Like many lifelong organizers, I got my start working on political campaigns. What started as helping a student get elected to the local city council in college quickly accelerated into managing Congressional races. In the winner-take-all environment of US politics, all good campaign strategists are constantly on the lookout for an advantage they can grab.
So, to my fellow campaign hacks of all levels, here's a roadmap to out-organizing your competition with features only found in NationBuilder.
Here are the first 5. Tune in next week for the second batch.
1. Use text-to-join keywords at every event
Candidates speak at a lot of events. Usually they don't do much to capture the contact information of audience members -- amounting to a huge loss of potential volunteers, donors, and ID'd supporters over time. Sometimes the campaign is smart and passes around a clipboard for folks to signup. Sometimes that info gets put into a database by hand, but often the handwriting is illegible.
Instead, try this. With every signup page in NationBuilder you can create a text-to-join keyword. When the candidate is at an event or speaking to a crowd, ask people to pull out their cell phones and text "WIN" (or any other keyword) to the assigned number. NationBuilder will capture the cell number and send followup texts to grab the person's name and email. You can automatically assign a tag so you know exactly what event the person attended.
Now the campaign can easily follow up while your opponent just wishes.
2. Make life easy for your finance committee members
Building a strong, well-run finance committee is one of the first things any successful campaign prioritizes. Tracking the efforts of these supporters is a whole different ballgame. Usually a finance assistant tries to encourage harder work but just ends up annoying powerful people.
NationBuilder makes it easy to change this dynamic because everyone can have their own online fundraising effort. Each finance committee member gets their own recruiter link and personal fundraising page, and donations coming from his/her network track right back into the database, credited automatically. The Obama campaign used similar personal fundraising links to crush Romney in small dollar contributions, but still had to have staffers doing the reporting. Now its just a couple clicks.
3. Build strong grassroots leadership with NationBuilder Match
Every good field effort depends on quality leaders. Whether they're country or town chairs, precinct captains, or team leaders, they're the folks who deliver the votes. An advantage in the field can mean an extra 2-3% on election day, and that's often the difference between winning and losing. Many organizers spend months trying to find the people who are most capable of stepping up to lead. And there's nothing more frustrating than when a volunteer wants to be in charge of some turf and you later find out that no one will follow that person. Not only have you wasted your time, you might have actually done harm.
Enter NationBuilder Match. As soon as you put an email into NationBuilder, we'll find that person's social media information for you and attach it to the record. Every supporter record has a network tab that shows you everyone in his/her network who is also part of your community, and quantifies it for you. In states like California where the voter file includes emails, huge parts of your target universe will match to social networks. This means you can pull a precinct and sort by how many twitter followers a person has, or find the highest Klout scores.
Now you know the most influential person in the precinct. Guess who should be your precinct captain? You've got David Ortiz on your team now when the opponent is struggling with A-Rod. Guess who's gonna win the World Series (come on now, you knew I'd put in at least one Boston reference in a blog post about winning).
4. Let your supporters host a house party with one click
Here's a story of two very big competing mayoral candidates. Candidate A had the backing of organized labor, tons of money, and a big field staff. He also had weak, outdated technology. During the final weeks of the campaign, all of the supporters who wanted to host events had to go through the finance staff. They were hard working and diligent and put together a couple dozen events to help Candidate A.
Candidate B was outspent and out-staffed and out-independent-expenditured (pretty sure I just coined that phrase). But Candidate B had a simple button on his NationBuilder website that said "Host Your Own Event." Each event's information went directly into their database so events could be managed effectively. In the final couple weeks, lots of supporters decided to click. Hundreds, in fact. Soon, a house party tsunami swept the land and fired everyone up for GOTV. In a low turnout primary this made a huge difference.
Candidate B is now the Mayor. Do what they did.
5. Boost your voter ID with CallFire IVR calls
Everyone wants an army of door knockers to ID voters like a Presidential campaign might have. But most candidates don't get there. Still, there's an easy way to make up for it using an IVR call, which stands for interactive voice recording. This is a special type of robocall that, instead of annoying the recipient, asks how the voter thinks and records his/her preference. Which means you can have a much stronger voter ID practically overnight for a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars. This will help you know who to turn out so you can target your efforts much more effectively.
Here's where the NationBuilder advantage comes through big: NationBuilder is built with far more modern code than other campaign technologies, so other technology makers can easily connect to it using our API. One of these apps is CallFire, which will let you set up all sorts of call strategies, including IVR calls, on your own. Since NationBuilder customers own their own data, you can cut a list in NationBuilder and sync it automatically to CallFire to send out the IVR call. Try doing that on a platform that won't let you export.
You can't. You lose. NationBuilder wins.
Next up: using digital field when addresses are unreachable, turning donors into GOTV leaders, enhancing messaging with issues surveys, better voter registration targeting, and more. Check out even more ways campaigns gain a big advantage in our follow up post.
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