Session 8- Reaching Voters Online.mp3

[00:00:00] Hi, everybody, welcome to ETF Action Campaign Academy. This is our session on. Voter contact online and were led by Sarah Horvitz, who is the political director at Run for Something. And so with that, Sarah, take it away.

[00:00:15] Everyone. Thank you for tuning in today to this campaign academy. I'm Sarah Horvitz. I'm the political director at Run for Something, an organization that recruits candidates under 40 to run for local and state office. Prior to my time, I've run for something. I have worked on campaigns across the country in almost two dozen states. Field doing a little bit of email writing and things of that nature. All right. So we are going to talk about reaching voters online. So why should you use digital as part of your campaigns? Digital allows you to amplify your message and reach a wider audience than you could with just direct voter contact. I imagine you all have learned about the importance of knocking doors, making phone calls, maybe doing a little bit of texting. Digital allows you to scale those operations in an easy way. It doesn't have to be complicated. It just needs to be consistent. And it needs to be clear. So what does digital do? Digital amplifies your campaign message. It establishes your credibility and your viability, and it pushes people to donate to volunteer and support your campaign. We'll get into a little bit more on some techniques you can use, some tools you should use, but just know that digital doesn't need to be this big, scary, complicated thing. It can just be you or a volunteer or two at your computer helping you write some fun content, share some photos and talk about why you're the best candidate for your office. So all of you probably know what these icons are. We have email, we have Instagram, we have Facebook and we have Twitter. These are the main digital platforms that people are going to talk about. They might try to find for your campaign. With that said, you don't need to use all four. And I'm starting off by talking about this because as I mentioned at the beginning, running a good digital program doesn't mean having great content on every platform every day. It just means reaching people where they are. One of the big things about this chart is it shows you what platforms people use. People are mostly on Facebook, as you can tell from this. Not a ton of people are actually on Twitter. It may feel like everyone's on their every reporters on there, but that doesn't mean that every one of your voters is going to be on there. And at the end of the day, most of your digital work should be targeted at voters. That's why you need to win your election. That's who you're trying to get support from. You can see folks are also on YouTube, they're on Instagram, they're on WhatsApp, which probably isn't really a great campaign tool. If you're wondering what we chat is, it's a China based chatting application. Again, probably not as useful for your campaign. My main point of showing this chart is to show you that folks are on Facebook. If you're only gonna be on one platform, that's probably the one that makes the most sense. That's where the most of your voters are. And Facebook is so versatile in what it can do. You can send out ads over Facebook, you can post great pictures. You can start Facebook groups with your top supporters and you can create a page for yourself, all accessible, all links directly back to you. And you can have someone log in and use Facebook from their profile to post on your behalf.

[00:03:32] Some other online tools to consider. You're going to need to use some things to send out mass emails. The biggest thing I can recommend to you is not to use Gmail to do that. Gmail has like a daily setting limit. If you send a seed email from your email account to like 500 people, it's going to end up getting and spam your emails gonna get shut down. It won't be a great look for you. With that said, there are a lot of different email platforms you can use. I put constant contact and Action Network on here. They're used by a lot of campaigns. You can also use ship mail champ and a few others just to get out weekly daily updates on your email. With that said, you're going to want to link those emails to some sort of fundraising platform. ActBlue works with a lot of local campaigns. They're a Democratic focused organization. They're really great. Crowd PAC is another organization that you can do fundraising through. Link to email and use those as your payment processor. One quick thing I do want to add. You should use a campaign based payment processor that links to your emails. For one thing, it will sync up nicely with whatever other platforms you're using to manage your tools or manager your list rather. And also it's going to collect important information like occupation and employer, which you really need on your campaign for the legal reasons.

[00:04:53] So just to wrap this up email. There are platforms available to you. Don't use Gmail.

[00:05:00] When you're thinking about writing emails, a few big things to also think about why are you sending this e-mail?

[00:05:06] What do you need? Do you need volunteers? Are you trying to raise grassroots dollars? Did you just get an endorsement that you want to share and get people maybe to donate because of that? You want to give someone a reason to help you? Like, what can they do? What is the point of this email? What are they taking away from it that they can do to support your campaign? Then you want to write out what are the steps that they can take to support you. And the final piece. Why? Right now you need to create some urgency. If you just send an email that says like, Hey, I'm raising money, we're going to do some stuff with the money. It's going to be great. No one's going to feel compelled to donate right now. If you say, hey, we've got a ton of momentum, the campaign is going great. The fundraising deadline for this quarter is tomorrow. We need you to chip in ten dollars now. That's really easy. Someone can solve that problem. They can feel that urgency and donate money to.

[00:05:59] I want to go into a little bit more on creating content, creating content is fine.

[00:06:04] That's creating photos, generating new tweets, Facebook posts, whatever it is. You want to make it simple, though. People don't give a lot of time and attention to every single posted they scan through or every ad that they see. So you want to make sure that if someone reads one or two sentences and sees a photo, they've digested it and they want to share it. So you want to make your content easy to take in. Creating a face post Facebook post with five different messages isn't going to make it easy for someone to take all that in. You want to keep it one message, one post. So easy to take in straight to the point. What are you trying to share? Did you just get a new endorsement? Did you hit a thousand doors this weekend? Did you make 500 phone calls? What happened? Were you at an event? Straight to the point. And finally, you want to make it easy to share or rather regurgitate. Folks love hitting that share button on Facebook, posting about a friend or a great candidate in their area. You want to give them a reason to share it by making your content simple.

[00:07:08] A little more notes on emails and about, you know, planning out what you're doing. This is a great example of a campaign email. You have a grab. In the beginning sentence, you summarize a story in the email and then you have quick links to take action. My email was state. My ActBlue page was saved.

[00:07:27] So when I got this email, I got all these quick donate buttons, whereas I can just literally quick click that link. I'm logged into ActBlue. Boom, money sent. The great advantage of using our glue is this. But super simple, someone can take action. There you go.

[00:07:45] Things to think about before you hit, send the supplies to Facebook posts, displays, tweets. This applies to email. Edit edit edit you should have an editing process. If it's you your significant other, that's fine. Make sure that everything that goes out is read by you and at least one other person. Ideally, too. It's a great project for mom and dad to help with or someone to help with on your campaign who maybe isn't quite as capable of knocking doors. With that said, if you need to go through two rounds of edits, make sure that you have a process where you have a few days leave before you need to get a lot of big things out. And if you want to do a quick response that you focus on like right there that are willing to read for you. I can't tell you how many emails I'm subscribed to, where I see typos or like something is a weird sentence. Just make sure that you read over your content. With that said, you should also read it out loud. Sometimes you might read something and it sounds fine and then you've actually read it more closely and you're like that makes no sense. So read it out loud. And then the final thing. Read it again and then ask yourself, does this email push me to take action or this post or whatever? If I read this. Am I reading it and going, oh, like I get the point, but whatever. Or Oh, I've read this. It's compelling. I'm going to donate. And Final Tips. You want to know your voice. Know who you are, what you're trying to say, and keep it consistent. You should be yourself and you should be your authentic self. There's no reason to change up who you are. For the online worlds, be who you are. I know what you're trying to accomplish. Make sure your posts have a point, a message. Even if the message is just like, look at how much fun we're having on this day. Make sure there's a point there. And finally, make it easy and simple. Digital is simple. You don't need to overcomplicate it. Keep it nice and fun.

[00:09:40] And now I think I'm going to take some questions.

[00:09:42] I have a question, especially when we're talking about the current news cycle and how everything happens on Twitter, on Facebook, especially with tweets by government officials. How do you decide when to engage and when to ignore the statements and news that is constantly breaking online on Twitter?

[00:10:02] Yeah, great question. The big thing is to focus on your campaign, right? You're running for your local office because you care about these three issues. This is what's the most important to you. If you see a tweet or a post or an article that affects your local area, your local campaign that you really feel compelled to talk about. That's a great time to engage with that and talk about it. There is so much happening in the news, though. You don't want to get your local message conflated with what's happening all the time on a national scale. Again, keeping it simple, keeping it easy is going to be important for you to have one clear message on line.

[00:10:42] So let me ask you that for a really baseline thing. How much did a campaign invest in their digital presence in a Web site? Did it be a fairly simple thing?

[00:10:53] Should it have their complicated policy propositions on there? As you to know everything about, you need to know about a person online. What's your thought?

[00:11:01] Yeah. Definitely. So when people go to a campaign Web site, the first thing they're going to do is they're going to open it up and they're gonna want to know who you are. So they're looking for like a big giant fan or photo of you. Some links to things that your bio. The issues you care about, whatever. They're not going to spend very long on your Web site, but they want it to be as you need it to be a good Web site. You want it to look professional. You want it to be really beautiful for as cheap or as expensive as you can afford in terms of your issues. Page put content on there that you want to push out to the world. If you've written 12 page policy statements that you're comfortable with the news picking up and writing about, great for them on your Web site. But that said, if you look around most campaign Web sites, people don't have that much content on there. They have what's important and necessary to them.

[00:11:52] What about you? Something on the issues and doing it?

[00:11:56] Yeah, definitely. Your bio page is really, really important. But again, no one wants to read 20 paragraphs about your background and history. Keep it simple. Keep it concise.

[00:12:09] Have you run into the next one? So how do you think online and off line? I'm a voter. How so? If someone comes to your website and says they want to volunteer or says something on Facebook or Twitter about how they want to volunteer, how do you then link that to whatever CRM you're using? Manage your photos.

[00:12:28] Yeah. Great. Great question. And a really important. This really digs into the process part. Make sure that you have a process setup for how your intake forms work. If you have a Google form to accept volunteers that you're sharing over Facebook and sending out an email, make sure that when someone clicks that form, someone is consistently checking that forum. Ideally, you get an email every time someone submits that, or if you see someone reading your Facebook posts like on your end and you see someone say, Hey, I want to volunteer immediately as fast as you can get their name, their email given added to your database. If you're using vote builder, there are easy ways to create forums to get sign ups through that put. Your online digital program allows you to get leads. It's up to you and your volunteers to follow up on those leads as fast as possible. If someone signs up on your web site to take action, like to knock doors this weekend, you want to get to them as fast as possible before they get invited to a barbecue or something else so that you lock in their time and their shift.

[00:13:33] I have one. So given the data breach scandals and in and around social media, does that or should that change any aspect of voter outreach on social media? Should you have a stated policy about how people's data is handled? Anything like that? People are just getting really sensitive.

[00:13:52] Yeah. Secondly, I think it's really important to talk about that on your sign up forms and letting people know like what you're planning to do with their data. I will also say that it's important to create secure passwords and know that everything that you post or Facebook message or do on your various channels could at any moment become public. It's a sad reality of the times we live in, but it's important to know what you should do everything you can to protect your volunteers and whoever else's data. Don't post their phone numbers in public places if they don't ask you to. Same with their email addresses. Be sensitive. These people are helping you and you want to treat them with a lot of respect.

[00:14:33] I have a question all around so around social and social, though, especially with Facebook coming, new rules about social work. What advice would you give to a small campaign about whether or not it's worth worthwhile to invest in social and how to navigate some of the new rules that social media sites are coming up with?

[00:14:57] Yeah, that's a great question for all of Facebook shortfalls. They do a really good job of explaining how their digital tools work, what's happening with them and how to best utilize them.

[00:15:09] If you're running with a small budget and you're trying to decide whether or not you should run, Kate, Facebook ads go through there. A little academy online. You can figure out so much about how the platform works and what kind of reach you can expect with it. You also should talk to friends, figure out if this is what you need and also map out your goals. Why would you be doing if Facebook program? What are you trying to get? Are you trying to get build your email list to raise grassroots dollars or are you just trying to do general awareness about your candidacy? What is it that's your goal? And use that to figure out if that money could be well spent to reach your target audience.

[00:15:45] Thank you so much for your time, Sarah.

[00:15:47] Awesome. Thank you all. Hope it's very helpful.

[00:15:50] Thank you so much. By Sarah.