Killer Campaigning: Political Campaign & Election Strategy
Personal Touches in Local Elections & Political Campaigns
A Killer Campaigning fan named Nick sends us a request to be a bit more specific when it comes to giving political campaigns the personal touch:
Hello, I love your website and have already every single one of your posts. You emphasize the value of personalization in local campaigns in many of them. Could you spell out exactly the methods you have used to personalize your race. For example, I am interested in knowing how you would personalize direct mail (i.e. examples of the language you include in various types of DM), how you identify a topic for personalization with a voter, etc. The longer the list the better. Pretty much anything on the personalization front that goes beyond simply hand-signing your signature and the address on the envelope (things that all local campaigns should already be doing in my book).
Thanks for the compliments, Nick; it’s good to know the tips we post here are helping you. You ask a great question, since I do feel that personalizing your campaign is one of the most effective strategies you can use to win a local election. I plan on introducing some specific personalization strategies in future posts, but I’ll give you some quick examples of methods I’ve used to add the personal touch to campaign materials like direct mail.
First, let’s mention an important point: the larger your district/war/city/county is, the more difficult it will be to effectively practice personalization. Since adding the personal touch to campaign materials means spending more time on each piece than you normally would, the amount of time you need to do it correctly can end up being enormous.
There’s a reason why statewide and congressional races often employ a mass-production, impersonal strategy: because there simply isn’t enough time in a single year to personalize a campaign that is targeting tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of voters. While you can personalize these efforts as much as possible by having volunteers call voters in phone banks or knock on doors for you, casting a large net with your literature and message is really unavoidable.
As a local political candidate, you need to determine exactly how much effort you can afford to expend on personalizing your campaign, and when to implement the mass-produced, assembly line approach instead. If there are 5,000 registered voters in your district, then you could conceivably write a personal card to each one of them if you give yourself several months to do it.
If there are 50,000 voters in your district, however, you would be making a big mistake by spending too much time on that kind of a labor-intensive project. While you might end up filling out 5,000 cards, that’s only a small percentage of the electorate . . . and that time could be better spent raising money that could pay for several targeted mass mailers.
I’m sure you get my point: while personalization is great to use in a small-to-medium-sized local campaign, it’s not the best strategy in a large one. The tips I write about here might work for me when I campaign for city council Amherst, Ohio,but they’d be a huge mistake for someone running an election effort in a much larger city or district.
Micro-Targeting With Targeted Political Campaign Direct Mail
Your question about personalizing direct mail is something that I haven’t covered on Killer Campaigning yet, and it’s an important topic. By definition, direct mail–or “bulk” mail–can’t really be personalized down to the individual voter; in order to qualify for a lower postage rate, your bulk mailings must all be identical, with no hand-written messages included. In most cases, you need to send 200 pieces or more to qualify for the bulk mail rate.
In spite of an inability to hand-write messages or make individual pieces unique, you can still personalize political campaign direct mail to a certain degree; it’s called micro-targeting, and it can be extremely effective if done correctly. By micro-targeting, you add the semblance of a personalization to an otherwise assembly-line strategy.
At its core, micro-targeting is dividing your targeted voters up into the smallest groups possible that still share a common interest, political philosophy, background or environment. If you do a good job of categorizing voters into the right micro-targeted group, then you should be able to send a specially designed mailer to everyone in the group and still make them feel like it personally speaks to them alone.
In local elections, your micro-targeted groups can be as small as a few hundred people; there might be an issue involving the maintenance of a certain street that will be of interest to voters in that ward, for example. In larger races, a micro-targeted voter group can reach into the tens-of-thousands.
Members of groups with political goals are great for micro-targeting; if you are a gun owner, for instance, sending a targeted mailer to every registered member of the NRA in your town to let them know that you share their values would be very effective.
I’ll delve deeper into exactly what methods you can use to build these micro-targeted lists at a later date, but I hope this helps a bit. Thanks again for the great question . . . it will probably take dozens of future posts to explore it fully!
