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sizeable portion of your campaign budget to lawn signs and door hangers. Your PR team might also be lining you up for some coverage in the local newspaper and some sound- bytes for the nightly news. If you are running a big budget campaign you are probably organizing a huge television ad blitz. Your strategy is based on timeless methods that have never failed … yet.
Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
– Sun Tzu Whether you have a big budget or a small budget the
political campaign playing field has changed, and you have to make sure you have appropriately budgeted to do battle on every field, not just the traditional ones. One area in modern campaigning that has caused more confusion and than any other is the online campaign. Can you ignore the latest trends online and still win? Possibly, but is that a win- ning strategy or a strategy of wishful thinking? I’m going to outline the five fundamental rules to building a winning online campaign at any budget level.
1) Never Forget the Campaign’s Goals Haven’t Changed, Just the Medium The goals of campaigning are still the same: find volunteers, so-
licit donors and get people out to vote. Campaigns are about com- munity engagement, and leveraging that engagement to influence people to perform an action in your favor. Online campaigning is therefore about getting people to engage online to perform a real world task, such as voting, volunteering or donating funds.
The Art of Online Campaigning A
By John Craig
re you managing a campaign or running for office this year? If you subscribe to traditional campaign strategy, right now you are probably earmarking a
Military tactics are like unto water … Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.
– Sun Tzu For the past 50 years, television was the king of the broad-
cast technology world and played the primary role in voter decision-making. Today, the Internet is on par and is set to bypass television for the largest daily share of our media con- sumption. In Canada, four out of five Canadians are now online. Services such as YouTube, Facebook and Google have taken over from the evening news as our primary source of information, and studies have shown that information re- ceived through our friends on social networking sites now has a greater impact on our decision making than informa- tion received from any other source. Websites are table stakes today; social networking and new media integrations are the required innovations. The second media shift is the move away from the
wired world to the wireless. This year it’s predicted that people will access the Internet more frequently from a mobile device than they will from a laptop or PC. Market research firm Synovate found that 82% of people never leave home without their phone, and 42% of those people “Can’t live without” their mobile device. If you aren’t building an online presence that takes into account mo- bile devices such as the iPhone you may disappear com- pletely from the online world. ZipStripe (www.zipstripe. com) is a mobile campaign marketing company that can help you navigate this change, with services that range from SMS and MMS message services to mobile applica- tion development, allowing you to reach voters and do- nors on a wide variety of mobile platforms on an anytime, anywhere basis.
Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten
to battle will arrive exhausted. – Sun Tzu
June 2010 | Campaigns & Elections 57
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