political campaign | PC Sweeney

10 tips for your library’s ballot initiative campaign

Posted on February 22, 2017February 22, 2017 by pcsweeney

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.

What Can Libraries Learn from Using a Message Box like Kellyanne Conway?

Posted on December 28, 2016January 30, 2017 by pcsweeney

This post is (hopefully) the first 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.

There is one tool that is essential to a community organizer in order to develop a strong message for a political campaign and to understand how to respond to opposition. It’s extremely important to use this tool to make sure that the communication is planned and delivered correctly because a political campaign can easily die if it delivers the wrong message or stutters in the face of opposition. This tool is the Tully Message box and it is one of the most highly used message development tools for political operatives. You could see it in action the recent Presidential Election campaign where Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was deftly able to navigate opposition messaging to return to the narrative of the Trump Campaign. She was often able to dictate the message she wanted during interviews with the media and her secret to performing so well in the face of criticism was that she used a tool like a message box to understand her message, her opposition’s message, and how to use it to get back to her own message.

Even though I’m no fan of her politics, her agenda, or her candidate, and I wish she used her powers for good, there is a lot to learn about how well she navigated these interviews.

One way of making sure that a political campaigner like Kellyanne Conway is able to take and keep control of the conversation is through a Tully Message Box. The Tully Message Box was named after Democratic strategist Paul Tully. He used the box to look at the elements of a campaign message that will most significantly help the communication side of any campaign. Once that framework is understood, then it becomes much easier to craft an effective way of keeping control and responding to any message in the campaign. A Tully Message Box is broken down into four areas-

What do we say about ourselves?
What do we say about the other side?
What does the other side say about us?
What does the other side say about themselves?

What do we say about ourselves?

What does the other side say about us?

What do we say about the other side?

What does the other side say about themselves?

What do we say about ourselves?

This is the area of the box that will be easiest to fill out early in the campaign. This is the message that a campaign team is hoping to put before the voters. It is the result of the beliefs and values of the campaign and how they are expressed. In essence it would be what the campaign would sound like if it were the only ones allowed to speak. These are the campaigns core values and its beliefs about the issue. It often helps to start this box by answering the questions; Why now? Why is this issue important?

What do we say about the other side?

It would be nice if politics only encompassed support and opposition for issues logically presented to the electorate and the electorate voting based on those simple facts. However, voters often vote based on emotional values such as fear, anger, etc… That’s why there are often so many negative campaigns. The negative campaign is often defined in this message box square. While a campaign can easy to slip into name-calling and negativity, this area is often best served by contrasting the campaign’s belief or value system against the other side rather than speaking about them in terms of emotional responses. Also, while there is a need to speak about your own policies there is a need to speak about those of your opponent and that is framed here.

What does the other side say about us?

The comments and accusations that any political candidate faces from an opponent are important to record throughout a campaign. Any activist may have to face these opposition messages on a regular basis and understand how to respond to them. Getting these down in print will help any campaigner understand what might be said and devise a way of countering it. The more prepared the campaign is for the messages of its opponent the easier it will be to steer the narrative back to the campaigns message. This is where Kellyanne Conway excelled. There is no doubt that she spent countless hours understanding this square of the message box.

What does the other side say about themselves?

The last box is one that can help with reflection. An opponent of any cause will have a set of values, beliefs and polices that they presumably believe in. If an activist is able to analyze these and understand them it gives them the best chance of anticipating their attacks. If they know how they differentiate themselves from the opposition then they will be able to formulate a response based on the flaws that are seen in the opposition’s argument.

Putting it into use

It often helps to put a message box into use for one opposition message at a time. Remember that when using a message box, the goal is to stay on the campaign’s side (the left side of this box) and move the messaging away from the opposition’s message (the right side). This allows a campaign to understand each opposition message individually and to create messages that undermine the opposition before those messages are used by the opposition. It also helps to memorize each counter message so that if an activist is attacked with an opposition message, they can counter with a well-memorized counter message. Here is an example;

What do we say about ourselves?

Libraries provide a wide range of services that can’t be found anywhere else in the community or online.*

What does the other side say about us?

Libraries are obsolete because we have Google.

What do we say about the other side?

They are disconnected from many in the community who don’t have access to the internet.

What does the other side say about themselves?

I don’t use libraries because I have Google.

Once these four areas are defined for each opposition message in a campaign then it becomes easy for a library to use these counter messages whenever necessary. The message box allows you to plan ahead and keep control of the narrative. They say that forewarned is forearmed and a Tully Message Box allows a campaigner to fully understand the direction that any conversation can go in. This gives an activist the power to anticipate what might happen next and have a set of strategies to steer the narrative in their own direction.

*to build a really strong message against opposition using the 27-9-3 method, check out EveryLibrary’s opposition training guide at action.everylibrary.org.

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.

Further Reading about the Tully Message Box
Progressive Majority
The Campaign Workshop
Wellstone

The Only Online Platforms you Need (right now)

Posted on September 2, 2014August 30, 2014 by pcsweeney

I recently gave a webinar on social media and I thought I would write a bit about it even though I’m pretty tired of talking about social media. But, I think there is something new to say here. The talk stemmed from noticing that so many library campaign committees and librarians running their organizations social media have fallen into the trap of trying to identify the next big platform to use. They’ve joined everything from Snapchat to Pinterest to Facebook in search of some kind of social media nirvana that will solve whatever problem they are trying to solve. I don’t think this is a good use of our time or resources so instead of asking you to join and use more social media platforms, I’m going to ask you to ignore all the social media static and only focus on what we know works (for now). We are going to step away from focusing on being as social as possible, to being as effective as possible.

We have seen libraries ineffectually chasing social media as fast as that social media comes and goes. If you remember the clamor to get on to MySpace, Second Life, Friendster, etc… and then next big rush to get onto Pinterest, Goodreads, and G+ you’ll also remember how fast some of those faded away. This is basically the fishing net method of social media marketing. Libraries are throwing the biggest net possible and hoping that they catch something they want and throwing the rest back instead of using the bait that works to get exactly what they want.

All of this is largely because we are looking at using these tools backwards. For example, our organizations get on Twitter and then try to figure out their Twitter strategy. But this doesn’t work because there is no such thing as a Twitter strategy. Twitter is a tool to help you achieve a strategy. What is more effective is to ask what the library’s goal is in building a relationship with the community, then figure out how to measure it, then figure out which tools satisfy your requirements and use those. Remember that for an election or advocacy standpoint, our goal is to get our message out to as many people as possible as effectively as possible.

With that in mind, I’m going to argue that the only two online tools that you really need right now to win a library election or advocate for your library are Facebook and Email. These two platforms can be used effectively in conjunction to build the relationships that your campaign is looking for in a more focused and streamlined fashion. These are two complimentary tools with enough depth, scope, and longevity to take the time to invest resources in and they connect with each other in a way that supports both.

The most important thing I learned in political advocacy is that its all a numbers game. As of 2013, the only two online tools with a high enough usage to be advantageous are, in fact, Facebook and email. According to a Pew Study, around 85% of Americans have email and around 74% of Americans have Facebook. The next highest user percentage rates are less than 25% of the American Public with Linkedin at just 22%, Pinterest at 21%, and Twitter at 18%. What this means, is that if you capture every Twitter user in your area and win them over with your message and they are all registered voters and they all go out to vote, you’ll still lose the election because that is just 18% of the public. Yet, 58% of Americans report that one of the first things they do in the morning is check their email. So, where do you want to be?

A much better strategy would be to go with the tools that you know have enough market saturation to get your message out in a high enough volume to really help you get your message out. Those are email and Facebook. There are some strategic differences in how these two platforms work and how people engage with them, but that will be a post for a later day.