campaign

This post is the sixth post in a series on tools from political campaigns that can be used to arm librarians in the face of growing opposition during the Trump era where anti-tax and anti-government sentiments have a much stronger voice than ever before.

Fundraise Early and Often
Fundraising is the most difficult part of any political campaign. State and Federal politicians never stop fundraising and many of them start their fundraising efforts years before their campaign starts. In fact, it’s reported that politicians spend up to 30% of their time fundraising. That’s why, even if your campaign is years away, you should set up your ballot committee and start fundraising now! The earlier you get a financial commitment from your base of supporters, the sooner you can start spending it to persuade others to vote yes.

Write a Plan
If your campaign has no written plan, you have no campaign. A strong campaign has a strong plan written in clear and concise language that anyone working on the campaign can quickly and easily understand. Not only does this help introduce volunteers and staff to your campaign but it also really helps them understand the importance of their role. Of course, if you don’t write the plan down and the campaign plan only exists in your head and something happens to you or you have to leave a campaign for any number of reasons, the campaign will be left to start over from scratch. Don’t do that to people counting on you.

Get Comfortable with Real Data
I could talk for hours about the national, state, and local, data that libraries need to win campaigns and the terrifying lack of data in the library industry. But, even for our local campaigns, spending money early on getting good data will save your campaign many headaches in the future. A good pollster will help you find out who will vote for your library, if there is enough support to win, and they will help you find out why people will vote for you library. That’s why you need to hire a professional pollster to do the work the right way. If you run your campaign on bad data you’ll overspend or misspend your campaign funds and potentially lose the campaign (Hillary Clinton). A good pollster will help you determine what data you need and they will make sure you get the data you need.

Set a Win Number
If your library needs a simple majority (50% plus one) of the voters to win an election or even if it needs a supermajority then you will need to find out what that number is before you begin. This number is critical because everything else you do depends on it and it will be your target throughout the campaign. Finding your win number is fairly easy and just requires a little research. For example, if your library is in a special election, look at the voter turnout in the previous 3-4 similar special elections, take an average, divide that number by 2 and add one (for a simple majority).

Set a Budget
Your win number and polling data is what is going to help you determine how much your campaign will cost. I often get asked how much it costs to run a campaign and the honest truth is that it depends. It largely depends on how many voters you plan on contacting, how you plan on contacting voters, how much each contact costs, and how many times you plan on contacting them. While these aren’t the only factors (there are many more) you can set a budget based on three levels of fundraising success.

Check it Everyday
Once you have this budget in place, don’t throw it away. It is a living document and needs to be consistently updated and tracked. The two worst ways to lose a campaign are with money left to spend after Election Day or overspend your campaign too early with nothing left for the GOTV efforts.

Identify Voters
Take the time EARLY in the campaign to find out who is willing to vote yes for your initiative. If you can identify enough voters to get to that win number, you can spend highly targeted contacts on just yes voters solidifying their yes and making sure that they show up to vote on Election Day. This will drastically reduce the cost of your campaign and ensure that you are contacting the right people.

Ignore the Haters
This is going to be the hardest thing to do. This isn’t about handling opposition because there will almost always be opposition that you can’t ignore. Instead, this is about ignoring those silent no-voters. One of the worst things your campaign can spend money on is trying to convert no-voters to yes-voters. Conversion is extremely expensive and very risky for even some of the best campaign managers. If you can get to your win number with yes-voters (which you should be able to do according to your polling results), then you should be spending money finding out who they are and then spending money making sure they vote.

Go Digital Strategically
There are so many digital platforms that a campaign can use. My recommendations are to use a good campaign website like NationBuilder and then focus only on Facebook and Email. The market saturation rate and the data that can be used for Twitter, Instagram, etc… just isn’t at the level it needs to be to be useful enough for small local campaigns. True, you can reach some people with Twitter, but is it the right people, enough people, and is it convincing enough? On a national or some state campaigns, this math changes, but for most library campaigns it just doesn’t add up.

But, Don’t Forget Your Ground Game
Digital is great but it won’t win your campaign. Don’t focus on it as the solution. You will still, absolutely, have to conduct a ground game to win a campaign. That means you and your volunteers will have to call your voters, write them letters, or knock on their doors. The face-to-face interactions (especially canvassing and phonebanking) of a political campaign still have the highest ROI so make sure they happen and make sure your volunteers are trained to do it right!

Bonus: GOTV
The final week of a campaign is where you take all of your yes voters and make sure they show up to cast their yes votes. Don’t overlook this last week because all of the work you’ve been doing up until now won’t matter unless they show up to vote. Spend a large portion of your campaign resources contacting your yes voters and making sure they they cast their vote for your library.

If you are interested in having EveryLibrary conduct a training to build political skills for your staff or librarians or speaking at your conference or staff development day you can get more information here. Or for information about my training, workshops and consulting, please view my speaking page.

This post is the second in a series on tools from political campaigns that can be used to arm librarians in the face of growing opposition during the Trump era where anti-tax and anti-government sentiments have a much stronger voice than ever before.

So you need more money and people for your library, political initiative, movement, or cause? Try using a ladder of engagement.

In any political movement there will undoubtedly be times when the organization will have to ask other individuals or organizations for resources. It is a fact of political life that initiatives and movements rely on the generosity of others to continue to grow and expand their influence. However, even those that are familiar with an organization and support it may take some convincing to part with their precious time or their hard-earned cash. After all, supporters are not simply ATM machines. They are people with feelings, desires, and needs to be met. That’s why even staunch supporters are often reluctant to give up time and money to a political cause, preferring to support it with their words over their deeds (often referred to as “Slacktivism”). Of course, this causes problems for many non-profits, organizations, or movements because they rely on a higher level of engagement to survive and to have the resources they need to succeed. It doesn’t matter if the organization needs a donation, a supporter’s time as a volunteer, or other resources, the method for engaging any audience in a way that gives them the opportunity to get involved and sacrifice their own resources to make a difference in the world is the same.

The ladder of engagement is a fundamental tool for any organization or initiative that can be used to gradually build the relationships that are required to convince the public to support a cause and libraries can use it just as well. The ladder represents the way that people move from being unaware of a cause or an organization, to becoming broadly supportive of it, and finally to becoming active within it. For example, if an organization approaches someone for a contribution of $500 dollars to a cause they know nothing about, then their chance of success is slim to none. If the organization first took the time to develop a relationship with a targeted individual and then asked for a donation of $500 when the target was mentally or emotionally prepared to be asked, then there is a much greater chance of success.

A standard ladder of engagement would be visualized like this:

This is one of my favorite examples of a ladder of engagement although there are many others online. In this example, we start with those that are “aware” of the cause and move to those that are “interested” and “interacted.” These initial three steps usually happens through marketing and advertising. This is how we get people to take notice of a cause, buy a product, or walk through the doors of a library. “Interacted” is also where people begin to take small actions such as liking a Facebook Post or Page. But this is where building supporters and activists is different than marketing. We want people to move beyond just supporting a cause with slacktivist actions and become fully “engaged” and “evangelized.” We want people to take real meaningful action.

In order to move people up this ladder, a campaigner needs to spend time and resources making people aware of the campaign. Next, they need to give them small opportunities to get involved or show that they care (changing their profile picture, sharing a post, etc…). After that, they should be given a place to be engaged or take more meaningful action like signing a petition or asking their friends and family to get involved. And finally, asking them to take that final action such as making a donation or volunteering for the cause.

One of the best examples of this tool in action was from the Obama Campaign in 2012.

The Obama Facebook ladder of engagement looked like this:

First, people were made aware of Obama’s campaign by seeing boosted posts on Facebook.
Then they were encouraged to take an easy next action by ‘liking’ the Barack Obama Facebook page itself.
Then the campaign asked people to “sign a birthday card” to Obama on Facebook in the lead up to his birthday. When people took this step they were asked to fill in their name and email address and the campaign had a valuable piece of information in their database: an email address.
After that, the campaign sent an email to supporters asking them to fill out a survey, or share a personal story. This step encourages people to become more committed to the campaign and builds a profile for the supporter so the campaign can better target them in the future. (Notice at this point that the Obama campaign has made only easy asks of people. They haven’t asked anyone to give up any money or time. But they have built a relationship with people and gathered some useful data, like an email address and location.)
Finally, people who participated in all of the previous steps get a fundraising email. But instead of a direct request for money they are asked to contribute to the campaign in return for a bumper sticker or t-shirt. Never under-estimate the power of swag!
Those that gave to the campaign are then asked to volunteer for the campaign or join at a deeper level in some other way such as organizing a house party, canvassing, or phonebanking for the campaign.

The people that a movement engages with undoubtedly start off having almost no knowledge of what it is about. The ladder of engagement allows a campaigner to walk with people as they get to know the movement and what it stands for. The more time a community organizer spends with someone then the better they get to know each other and the more likely they are to give.

Luckily for libraries, most people know that libraries exist and many American’s use their library so librarians typically won’t be starting from the “Unaware” rung of the ladder.

Creating a ladder of engagement for an audience online is fairly easy with Social Media. Facebook’s data is extremely accurate and allows a user to simply upload a CSV of an audience using just name and address and Facebook will connect that list of people to their Facebook Profiles (we won’t think too much about how scary that is). This means that if a library can generate of a target audience from any of wide range of possible sources, upload it into Facebook, and then target that group with ads then they can move them up the ladder of engagement. For example, a library can download a list of known charitable individual donors in the community from AtoZ databases (or ReferenceUSA) that includes name and address and upload that list to Facebook. Then the library can target that audience with ads about the importance of the library. After that, they can ask that group to sign up on an email list or other creative form that gathers more data. Then they can ask the public to change add a badge to their social media or take some small action. Once that is accomplished the library can then begin targeting them with more customized emails that encourage donations or other supportive actions.

It is easy to create ladders of engagement for people offline as well as it is online. Many times it simply starts with some research for a target audience or individual. A library can easily use a donor list, AtoZ databases (free with a library card), or Facebook to build their initial lists. Then plan their target’s engagement from there. For example, if the library has a goal of getting donations from some of the largest companies in their community, the library would download a list of the largest companies from AtoZ Databases (or ReferenceUSA) where the email addresses or phone numbers of many of the executives can often be found. From there, a librarian would reach out with an email or phone call to introduce the library and its needs using a strong script (we’ll talk about developing scripts later), and then if the executive is receptive to the library the librarian can offer to meet the executive for coffee to talk more about the library. Next, the librarian might find some way to get the company to involved in the library in some small way. At many of the libraries I have worked in, we have been able to get volunteers from companies, sign their employees up for library cards, or have them sponsor or run a program. When this relationship is built, the library will have a much easier time asking for a donation for a capital campaign or an initiative.

To have an effective ladder in an organization it needs to set the ladder up in advance and understand what is needed from the process. It’s important to take the time before beginning to think about the goal of the ladder or where it is that people need to end up. Is the organization looking for money, or volunteers, or letters to editor, or people to show up at a city council meeting, etc…? In any of those cases, thinking about where people are in the community that need to be reached and helps understand how best to reach them. It’s always best to meet people where they are already. It might make sense to reach them online, or in person, or a hybrid of the two. Then plan about small actions that people can take to get more and more engaged in the library until finally, librarians can reach out to them when they are most primed to give.

If you are interested in having EveryLibrary conduct a training to build political skills for librarians or speaking at your conference or staff development day you can get more information here. Or for information about my training, workshops and consulting, please view my speaking page.