Secrets for Winning a Political Campaign: Personalization

I’ve worked on many different types of campaigns, from small city council and school board races, to larger state representative campaigns, to congressional and presidential races.  While all are fun and exciting to play a part in, my favorite type of campaign to work on is the smaller local race, where the electorate is small enough to use very effective techniques that aren’t possible in larger districts.

What if I told you that there was one surefire way to win your local election without spending tons of money?  After years of running local campaigns, I’ve figured out that this secret almost always works, and that your opponents aren’t likely to use it.  So, what’s the secret?  It’s called personalization.

Personalizing a campaign means that you make each voter feel that you actually sat down and took the time to pay attention to them personally.  There are many different effective ways to personalize your campaign, from writing a message on every door card, to calling the voters directly on the phone, to knocking on every door in your district and introducing yourself to your constituents.

All of the personalizing techniques that you will use on your campaign have one thing in common: they take up a lot of time and they are hard to do.  The good thing is that since it’s difficult to do well, your opponents aren’t very likely to personalize their campaign to the extent that you might.

It’s a sad fact that most candidates for city council, school board or mayor in smaller cities simply won’t put much work into their campagin.  They will do what all candidates for office have done in the past: maybe send out a tired, boring mailer before the election; attend a few spaghetti dinners and shake some hands; knock on a few doors in their neighborhood.

That’s to your advantage, of course, but only if you are willing to put in the work that personalizing your campaign takes.  Remember: a door card personalized with a hand-written message is many times more potent than a mailer that only has a resident’s address typed onto it.  A handshake is many times more potent than a yard sign.  And writing a personal letter is much more effective than showing up at a spaghetti dinner with your campaign shirt on.

You can see why personalization is difficult to do in larger races; it can take months to write personal letters and knock on doors in even a smaller city, so it just isn’t possible to any large degree in a race that will have hundreds of thousands of potential voters.  (Although I did use the personalization technique in a congressional campaign by sending out postcards to every voter that were “hand-written and signed” by our candidate.  It took many months to fill them all out!)

In a smaller local race, though, personalization could be the secret that you can use to beat your opponent, no matter how well-known they are.  If you’re willing to personalize your campaign with hard work and consistency, then it will pay off every time.

Personalization in local campaigns is one of my specialties, and I’ll be focusing on more specific ways to personalize things in future articles here on Killer Campaigning.  It all basically comes down to one thing: outworking your opponent, and making sure that the work you do is effective.