Political Consultants

Looking to build a winning digital strategy for your campaign? It begins and ends with consistency and a comprehensive approach, regardless of the platform.

A group of digital strategists and communications pros tackled the question during a Thursday afternoon session at C&E’s CampaignTech conference. Whether it’s TV, radio, print or online, keeping your message consistent across all platforms is just as important as finding the right media mix.     

“It’s wasteful to use a shotgun approach in communication,” argued VOX Global’s David Payne. “You have a limited time to get it right and convince people you’re right.”

Payne spoke alongside Megan Whittemore, deputy press secretary for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.); Stephen Freitas of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and National Media’s Jaime Bowers.

Among the most critical aspects, all agreed, is efficiency and finding a way to make use of different platforms at different times to spread your message.

Cantor’s office has focused on using Twitter to drive its message to specific audiences, noted Whittemore. The Majority Leader’s office, for example, uses a specific handle on Twitter to push stories out to the press and it’s Twitter feed amplifies the message Cantor is driving using other platforms.  

“People are going to tune out and tune in whenever they have time,” said Whittemore, emphasizing the premium on message discipline. “Have a narrative and develop it over time and no matter what platform you use, make sure that narrative is consistent.”

In the majority leader’s Capitol Hill office, there is a Twitter wall that allows visitors to follow online conversations while waiting in the office’s common area.

“It has encouraged a lot of people to follow us,” said Whittemore.

Traditional media is also becoming more of a two-way conversation between advertisers and consumers, said OAAA’s Stephen Frietas.

A relative newcomer to the space, he said, is digital outdoor advertising, which has the added benefit of connecting advertisers with consumers where they meet and congregate. Seeing a digital message and being able to react to it with a group of peers in real time, acts an amplifier and helps facilitate a dialogue.  

“All media need to figure out how to have that true dialogue,” said Frietas.

In 2008 and 2010, Twitter was the social media drug of choice. The site and its 140 character posts steadily engulfed the political world after its inception five short years ago. Members began tweeting with sometimes embarrassing frequency. Think Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) pinging her followers during President Obama’s February 2009 address to Congress.

It has only gotten worse. Now, 80 percent of elected officials in Washington are on Twitter, according to one estimate. It is officially more popular among the political elite than it is among the social media-happy Millennial generation.

Still, it’s quite possible Twitter will have some competition next November as Tumblr continues its evolution in the social and political media world. The micro-blogging network, a cross between a traditional blogging platform and Twitter, has grown by 900 percent over the past year and now has more than 33 million active users - making it the largest blogging community online.

Just like a traditional blog, Tumblr users draft their posts, which tend to be multimedia-heavy, and publish them to their official page for others to view them and leave comments. What makes the site resemble Twitter or Facebook is the Dashboard feature. Located on the home page, the Dashboard provides a place for users to see their friends’ posts in a newsfeed format without having to go to each users’ individual page for updates. In the same way Twitter users can conduct a hashtag search for specific topics, Tumblr also allows its users to search for specific tags, such as “politics” or Occupy Wall Street.

Tumblr users tend to be more likely to fit a specific demographic profile than those of Facebook and Twitter. Three-quarters of all Tumblr users are white, 60 percent don’t have children and only two percent of all Tumblr users – the so-called “addicts” – make up 40 percent of all posts.

Politically, Tumblr’s users skew to the left, with large communities on Tumblr for progressives and feminists. Tumblr is also the main social network used by those participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement – the page “We are the 99 percent” is filled with pictures and stories of protestors. Many major media outlets, including Politico, Mother Jones and National Journal, also have Tumblr sites.

Tumblr counts among its most popular users several Hollywood celebrities and Barack Obama himself. Launched this past October, Obama’s Tumblr page serves as his official campaign blog and already includes videos of the president, answers to voters’ questions, submissions from supporters and more.

Obama may be the only candidate currently using Tumblr, but that doesn’t mean that it will stay that way. Four years ago presidential candidates from both parties focused their cyber energies on MySpace; it was the first social network to host a major presidential primary debate. Yet MySpace never adapted to the changing world of social media and is now virtually as obsolete as chat rooms.

There are similar websites out there, such as Pinterest, which have attempted to but failed to make a dent in Tumblr’s core audience. All the signs point to Tumblr being the next big competitor to Facebook and Twitter, and who knows, perhaps it may pass them in popularity one day in the not-so-distant future.

Katie LaPotin is an account executive at Advocacy Ink, a full-service public relations, communications and political consulting firm in Alexandria, Va. Previously, she worked at a Republican polling firm and on several campaigns in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Politics and video games aren’t typically discussed in the same breath, but digital strategists say gamification can actually be a powerful tool for identifying and engaging the public.

“67 percent of households are playing games,” said Jordan Raynor, vice president of media and public affairs at Engage. “Why can’t we make politcal advocacy fun?”

Raynor was part of a Thursday panel at C&E’s 2011 CampaignTech conference that examined how nonprofits and other advocacy groups are using online gaming to engage constituents.  

The idea of weaving game features into campaign strategies isn’t necessarily new; after all, the basic premise of competition is at the heart of both gaming and politics. But now technology has enabled practitioners to take it to the next level.

“Marketing through games is acknowledging that there’s a tremendously large audience that engage with them,” said Michael Silberman, the global director of digital innovation at Greenpeace.

Silberman pointed to a campaign called VW Darkside, which is an effort designed to convince German automaker Volkswagon to support climate change policies. The campaign is a spoof of the company’s popular Super Bowl Darth Vader ads and enlists new members to join and bring friends into the fight as Jedi.

“Make the basic message as interesting and compelling to reach as many people as possible,” said Liz Mair, founder of Mair Strategies.

One way to make gamification more practical is engaging canvassers in competitions and encouraging attendance at campaign events.

“Gamification has a place for expanding the pie [for entertainment]” Raynor said. “In political campaigns I don’t think we’re looking to expand the pie, I think we’re looking to make the pie sweeter and more substantive.”

Some consultants have become so entranced with the sexiness of online and mobile applications they forget that elections are won by employing a fairly simple strategy: identification, persuasion and turnout. There are certainly ways that the web can help a campaign connect with likely voters. But increasingly campaigns are exchanging proven tactics for these tech-heavy options that underperform. 

Technology has its place on the trail, but campaigns need to remember that more than half of the American electorate is over the age of 50, with some 20 percent 65 and older. This means the use of online and mobile-based applications for voter outreach is problematic if it’s not combined with more tradition methods. From my experience, winning requires a calculated balance of tech-heavy solutions (online and mobile) and some of these more boring, underrated—yet still highly effective—tactics.

1. Phone Banks. The use of phones on a campaign is becoming a lost art. Some campaigns believe that texting and mobile apps can replace the old-fashioned volunteer phone call. That’s not the case. Several campaigns that enjoyed the national spotlight last cycle didn’t operate phone banks at all—and they lost handily to opponents who spent less money but made more phone calls. 

The campaign phone bank should be the heart of the voter identification, persuasion and turnout program. The phone bank will help the campaign target its manpower, direct mail and even television and radio buys. A well-organized phone program can win elections, as it allows the campaign to reach thousands of voters each week, track their choice in the election, and then encourage supporters to go vote on Election Day. These are things that email, text messages and mobile applications cannot achieve effectively.

2. Door-to-door operations. The use of an integrated door-to-door operation has followed the phone banks into obscurity in the campaigns of many first-time candidates. The American campaign style is strongly rooted in retail politics, and nothing is more retail than meeting voters at their door. Most campaigns can reach approximately 40-60 percent of their voters via phone, and significantly less online. This makes knocking on doors the most effective voter contact tactic in a campaign’s arsenal.

An effective door-to-door program should be incorporated into the phone program. The phone bank will identify clusters of undecided or unidentified voters for volunteers to visit. Delivering a message in-person significantly enhances a volunteer’s persuasiveness.

3. Early voting/absentee voting programs. Few campaigns get this right, because executing an effective early voting or absentee voting program is difficult to engineer and track. Republicans and Democrats, however, have both notched surprising wins in the past decade that were only possible by running strong early vote and/or absentee voting programs. Many campaigns simply ignore this tactic because it requires a long-term investment of manpower and money. But these programs can be worth up to 2-to-4 points in a tight race—more than enough to win. 

4. Get-Out-The-Vote pushes. The election isn’t won until a campaign gets enough of its voters into the polling station. Each cycle, more than a dozen campaigns come up short on Election Day not because they lost the message war, but because they didn’t execute a solid GOTV program. 

Effective GOTV programs can involve direct mail, phone calls, emails, texts and even door-to-door. That said, some modern campaigns fail to recognize that emails, texts, and even direct mail do not have the effect that calls and personal visits have when conducting GOTV operations—particularly on Election Day.

5. Planning. With modern campaigns facing so many communication and strategic options, many choose to skip the planning process altogether. These same campaigns often fail to make it over the finish line. Most reliable consultants and long-time operatives will tell you that winning campaigns means being proactive, not reactive. Unfortunately, it’s impossible for a campaign to be anything but reactive if it doesn’t have a plan. Planning doesn’t necessarily mean writing and following a 300-page campaign strategy memo. It does, however, mean thinking through the options, scenarios and environmental conditions of your specific race. That alone can help a campaign devise a superior strategy that will carry it to victory on Election Day.

Tyler Harber is a Republican consultant and pollster. A partner at the Prosper Group, Harber has worked hundreds of campaigns in the U.S. and abroad. Follow him on Twitter (@THarber).