text messaging, and SMS data collection software from CallHub. Get started for free.
Fresh Reading
