Killer Campaigning

What is a Telephone Town Hall?

mattsamp — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:51:13 +0000

A telephone town hall is a great way to showcase a candidate’s charisma and personality in a setting that’s comfortable and informative for the listening audience. But what is a telephone town hall?

Basically, a telephone town hall is like a live radio talk show with a host engaging in dialogue with select members of the audience. By using a telephone town hall meeting, a candidate gets to interact like with the voters, answering questions and communicating their message. Additionally, a campaign will gain increased website traffic, new campaign volunteers, donors and on-the-ground advocates. This is a high-tech and high-touch way to reach voters.

Most telephone town halls should last about an hour. Voters stay connected to the call for an average of one to nine minutes; others, much longer. And, many people want to ask a question, so you never run out of people to talk to.

Telephone town halls should come with a free moderator that manages the complex details of the call. This moderator is your “volunteer host” who keeps the call moving and is able to handle the technical side so the candidate can focus on staying on message and answering questions. Also, you should have a call screener who weeds out the “crazies” and helps people keep their questions specific so the candidate can answer as many questions as possible. With a telephone town hall, a campaign can also run live polls during the forum and connect the voter to a live person to accept a campaign contribution.

Telephone town halls provide a unique benefits that other touch-points don’t offer.

Your campaign dials out to tens of thousands of voting households, but a majority will not answer the phone and will instead receive a voice message. In the voice message, you drive voters to your campaign website and any upcoming events, but you also drive them to the live forum – which they can call into via an 800 number and conference code.

The live answers and those households that dial back in manually after receiving a voice message are predominantly the most active voters – we call them “opinion makers.” These are the voters whom less-engaged people turn to for advice about a candidate. If you reach these voters, you’re connecting with grassroots activists, centers of influence and talkers. But don’t worry about those who don’t answer; your telephone town hall will draw thousands of participants to your live meeting.

Your live audience will also consist of undecided voters who trend towards the middle of the aisle. These are your swing voters. A well done teletown hall draws easily their support, because they’re positively influenced by the kind of direct communications approach a telephone town hall provides. Even if they only listen for a few minutes, the impression is the candidate took the time to contact with them in a meaningful way.

Telephone town halls are are a great political strategy. Participants can press “0” to go to a screener who takes down a summary of their question, then puts them in a queue. You can pick which questioners to take, already knowing what topic they’ll be addressing. A good screener should be able to rank callers based on how friendly they are, how pithy they ask their question, how they sound, along with other criteria. Should a caller sound too hostile or appear to be possibly disruptive, the screener can send that caller back to the main audience instead of into the potential questioner queue. The campaign manager or communications director uses the live staff chat feature built into the web-based control panel to tell the co-host which questions to take, in what order.

Most teletown halls offer others thing like touch-tone polling feature to tag potential volunteers, donors or those interested in attending a campaign event; tagging listeners interested in receiving literature or even a campaign sign. The is even more things one can do with a telephone town hall, but now you have a better understanding of what is it and how they work.

If a candidate sounds confident, has clear answers and appears authentic, there’s more to be gained with a telephone town hall than just voters.

Why Volunteers Should Be the Heart of Your Political Campaign

mattsamp — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:24:19 +0000

The Heart of a Volunteer: Why Volunteers Should Be the Heart of Your Political Campaign!
By Mark Seme, Guest Contributor

Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle once said that there was “Nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer” and while his words may be all but cliché, today they are as true as ever; particularly when running a political campaign.

Regardless if you are a political campaign veteran or a new comer to the arena, volunteers will play a crucial role for your campaign. What many inexperienced candidates (and experienced ones too) don’t realize is that volunteers can do more than simply knock on doors or answer phones. Volunteers can keep a candidate connected to the community, bring a bevy of innate abilities to the table, and become important leaders for your next run for office.

Cultivating and maintaining a good relationship with your volunteer staff can be challenging at times during a hectic and taxing political campaign schedule but the benefits far outweigh the cost.

Your campaign volunteers are likely a diverse group of people with their own agendas, schedules, and have their own reasons to support your campaign; their diversity is, in part, their most useful asset.

Volunteers are often active members of the local community and they have influence with their friends, family, and co-workers to whom they will willingly and passionately convey your campaign’s message to. Volunteers are passionate people and if they feel appreciated there is no end to the free publicity your campaign can garner thanks to the word-of-mouth. The campaigning that they will do for you at the dinner table, the local pub, or any other time they are with friends is invaluable.

As your volunteer staff discusses the issues amongst their own social networks they will likely be exposed to many different views on your campaign’s issues and other topics that you may have never even considered. As a candidate it is your responsibility to know what issues are affecting your constituency. You can learn a great deal about what concerns voters have by simply listening to what your volunteer staff has to say.

Just because a volunteer isn’t a professional political guru doesn’t mean that they can’t bring a lot to the table. One mistake that many campaigns make is not making full use of their volunteer’s talents. As a regular volunteer I can hardly relate how often I have shown up to a post and been routinely handed a phone or a stack of mailers and been hurriedly told to perform a repetitive task without any input in the matter. This kind of relationship between professional staff and volunteer’s not only makes for a lack luster performance on the volunteer’s part, as they feel unappreciated, but also hinders performance by placing people into roles that they are not comfortable with.

Most of your volunteers have careers and interests of their own that make use of skills that can be used for effective campaigning with a little creativity. Obviously people who work on phones all days such as police dispatchers or collections agents make for ideal phone bank workers but some talents are not quite as obvious; waiters are an excellent example.

Wait staff serve food and drinks, pretty simple, but they work on tips and often require a certain finesse when handling customers so these kind of people generally make excellent canvassers. Directing your professional staff to take a more active interest in the lives of your unpaid staff will create a better and more efficient campaign.

Running a political campaign is quite simply one of the most exhaustive and stressful endeavors one can engage in, and more often than not so much attention is focused on attaining this cycle’s victory that little thought is ever given to the next campaign. Training and cultivating your volunteer staff this election will make your campaign that much more effective the next go around.

Trained volunteers can and should become your go-to team on your next campaign. These experienced volunteers could play a crucial role in organizing your next crop of recruits or could even prove valuable as paid staff in the future. If you spend a little extra time cultivating capable volunteers their experience will help you next time around as they are much more likely to come back for your next campaign.

Staying in contact with your trained volunteers should also be a priority after your election, regardless of the outcome; win, lose, or draw stay in touch with them. Send an email out to your former volunteer staff every once in a while or invite them to fundraisers and benefits simply to stay connected with these valuable team members. Even if you decide to forgo any future runs at office your fellow colleagues will be very grateful if you are able to provide them with a few great volunteers.

Whenever embarking on a political campaign it is important to remember your volunteer staff is an invaluable resources as they bring you closer to the community, have their own unique talents, and can be important in future campaigns. Volunteers have always played a critical role in the political process and with a little attention to detail on your part; they can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your campaign.

Mark R. Seme studied political science in college, is a veteran of several campaigns, and is a life long student of politics. In 2011 Mark founded the website Saturday Night Politics, a political commentary site that takes the spin out of politics by focusing on pragmatism instead of partisanship.

Social Media Strategies and Tactics in Political Campaigns

mattsamp — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:12:21 +0000

We’ve added a subgroup on LinkedIn called Social Media Strategies and Tactics in Political Campaigns, all about social media in politics. It’s a discussion and networking group for political candidates, political consultants, campaign managers and allied professionals regarding the use of interactive political advertising, social marketing in politics and emerging social media uses applied to politics and campaigning. Join us!

Google Alerts to Track Political Campaign & Election Issues

killercampaigning — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:30 +0000

If you want to be an effective political campaign candidate, you need to make sure that you stay educated and up-to-date on the many election issues that might affect your district and your constituents.

There was a time when political candidates had to rely on daily newspapers and magazines for staying current on the issues, but the Internet has made it easier than ever before to keep up with local news. I use a free tool called Google Alerts to have instant notifications sent to my email inbox anytime an issue that affects my district gets published online, and you can easily do the same.

Google Alerts takes only a moment to set up, and it’s an extremely useful online tool. To use it, simply go to the Google Alerts interface, then type the keyword phrase that you want to be updated on in the box labeled “search terms.”

One of the first terms that you will want to create a Google Alert for is your own name, since you’ll want to stay informed about any website that publishes information about you or your candidacy. Make sure that you enter your name surrounded by quotation marks–for instance, “Phil Van Treuren,”–so that you are only notified when your entire name is mentioned, and not just part of it.

Next, you have the option of specifying what kind of search results you want to be notified about–news, blogs videos, discussions–but I simply choose “everything” so that I don’t miss any online mentions. You can also choose how frequently you want to be notified of new results (every day if you want) and how many results you would like to see in every email.

The last step is simply to enter the email address where you want the results to be sent, and you’re all set. Every time your specified Google Alert keyword phrase shows up in the search engine’s index, you will be sent a link to the page in the Internet where it appears.

A couple of tips: first, if you have a common name, you want to make sure that you narrow down your search specifications so that you are only notified when it’s sure to be referring to you. A Google Alert for the term “Bob Jones” would probably return hundreds of irrelevant alerts every day. But if you were to set a more specific Google Alert for +”Bob Jones” +”City Council” +”Ohio”, then most of the alerts would probably refer to you personally (putting the “+” symbol in front of phrases means to only return results that include that phrase).

You can set as many Google Alerts as you want, and the service is very reliable. After setting an alert for your own name, you might also want to set alerts for your political opponent’s name; the name of your town or city; and plenty of other keyword phrases that you might want to stay educated on.

Of course, you should still keep an eye on the daily papers to make sure you aren’t missing anything, but Google Alerts makes it much easier for political campaign candidates to stay current on issues that might play a role in their local election.

Squidoo for Political Campaign & Election Websites

killercampaigning — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:14:40 +0000

We’ve talked before about how to practice effective search engine optimization to get your political campaign candidate website ranking for local search terms. One of the most important steps in getting your election website indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing–and getting it to rank for local search terms–is by building links back to your new site.

One of the best free resources for building links back to your political campaign website is called Squidoo. By simply registering for a free account, Squidoo allows you to create unique web pages–or “lenses”–about any topic you want. These lenses also allow you to create links pointing to other external websites.

Squidoo lenses are very easy to set up and publish, but you should put plenty of thought into what the lens will be about and to make sure that it provides factual, useful information about the subject. I suggest that you make your first lense about the city, county or district you are running in.

Take, for example, the Squidoo lens that I recently published about Amherst, Ohio, where I am a city councilman at-large. I made sure that the lens was packed with lots of relevant, factual information about the City of Amherst and its demographics. I also included other easy-to-add Squidoo modules like a guest book and an imported RSS feed of the latest blog posts from my candidate website.

But here’s the most important part of the Squidoo lens when it comes to SEO: the relevant external links. I included several relevant links to Amherst-related websites that visitors might find useful–like the local library and police department–but I also made sure to link back to my political campaign website, as well.

This link back to my website will help it gain more authority in the search engines, and over time it will help my site rank higher for Amherst Ohio related keyword searches.

If you’ve recently launched a political campaign candidate website and want to get it ranking in the search engines for terms that have to do with your candidacy and district, then creating a Squidoo page should be the next thing on your agenda.

Local Election Analysis: Analyzing Political Campaign Results

killercampaigning — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:42:01 +0000

While most of what we cover here on Killer Campaigning has to do with the actions you take before election day, today we are going to focus on what good candidates should do after all of the votes have been tallied. Whether you win or lose your local election, analyzing the results of your race can help you run even better political campaigns in the future.

As a former political consultant and current elected official, I start analyzing my local election results as soon as they come in on election night. Here are some of the elements that I look for: which precincts I performed the best in (and the worst); where my opponents got more votes (and where I got more than they did); which precincts had the highest turnout (and which had the lowest).

These are just a few of the things that you can include in your local election analysis–and don’t think that you need to analyze your results as soon as they come in like I do. On election night, especially if it’s the first time you’ve run for office, your focus should be on one thing: whether you are winning or losing.

Once the excitement has died down, though–maybe even a few days or a few weeks after the election–take some time to look at the voting results and see how things played out precinct-by-precinct and ward-by-ward. Did you end up getting a higher percentage of the vote in precincts where you spent more time campaigning? Were there any precincts where you did better than you thought you would? Overall, was turnout higher or lower than you anticipated?

Answering these questions and more will give you a lot of insight when it comes to your strategy for the next campaign–whether you are running for re-election or giving it another shot after coming in short the first time.

The data that you get from running for office the first time–whether you win or lose–is extremely valuable, and will allow you to run an even better local political campaign next time around. Make sure that you don’t skip the local election analysis after all of the votes have been tallied, whether you do it on the same night or a few weeks later.

Local Election Cycles: Best Years to Win a Political Campaign

killercampaigning — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:34:50 +0000

There’s an old saying that goes something like this: when you run for office is just as important as how you run for office. It’s a bit of advice that I happen to agree with; some simple historical voting research and analysis of current voter sentiment can give you a better chance at winning a local election by launching your campaign during an election cycle that will be more friendly to your efforts.

Here’s the problem: not everyone who wants to run for local office is willing to wait months or years to kick off a political campaign, and many eager candidates jump into a race without doing any research at all about historic election cycles. Most of these shoot-from-the-hip local candidates go on to lose their political campaign on election day, and are too demoralized to ever run again.

Being wise about which election cycle you put your name on the ballot starts with getting some historical election results and voting data from your county board of elections studying the data. Let’s use, for example, a city council race with a term that is up for re-election every two years. In this case, I would get election results going back about eight years and look at each of the four previous election cycles.

With this data, you’ll be able to identify some important trends: which election cycles are friendliest to first-time candidates (due to low turnout), which election cycles are friendlier to well-known names (due to higher turnout), and which election cycles tend to favor particular political parties.

Several factors could result in specific election cycles having the characteristics I listed above: presidential campaign years, gubernatorial campaign years, and years when there simply isn’t much interest in local elections at all.

With a little bit of research, you should be able to quickly identify which election cycle will be the best year for you to run. You usually won’t have to wait much more that a year or two in order to put your name on the ballot and make your eventual election day victory more likely.

Having said all of that, however, don’t let me discourage you from tossing your hat in the ring immediately if you have a gut feeling that your hard work can overcome the odds. There’s never any time like the presence, but with a bit of patience you could increase your likelihood of winning by a few points.

Teaching Kids to Love Voting, Political Campaigns & Elections

killercampaigning — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:21:23 +0000

I just read a really delightful post by blogger Phil James in which he describes how, when he was a child, his father used to take him along to his polling place on election day and let him pull the lever in the voting booth. James says that this helped foster a lifetime love for political campaigns, voting and local elections:

“Not to step on too many clichés here, but I feel there was more than one life lesson learned that day. I asked dad all sorts of questions about the election. I brought my homemade sign to class to rally the support from my peers; got a beat down from my brother after admitting that I voted for Mondale in the mock school election. It led to a brief career in political campaign work after college and an obsession with social justice.”

James illustrates a family tradition that is still important to many parents: teaching children the importance of taking an active interest in politics and our civic duty to vote for the best campaign candidates. By making it a fun family event, James’ father helped ensure that his son would always love the act of voting and pass on the tradition to his own kids.

I’m not sure how many local Board of Elections poll supervisors would allow parents to take their kids into the voting booth, but are there any fun election day traditions that you do with your children?

Mine are great helpers on election day, and last year they helped me wave campaign signs at the polls. We had a blast, and I’m looking forward to involving them in future campaigns as they get older. Even if I weren’t an elected official, though, I would still try to instill the importance of being an educated voter and following through with your civic duty on election day.

Political Campaign Election Cartoons: a Local Newspaper Tradition?

killercampaigning — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:54:28 +0000

There are two medium-circulation local newspapers in my suburban Cleveland area, and both offer comparable news coverage and editorials. Only one of them, though, has an on-staff cartoonist who puts a humorous artistic slant on local politics and events, and that’s one of the reasons that I tend to like this paper’s editorial content more than the competition.

I’m a former journalist myself, and I realize that it’s fairly uncommon for a local newspaper to have its own cartoonist on staff and publish cartoons that have to do with local political campaigns, candidates and elections.

The lack of local editorial cartoonists isn’t so much because there aren’t enough people with artistic talent to draw cartoons. The problem is that political campaign cartoons need a special kind of wit, humor and comic subtlety in order to work, and few artists are able to pull it off.

A good political campaign editorial cartoon can poke fun at candidates without resorting to juvenile or crude humor, and is usually funny on many different levels. In fact, I think that artistic talent is the least important talent that a political cartoonist needs to possess. Some of the funniest election cartoons that I’ve seen featured pretty crude drawing skills.

Does your local newspaper have its own political campaign cartoonist who draws caricatures of candidates and election issues? If so, are they effective in their satire or do they miss the mark?

American Majority Activist Training in Rocky River, Ohio

killercampaigning — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:31:49 +0000

For Killer Campaigning readers from Ohio (we have quite a few of them), there’s a great Activist Training Seminar being put on by American Majority this coming Saturday, June 12 in Rocky River. You can check out details on the venue location and schedule at this link.

This should be a great training session, regardless of what party you belong to. American Majority is national non-partisan political training group that has trained more than 4,000 individual candidates and activists in the United States this year alone. They have offices in six states and train in dozens of states annually.

Topics at the Rocky River training session will include Grassroots Action, Building Effective Campaign Plans, Utilizing New Media and much more. American Majority will provide full training materials, samples, supplements and other useful materials.

And hey, did I mention that the seminar is being held at Beachcliff Tavern?

Anyone in northeast Ohio who is gearing up to work on political campaigns this year or in coming election seasons should definitely make a point of attending American Majority’s Rocky River Activist Training this Saturday!