A PUBLICATION OF THE CAMPAIGN WORKSHOP

Complete Guide to Digital Advocacy

in Trump’s America

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Since November 8, 2016, a new obstacle developed for progressive advocacy organizations nationwide. With a Republican controlled House, Senate, and now White House, it was a sad day for progressive advocacy campaigns and organizations to see Donald Trump become the 45th President of the United States. But each situation has a silver lining. Love or hate him, Trump has awoken a grassroots activism movement unlike any we have seen in recent years.

Here at The Campaign Workshop, we love advocacy and we know it. After election day, we immediately started writing and developing materials for advocacy organizations, small or big, local or nationwide, to resist Trump’s agenda. The game and the rules have changed. New technology, unprecedented levels of engagement, and high stakes issues have created a perfect environment for advocacy organizations to promote their message and achieve their advocacy goals with the right tools.

We have always enjoyed sharing our ideas with you, in the hopes that we can help make advocacy more accessible to progressive campaigns across the country. Every eBook, blog post, and video that we create is a team effort. A big thanks to the whole team: Sophie, Andrea, Lizzie, Elena, Tracy, and Shelley.

Please give us feedback and let us know if there are any other topics you would like to see us write about.

Happy reading,

Joe Fuld and The Campaign Workshop team

INTRO

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...................................................................................................... 2

1. Introduction to Digital Advocacy 4Goal Setting for Digital Advocacy ............................................................ 4

2. Why Creativity Online Matters 8Creativity is Key ............................................................................................... 8

Digital Advertising Doesn’t Mean Instant ............................................. 8

3. Digital Advertising — How Much Does It Cost? 10How Cheap is Digital Advertising for Advocacy? ............................. 10

Digital Advertising Tactics, Targeting and Your Budget — Which is Right for Your Campaign? ........................ 12

4. Tools for Advocacy 15Tools for Action ............................................................................................... 18

5. Is a CPA Campaign Right for Your Nonprofit or Advocacy Campaign? 22Put Cost per Acquisition to Work for Your Nonprofit Advocacy Campaign ................................................................. 22

Your CPA Campaign is Over, Now What? ............................................ 23

6. Using Social Media for Advocacy 26Facebook For Advocacy: What Are You Buying? .............................. 26

Leveraging Your Facebook Audience ..................................................... 27

ActionSprout and Facebook — Integration For Advocacy ............. 28

Twitter for Your Advocacy Campaign..................................................... 30

Snapchat and Advocacy .............................................................................. 31

7. Other Digital Strategies and Tactics 33What is Digital Programmatic Buying? .................................................. 33

Content Marketing and Your Issue ........................................................... 34

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Introduction to Digital Advocacy

Goal Setting for Digital AdvocacySetting goals early on in the development stages of your advocacy campaign is a great way to stay organized and on a path to success. Here are some important goals to keep in mind:

Primary and Secondary Goals

Frequently, organizations leave their goals implied for a digital advocacy campaign. Yes, your broad goal is probably to win, but leaving the details up for interpretation will likely mean missing out on opportunities to make long-term advances. Before you formulate your digital plan, take a 30,000-foot view and flesh out your primary and secondary goals. To do that, answer these two questions:

• Primary Goal What is the primary objective of your digital advertising campaign?

• Secondary Goals Even if you don’t win your advocacy campaign, what are the relationships and tangible assets you’d like to come away with (e.g. list growth, increased fundraising capacity, improved relationship with a decision maker, etc.)?

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

CPA campaigns are the most efficient way to grow your list, and they’re also a wonderful way to apply pressure to decision makers. In order to set goals for a CPA campaign, you need a good sense of your:

• Budget

• Geography

• Time frame

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Typically, the smaller the geographic target, the longer the acquisition campaign will need to be. A good rule of thumb is that most campaigns should allow for a minimum of 8 weeks. You should also think about the number of names you need in order to have an impact. If you simply want to grow your list, how many new names do you want to add? If you’re trying to make a statement that will get the attention of an elected official, the number of names will be different, if, for instance, you’re targeting a state representative in Montana versus a U.S. Senator from New York. Figure out how your budget, geography and timeline fit together and your goals will likely be quite clear.

Email

If you’re running a CPA program, you should also be running a regular email program to keep new (and existing) supporters engaged. This will also help you to make sure that CPA is a long-term investment rather than a short-term fix.

With both CPA and existing supporters, you should make sure that you’re sending email with a purpose. Long, over-detailed emails with no ask or multiple, disparate actions aren’t going to help you in the long run.

As you’re designing your email program, think about what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve it, and with whom.

The “What” means your asks — are you fundraising? Asking people to contact a legislator? Forward to a friend? Obviously, there may be some changes to your advocacy program as events unfold, but having a basic drumbeat established so that you understand the overall progression of your campaign will help keep you on track. That advance planning will also ensure that you can respond more nimbly when the unexpected happens.

“With whom” and “When” means that your goals should reflect your list, and that timing and list segmentation will help to increase your advocacy campaign’s success. This means you should know how people came into your list, and what actions they’ve taken. Those pieces of information should inform your planning and goals. For instance, you may want to send all new opt-ins a fundraising ask (as that first sign-up is likely the most excited a new supporter will be about your organization) and set a basic goal of $5 donations from a certain percentage of those new supporters. But, there may be other groups within your list for whom a fundraising email won’t be effective or even appropriate.

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Testing

Any digital program should have some sort of testing component so that what works and what doesn’t is backed up by more than anecdotal evidence. Ask anyone who handles an email program, and they’ll likely tell you that the most successful emails are often not the ones they would have predicted. Similarly, you can’t always predict which digital ad will yield the most clicks, and that may not correlate to the highest number of completed actions. Testing will help you to identify patterns and high-yield tactics you might otherwise miss.

It’s difficult to put new procedures in place while you’re in the thick of a campaign, so planning ahead will be helpful in terms of integrating testing into your day-to-day email activities.

Social Media

Social media is a great tool — it’s cheap compared to other mediums, it’s interactive, and it’s a great way to create an audience for your message. A lot of people come in the door saying that their goal with social media is visibility, and possibly engagement. Those are certainly important pieces of the puzzle (social media platforms are probably the cheapest and most pervasive tools you can use to plaster your advocacy campaign across the internet), but they should not be the only things you come away with.

In other words, your secondary goals are critical here. How is social media (both the paid and unpaid portions of your program) uniquely positioned to help you achieve those goals? Can strong engagements and repeated interaction help you to bring an online supporter to an offline, real-world volunteer event? Does a certain amount of social media engagement translate into an increase in the likelihood that a follower will donate? Take stock of your interactions and examine what’s driving the types of conversions you’re looking for to help optimize your plans, ads and interactions.

Digital Advertising

There are a lot of different ways to approach paid digital advertising for advocacy. Typical metrics for success include click through rate (CTR), conversion rates (e.g. petition signatures or another action that goes beyond simply clicking the ad) and impression levels. You might also be looking to increase quality site traffic (people who take the time to look through your site, take an action, etc.).

With paid digital ads, it’s important to formulate your goals with your budget in mind. For instance, if you’ve got $10,000 to spend, you’re not going to be able to saturate an entire state with your ads, or even target multiple

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legislators in their districts. You may, however, be able to run ads in highly targeted publications or choose a very narrow audience to serve ads to (e.g. running ads in a political newsletter with a high open rate among political staffers). You’re never going to be able to do everything, so it’s better to be strategic and do one or two things really well. Above all, your metrics for success and your digital strategy should track with your goals and your budget.

Website Analytics

Another important tool at your disposal is Google Analytics. It’s free for almost everyone, and it provides a wide variety of information about a site’s traffic. Digging into your site’s analytics can be illuminating, providing you with information that basic ad metrics likely won’t. For instance, you may be achieving a CTR that’s off the charts, but a look into your analytics may reveal a high bounce rate as well, meaning that you’re getting a lot of traffic, but that it’s not sticking. That may indicate that your ad’s ask doesn’t match the content on your landing page, or that most of the bounces are coming from mobile traffic and are attributable to fat finger syndrome — without a peek into your analytics, you wouldn’t necessarily know these things.

These are just a few of the things you should keep in mind when setting goals for your digital advocacy campaign.

CHAPTER 1: THE BASICS

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Creativity is KeyWhen was the last time you saw something particularly eye-catching online? We spend so much of our time online these days, for work and for play, that it’s easy for content to get lost in the shuffle.

Which is why it’s more important than ever to be creative when posting content online. From social media to digital ads, creativity is key to getting noticed and remembered.

Let’s take digital ads as an example. When you’re reading an article online or searching for something on Google, there’s a lot of content competing for your attention. Many ads will go unnoticed by the average reader. To break through the noise, it’s important to have an ad that pops out to the reader. For online display ads, this can be accomplished with the design and/or the movement of the ad. For Google text ads, it’s important to have a headline that grabs your attention, while also paying attention to the makeup of the ad to ensure that its position is high enough in the search results to get noticed.

The next time something catches your eye online, take note of it. Take a screen shot or save a link to ads that succeed in breaking through the clutter. This can become a resource for creative ideas when you’re posting online.

Digital Advertising Doesn’t Mean Instant

Fast and Instant Are Different

While it’s true that the world of digital advertising is fast-paced, and it certainly gives us information much more quickly than any other medium, banking on instantaneous traction is a good way to fall short of your goals. This is because digital advertising is not a synonym for instant. Planning ahead will give you time to really define your goals and make sure your campaign has the right components and the right timeline to achieve them.

Why Creativity Online Matters

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Where some sites, like Facebook, get ads up and running quickly with very little turnaround time, others, like Google, have an internal review process that can sometimes take a couple of business days. If you’re trying to run a digital advertising campaign that lasts a week, and you’ve only given yourself 24 hours lead time, you will end up eating into some of that run time.

What’s more, if you look at a basic graph of the progress of most digital advertising campaigns (whether you’re looking at clicks or impressions), you’ll find that the first few days or even weeks are a time for building traction (especially if you’re targeting using a matched list). In other words, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll have a high volume of clicks and conversions within the first few days of going live.

The same principal applies to Facebook likes. If you already have a wide audience for your page, advertising and increasing those numbers can indeed be a fairly quick process. If you’re starting from scratch, however, those numbers take more time to build. One of the most effective ways to advertise on Facebook is to serve ads to the friends of people who’ve liked your page. If you don’t have a critical mass of followers, those ads aren’t really an option.

That ramp up time also means that a shorter buy is less likely to give you what you want. This doesn’t mean that it’s always a bad idea to be up for just a week, but generally speaking, that’s likely to be far too little time. If you have the time to run a more protracted buy online, it’s often a good idea.

If you know that you have an important date coming in three months, and that you want to run ads around whatever that date/event is, start talking about it now — don’t wait until a week before to get the ball rolling. That lead-time will allow you to manage your time and resources in a way that will be more efficient and effective when it comes to achieving your digital advertising goals.

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How Cheap is Digital Advertising for Advocacy?

The Answer: It Depends

Per unit, digital advertising is comparatively cheap — while you may spend several hundred dollars (or more) per point on TV, your cost per thousand impressions (CPM) can be as little as a dollar or two for digital advertising. That means that digital advertising can be a fantastic way to reach out to supporters and promote your advocacy campaign when you’re working with limited dollars.

That said, cheap per unit doesn’t necessarily translate into a small price tag. While you might not have to come up with the several hundred thousand dollars (or more) that an effective TV buy may require, it doesn’t mean that you can get away with spending $5,000 on digital advertising and call it a day. There is no magic number in terms of efficacy here (and digital advocacy is scalable in a way that other mediums are not), but there are several important factors to consider before spending your resources:

• Buying in a market like New York City is going to be a very different beast than buying in, say, Sioux Falls. Does your budget reflect your market?

• A good rule of thumb is to think of what you should spend on television advertising, and apply at least 10% of that budget to your digital advertising buy. This isn’t always doable, but if you can’t meet that threshold, it’s important to at least explore whether there are other tactics that might be a better fit for your goals, or if waiting until you do have more money is a better strategic decision.

• Sometimes it’s impossible to wait for more money to roll in because that would mean dropping out of the fight. Still, there are times when other tactics can stand in while you amass the resources required for a robust digital advertising buy, and it’s important to consider that option carefully.

Digital Advertising — How Much Does It Cost?

CHAPTER THREE

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If you’re spending $2,500 here, $5,000 there without a cohesive plan tying it all together, and if you’re not spending at levels that give you the ad density you need in order to break through, digital advertising for advocacy becomes incredibly expensive, as you’re flushing money away without creating impact.

• Prices among publishers can vary greatly. Pay attention to the CPMs you’re quoted. For example, some specialty publications (i.e. newsletters that circulate primarily to people working in capitol buildings) may charge you a flat rate of $785 for a one-month placement that is estimated to yield 10,000 total views over the course of the month. While $785 isn’t a huge fee in and of itself, that breaks down to a $78.50 CPM, which is a really expensive per unit. Some publications may be worth those costs, but many won’t be. Take the time to examine the costs of your digital advertising buy and think about whether you can accomplish the same things with another publication or network that will afford you a higher number of similar quality impressions.

• How long will your budget last you in the market you’re targeting? Digital advertising is fast, but it’s not instant. If your budget will only lend your buy strong density for a few days or a week, it’s likely not going to give you the impact you’re looking for (though obviously, this point is dependent on your overall goals, context and the content of your ask).

• If resources are limited, how can you fine-tune your goal and targets in order to create scale that fits your budget? For example, your goal may be to get progressive Philadelphia residents to take an action. Instead of reaching out to all residents, maybe you layer in a voter list-matched element to your targeting in order to reach progressive Philadelphia voters and prod them to take action.

• Lastly, it’s important to ask if a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) campaign is a more efficient use of your resources. Digital advertising for advocacy can be incredibly useful, but if your goal is to create a strong group of grassroots advocates, CPA may be a cheaper, more effective method of communication (and there certainly is no more efficient way to spend dollars in pursuit of list growth).

This is a lot to think about, but in the progressive advocacy world, resources are precious. Under-spending for digital advertising campaigns can ultimately be more wasteful than impactful, which is why it’s important to remember that cheap per unit costs may still require a significant investment in order to achieve advocacy goals.

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Digital Advertising Tactics, Targeting and Your Budget — Which is Right for Your Campaign?There are many ways you can use digital advertising in your campaign. Which tactics you choose will likely depend on not only your budget (which is a large factor), but also the capacity and time you have at your disposal. If you’re running a relatively small campaign and doing most of the digital work yourself, you may not be running pre-roll ads or looking into native advertising with large sites. On the flip side, if you’re running a large, yearlong advocacy campaign and have the resources and ability to hire a firm to run your campaign for you, you’re in a different boat.

Below we have listed out a variety of tactics you can use online and how they might fit into your budget.

Audience and Behavioral Targeting

Using third party data points, you can target people based on their demographic and behavioral traits. If you know your target audience is made up of women, age 45+, who are likely voters, you can use this type of targeting to reach them. This is a relatively inexpensive tactic to add and most vendors you will work with can accommodate this. It’s also generally available (in one form or another) in many self-serve platforms out there.

Pre-Roll

Pre-roll ad buys will really help make an emotional connection with your targets. If you have the budget to invest in creating video assets (or are already planning to be up on TV), adding pre-roll is a no-brainer. As with other types of ads, pre-roll can be targeted in a variety of ways — by geography, by voter, and other methods listed here. They’re also a great way to get cheaper, more micro-targeted video exposure than television, though quality pre-roll CPMs are definitely a bigger investment than standard display.

Unique ID and Cookie Targeting

Whether you’re running a political campaign or doing issue advocacy work, direct, list-matched targeting is really becoming the norm for digital campaigns. With Voterfile 2.0, you are able to use segments of the voter file to target your ads to specific voters. This can be used across a variety of vendors and platforms and with a variety of creative units. You can also run matches against member lists (though we’d recommend layering in voter targeted lists as well in order to ensure you’re targeting people who are likely advocates). Just remember, list matching

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requires some additional lead-time (build in a week to be safe) and a significant target universe (you’re likely to get about a 50-60% match rate, so your targeted universe will be smaller than your initial list) in order to work well.

Lookalike Modeling

In cases where your universe meets the threshold for a list-match, but isn’t as robust as you’d like, lookalike modeling is a great way to bolster your targeting. Essentially, providers build a model to find additional online users who look and act (digitally speaking) like the targets on your original list. What’s more, if there’s a specific population you know you definitely don’t want to communicate with, you can layer in a suppression file to help keep those people out of the modeled universe.

Mobile Geo-fencing

Geo-fencing allows you to choose a particular geographic location and serve ads to people who fall within a certain distance of that location (generally a minimum 1 to 5 mile radius). This type of mobile advertising can be incredibly useful if you want to reach people who are, say, at a rally or who frequent a particular place, like a job site. Geo-fencing can also be a great way to stretch a limited budget if you’ve got a very specific set of targets. For instance, if you know you really just want to reach legislative staffers and key decision-makers, you could target a state capitol complex and the district offices of lawmakers.

Re-targeting

Re-targeting allows you to serve ads to people who have visited your site. This puts them back into your funnel by serving ads that are related to the content they were just served, and helps increase the likelihood that they will complete actions on your site. We recommend using re-targeting with most digital campaigns, as it is a cost-effective and easy way to engage supporters, but it does take time to build a retargeting list.

Native Advertising

Native ads come in a variety of forms, but are essentially a type of ad that fits into the content of the media where the ads are being placed. In other words, it may take the form of a sponsored editorial on a news site, or promoted content in the sidebar based on the content of an article someone is reading. These ads can work well when you are trying to create and steer a conversation while boosting your campaign’s visibility and credibility. Native

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advertising isn’t cheap and it requires a significant investment in long-term planning. Broadly speaking, this tactic comes with a minimum investment of around $30,000 and a few months time.

List Acquisition

In addition to communicating your message to a custom-targeted audience with paid advertising, you can also build a list acquisition strategy into your campaign. This allows you to use email — one of the most effective and least expensive online advocacy tools — to communicate to a list of new supporters about the importance of your issues. There are many list acquisition tools out there, both free and paid. With a free option, you may not have as much control over the look and feel of your petition. Paid options allow you to target your petitions geographically and, in some cases, demographically as well. Using one or both of these options will help you build your email list to your benefit.

Social Media Strategy

Social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter provide campaigns with a quick, economical and effective way to communicate with supporters in real-time. In addition to creating a presence on these sites, you can also utilize them for paid advertising. Facebook and Twitter are great because you can use them with a variety of budgets (they’re comparatively cheap) and they come with a lot of the more sophisticated targeting tools than those available on other platforms. Social media sites are also unique in that a lot of their targeting capability is based on self-reported data, rather than appending commercial data to a file.

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Tools for Action In the current political climate, it’s more important than ever to find an audience of action takers for advocacy campaigns. Fortunately, we also have more digital advocacy tools than ever to help achieve that goal. We’ve put together a list of tools that you can add to your advocacy websites to make it easier for your supporters to complete an action (from simply signing a petition to creating a video message for their legislator). These digital advocacy tools also make it easier for you to track action takers and identify leaders based on their level of engagement.

Hustle

Hustle is a tool that helps you to reach large groups of voters by sending your tailored communication straight to their phone. It is much faster than phone calls because it allows you to text dozens of voters one after another very quickly, allowing you to maximize your time and reach more of your voters.

Hustle is the perfect tool for campaigns because your can use cell phone numbers for two separate and unique touches, a phone call and a text message. Plus the best part is that the user does not even know that you are using Hustle because the text message gives no indication of the program. If someone responds to the message, the program is set up to reply back to them as if a person is responding.

Phone2Action

Phone2Action is another digital advocacy tool to help supporters connect with their legislators while providing you with data on those connections. Advocates who visit your site are matched to their legislators and then have the option to send emails, phone messages, texts, tweets, and Facebook posts with the push of a button. You can create custom messages for those supporters to send to legislators, as well as track all the actions your supporters take through Phone2Action.

NGP VAN Action Center

NGP VAN has a suite of tools that provide peer-to-peer recruiting and social pressure that is integrated with the voter file. Members of a supporter’s inner

Tools for Advocacy

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circle of friends and family can be matched to the voter file through Facebook so that supporter can reach out personally to recruit more supporters or solicit other actions. The system can also track specific tasks and award points in a leaderboard to incentivize actions and highlight high-performing supporters.

VoterCircle

VoterCircle is a grassroots digital advocacy tool that elevates friend-to-friend contact over traditional campaign-to-voter contact to make messaging effective on any budget. The point of the platform is to leverage the power of personal networks by getting friends to mobilize one another to action.

The tool has a unique automated voter mapping feature that allows supporters to figure out which of their friends are registered to vote in their district. From there, that individual can use the platform to reach out to those friends with personalized messages. VoterCircle touts a 30-40% increase in turnout among unlikely voters who are mobilized via email from their friends.

ActionSprout

ActionSprout is a digital advocacy tool that works within the Facebook environment so your audience members can use their Facebook credentials to sign actions without having to leave Facebook to sign up for a featured petition (hosted as a tab within your Facebook page). ActionSprout is also a great way to gather inspiration for curated content, as you can follow other organizations and ActionSprout will provide you with performance metrics for those pages’ posts. Lastly, it’s a digital advocacy tool that will allow you to track individual users’ engagement over time, which will help you to identify your most committed Facebook supporters.

When Facebook users see your petition on Facebook, they can sign the action with the click of a button, so there’s a lower bar for conversion overall. ActionSprout will also track your Facebook posts and email you when a post is performing well. On your end, this will help you determine which posts could be leveraged for more sign ups and what content resonates best with your audience.

Progressives will be in a long-haul advocacy fight for the foreseeable future. Make sure you’re getting the most out of your supporters with the latest digital advocacy tools. If you’re interested in learning about more tools you can use, check out our picks for the 100 best political and advocacy campaign tools here!

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Sourcing Great Trump Images Without Breaking the Bank

Obviously, photos of Trump abound on the interwebs. The key is making sure that you’re using the photos in a way that doesn’t violate a license and end up costing you down the road. First, never ever just pull an image from a Google image search without figuring out where it came from. Simply including an attribution won’t mean you’re in compliance and protected. Second, if you have a lawyer on staff, double check with them regarding their recommendations for sourcing photos of Trump while complying with licensing requirements.

My first stop for photos of Trump is Creative Commons. It’s a great search tool that will pull options from across a variety of platforms (from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons to YouTube) and has a simple license structure that makes content simple to use, adapt and share as allowed.

One of our favorite Flickr sources for photos of Trump is Gage Skidmore’s account (you’ll also find all sorts of other politicians there as well). We’ve also had luck with Michael Vadon’s Flickr account. Again, make sure you’re checking the license associated with any photos you want to use to make sure you’re following the letter of the law.

Alternately, you can look for public domain photos of Trump. Photos that are paid for using taxpayer dollars are considered to fall into this category. This means that official White House photography is generally up for grabs (though this gets a bit more complicated if you’re using photos for purposes related to electoral work).

At the end of the day, finding great photos of Trump that won’t break the bank will take some time, but it’s well worth it, in terms of creating quality communications materials and preserving precious resources. So get searching and then have some fun in Canva! Canva is a web-based platform that helps you create great custom graphics, even if you don’t have any design experience. We have fallen in love with this extremely useful tool. It’s perfect to create slides for PowerPoints and images for social media.

Political Data — don’t let perfect be the enemy of effective

One of the biggest benefits digital advertising can bring to a campaign is data. Unlike TV and mail, you can hone in on your targets, pay attention to metrics mid-campaign and adjust as necessary, and analyze what worked and what didn’t when the campaign is over. In the past few election cycles, using that political data to micro-target has become increasingly popular. And with good reason. The ability to serve ads to the same list of voters that you are sending mail to, knocking on doors, and calling on the phone is incredibly valuable to your political campaign. You can amplify your message and create continuity between your digital advertising and other communication methods.

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However, there is a fine line between getting too targeted and casting a wide net. Many campaigns, regardless of size and scope, are hoping to use a very specific list of voters to serve digital ads to. What is important to keep in mind with digital advertising, is that even if you are matching a list to first party data rather than cookies, your match rate will never reach 100%. Often, it will be in the 30-50% range (and that’s a good match). This means that your original list of 100,000 people has now shrunk to 33,000 — 50,000. And that smaller pool of people is not identifiable to the individual level due to privacy laws. An issue you may run into is narrowing your audience too much and missing a large swath of potential targets because they do not necessarily fit within your list of matched online profiles.

Outside of first-party political data lists, there is a ton of data that is available for digital advertising. You can create an audience based on consumer history, education level, demographics, household income, location and much more. We have found the most successful campaigns use a mixture of first-party political data and third-party data to reach a wider audience (especially when the target area is small). This mixture of data is integral in a digital strategy so that you aren’t leaving a good portion of your audience on the table.

Finding the right balance when it comes to targeting for digital advertising can be tricky, but it’s worth putting in the extra time and thought to make sure your ads are being seen by the right people.

List Building and CPA

When Donald Trump won the election in 2016, a wave of social activism took over the country and has been building ever since. People are taking to the streets and protesting on an almost weekly basis. Many advocacy organizations are using this energy to gain supporters and donations.

For a long time, advocacy organizations and non-profits have been using online petitions as a tool to gain followers. These can be incredibly powerful as they allow organizations to gain highly engaged followers by way of the user signing on to petition a group or person. The follower gets to take a stand on an issue they care about, and the organization gains a new supporter who is more likely to take further action or give money in the future.

It is important to note that signing an online petition doesn’t always lead to on the ground action. When your organization is looking for ways to engage your supporter base, having a clear goal in mind is key. If you are looking to build up your list so you can go to those supporters down the line to ask for donations or to contact their legislators, petitions are likely the right choice. If you’re looking to get people on the ground to protest and take advantage of a social movement that has an expiration date, an online petition won’t necessarily help you.

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In the case of action, using more organic grassroots organizing tools can help you get the results you’ll need. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can help mobilize people. Having volunteers call, text and knock on doors is another way to mobilize. Timing is also key when looking to capitalize on a moment. If climate change is in the news a lot lately, that’s a good time for your environmental organization to take charge and really own the conversation. Run paid social ads, get people to protest at the White House, create a hashtag and really go all in.

Online petitions are great tools for organizations to use, but they do not equal action, and it’s important to be deliberate in your goals and intentions for your organization.

List building Best Practices for Advocacy

List building is extremely important for advocacy. The new supporters you add to your email list are people you’ll be able to turn to for donations, actions (e.g. calling a legislator), volunteering, and more. With progressives across the country fired up and ready to resist Trump’s agenda, there’s never been a better time to activate and engage with new supporters. So take the time to build relationships and invest in your advocacy campaign’s email list to reach the folks you can mobilize to make a difference for your cause.

The traditional CPA model adds supporters to your email list by prompting them to take an action on your behalf (often by signing a petition of some sort). At first glance, spending $2.50 per name (or thereabouts) may make it seem like CPA comes with a hefty price tag compared to a regular CPM rate, but you’re often paying for higher conversion rates and lower rates of post-action list churn. When a platform like Care2 hosts a petition for your organization, you can expect anywhere from 10-25% of leads to convert with an action (which is much higher than you’ll likely see with a run of the mill conversion campaign on your own website). What’s more, about 50% of those who participate in an action will opt in to receive more information from your group.

That said, the CPA landscape has undergone significant changes recently. These shifts in the market have made zip code and legislative district targeting more difficult than they used to be for smaller scale advocacy campaigns. Factors like population size and the partisan makeup of geos have also made the traditional CPA model trickier to navigate. As a result, alternative providers such as Daily Kos have been working to increase their inventory to meet the needs of smaller scale campaigns. At the same time, other ways to back into list building through the CPM model have become more common as well. For instance, you can use Facebook to host ads linked to petitions on ActionSprout to list build. While CPM-based options don’t allow for certain

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quality controls you’ll see in traditional CPA (chief among them the ability to use a suppression file), they do offer a viable alternative if your program doesn’t fit within the constraints of a traditional CPA campaign.

When deciding whether to pursue a CPA campaign of any kind, there are a few questions to ask before you dive in:

1. Does your budget allow traditional CPA to be a realistic addition to your efforts?

2. How much time do you have to list build?

3. How narrow are you looking to get with your targeting?

4. Does your organization have the capacity to do the follow-up necessary to make this a long-term investment?

Our best practices for CPA below will dive into these questions to help ensure you’re getting the best possible supporters and doing so in the best possible way.

Never, ever buy a list

Buying an email list may seem like a fast and easy way to build support for your advocacy group, but it’s almost always a bad idea. First of all, the people on a list you buy haven’t opted in to receive emails from you (email list purveyors use a passive opt-in method that is sneaky at best). They may not even know what your organization is or be a supporter of your cause. This will lead to a high unsubscribe rate. Second, most bulk email systems (the good ones) will not allow purchased lists to be uploaded into their systems. This it to prevent spam. Don’t be a spammer! With Trump as president, plenty of people will be energized about getting involved and taking action on behalf of causes like yours — find those people rather than wasting time and money on the wrong audience.

Leave enough time

If you’re devoting resources to list building, make sure you have enough time to do it right. A good rule of thumb is to devote 8 to 12 weeks or more to a CPA campaign. This accounts for the time it will take for your campaign to ramp up — you won’t meet your supporter goal overnight. And don’t forget, timeline is context dependent. Rural list-building is not the same as fishing for supporters in a densely populated city or state. Plan ahead.

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Know the geo

Make sure you know what kind of geotargeting your advocacy campaign needs in order to be successful at list building. It’s much easier to target entire states or large metropolitan areas than it is to target specific legislative districts or zip codes. Be sure to know where you want your new supporters to come from before investing in CPA.

Always opt-in (or opt-out)

When you add people to your list, you should always have a way for them to say, “Yes! I want to receive emails from you,” as well as a way for them to opt-out of receiving those emails should they not want additional communication from you. This helps make sure you’re getting real supporters and, again, that you’re not sending spam.

Update your database regularly

Make sure you go through your database and update it regularly. If people have sent you an email requesting to be unsubscribed, make sure that is happening in conjunction with an automatic unsubscribe through your mail system. Accurate, up to date records are the keys to developing a quality list.

Track your action-takers

Knowing how someone entered your list (e.g. a paid petition for Trump to stop spending taxpayer dollars on Mar-A-Lago trips via Care2) and the subsequent actions they have (or have not) taken will tell you a lot about who your supporters are and the value of a particular method of acquisition. This will help you to spend your acquisition dollars more efficiently in the long-term.

Encourage more list growth

Keep list building in whatever capacity you can. Don’t stop! Ask your current list to recruit their friends and family. Send out emails with actions they can take (signing petitions, etc.). Ask for money. Keeping your list engaged will mean you have an active audience and will help you continue to grow.

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Put Cost per Acquisition to Work for Your Nonprofit Advocacy CampaignBuilding a strong list of supporters is an important step for any advocacy campaign, and one that should not be ignored. You will be able to go to these supporters for a variety of help — volunteering, getting out the vote, donations, and more. There are many ways to build a list of supporters, but the fastest, most cost-effective way to do it is through a cost per acquisition or CPA campaign.

Unlike traditional digital advertising, a CPA campaign adds people to your list by having them take an action on your behalf (often signing a petition of some sort). At first glance, spending $2.50 per name (or thereabouts) may seem like CPA comes with a hefty price tag compared to a regular CPM rate, but your conversion rates through a platform like Care2 are likely to fall in the 9-12% range, which is much higher than you’ll likely see with a run of the mill conversion campaign on your website. What’s more, those sites generally guarantee a certain number of sign ups, and they’re fishing in a self-selected pool of advocates who are generally more likely to take subsequent actions than your average online signer.

Increasingly, CPA vendors are offering more advanced targeting, which is a huge asset. Not only are you able to target by state, but with some vendors, you are able to target down to the zip code. Some of this does depend on geography and population density, however, so targeting a single zip code in New York City is likely much easier than targeting a single zip in rural Georgia.

When deciding whether to pursue a CPA campaign, there are a few questions to ask before you dive in.

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1. Look at your budget to make sure it’s a realistic addition to your efforts.

2. It’s also important to look at the timing of your campaign. If you’re trying to put together a CPA campaign a few weeks out from an election or an important vote, you may not see the return you are hoping for. Generally, you should try to give yourself a minimum of 8 weeks to carry out a full CPA campaign.

You will also need to make sure you have the capacity to follow up with your supporters. You may be able to add 5,000 new supporters to your list, but in order to really engage new supporters and build a long-term relationship, you have to communicate with them regularly. This usually includes a welcome message within a week of adding names to your list, as well as follow-up emails at a regular interval to make sure they stay active and on your list.

Your CPA Campaign is Over, Now What?

CPA Campaigns Don’t End with Reaching Your Supporter Goals

Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) campaigns are a great way to build your list while demonstrating public support for your advocacy campaign. But once the dust settles and you’ve reached your signature goals, what do you do?

No matter what, you should expect some list churn — it’s just part of the process of managing a supporter list. That said, if you don’t do anything, I guarantee that you’re going to lose more people than you’d like. There are a host of things you can do, both short, and long-term, that will keep your new supporters active and engaged.

Timely Welcome Emails

The key word here is “timely.” Most CPA campaigns receive new supporter deliveries once a week (though you can usually set frequency of delivery with your vendor). You should be sending your welcome emails at that pace as well. The longer you wait to welcome people to your list, the more likely it is that they’ll have forgotten they signed up in the first place. Let them know how they came to be on your list, why it’s important, and what they can do moving forward.

Fundraise Right Away

If fundraising is a part of your advocacy goals, the best time to do it is right after someone has signed up — they’re never going to be more excited about your organization and cause than when they’ve just completed an action on your behalf.

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Cut to the Chase

Your emails should not be tomes. Keep the word count under 250 (extra points for keeping it under 150).

Provide an Action

The supporters you have gained from your CPA campaign come from a pool of self-selected Internet dwellers who are generally more likely to take action — let them do what they love. There’s a fine line here though, as you don’t want to clog their inbox (or the email itself) with asks. Your email program and the accompanying actions should be planned in advance and should create a sense that your emails are important and deserve to be opened.

Create Sender Trust

The person sending and signing these emails is important. You don’t have to send every email from the president of your nonprofit. Instead, think carefully about who is communicating with your list and how you can cultivate a voice for that sender.

Make a Plan!

All of the above will be much easier if you write out a basic plan for your email program, including a calendar for your emails and actions. Obviously, this will be a fluid document that accounts for unforeseen news events and anything else that comes up. But having a basic roadmap will dramatically increase the viability and success of your post-CPA list.

Track Performance Over Time

You should know how people enter your list, including if they’ve come from a CPA campaign. Tracking their actions over time will give you a better picture of who your advocates are, what helps to keep them engaged, and of course, how well your CPA dollars have performed as an investment.

Advocacy Email Post

Email is a powerful tool for many groups and organizations and when used for advocacy, can amplify your message in a positive way. As you are probably well aware, these days everyone uses email for both work and personal use, so communicating with your supporters this way is a logical choice. Email is fast, efficient and relatively cheap. You are also able to link your supporters to their legislators and other influentials, as well as provide them with an easy way to take action and donate.

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When you are crafting your email program, it’s important to take a look at the overall goals and strategy of your campaign. If you are looking to introduce legislation, you will want your supporters to contact their legislators to influence decisions. If your organization works better in the field and you need money to make that happen, your emails will be focused on fundraising. Email strategy should be part and parcel to your strategy as a whole so everything can work together.

As an advocacy campaign, there are likely two main objectives you’ll have when sending emails to your supporters: taking action and donating. For donations, it’s important to keep emails simple and clear. Make the ask direct and compelling and make sure the link is near the top of the email and easy to use. Nothing is worse than when you are trying to give an organization money and the link you’re sent is broken or hard to navigate. Or worse, it’s not mobile-friendly. Make sure you’re testing all the aspects of your email thoroughly so your supporters have an easy time giving you money!

Asking supporters to take action on your behalf is a relatively easy lift, as long as you make it seamless. Make sure you are using systems that connect constituents directly and easily to their legislators. There are both free and paid options for this. Sometimes you want your supporters to rally on your behalf in person. This may be a bigger lift, but with email you can make it as easy as possible. Include calendar links so supporters will have a reminder. Make it easy to share with friends and family on social media sites. All of these options and tools are easy to add to an email you send out to your list and will result in a stronger turnout for your cause. One of the greatest aspects of using email is all of the testing you can do and personalization you can include. Regardless of your list size, you can test things like subject lines, images, different hooks, and calls to action. These could easily translate into more support or more money for your organization. Testing with email can be incredibly simple and is free, so take advantage of it! Segmenting your list is a great way to make your emails more personal for your audience. If people on your list are giving $100 or more, they might not respond as well to your asks for $2,500. On the other hand, if people are activists, but not yet donors, you may want to craft their email messages to encourage them to donate. There are a ton of different ways you can segment your list, and it’s another free tool you’ll have at your disposal.

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Facebook For Advocacy: What Are You Buying?

Facebook for Advocacy Campaigns, What’s in a Like?

Here is the pitch when it comes to using Facebook for advocacy and politics: “Facebook advertising is great because it’s cheap, and it runs on a platform that a huge number of people use on a daily basis. Using Facebook for advocacy campaigns has the potential to capture the attention of a huge number of viewers with a particular message, and what’s more, turn those viewers into an audience with conversions through page likes.”

So far, Facebook for advocacy sounds fantastic — the panacea for all online advocacy efforts. But a Facebook for advocacy campaign is really only a great remedy if your goal is cheap visibility, and you see page likes as intrinsically valuable in and of themselves, to your advocacy campaign.

The first question to ask: does a Facebook for advocacy campaign fit your advocacy goals? If your goal is visibility, Facebook may be a great option for your advocacy campaign. That said, we would generally caution against visibility as a standalone goal, as it’s incredibly broad and doesn’t carry with it a concrete return that furthers your campaign (read: visibility alone doesn’t return tangible assets). What does visibility do to advance your campaign? If the answer is, “It gets us visibility,” think long and hard about what that really means.

If your goal is to put pressure on an elected official to take a particular action, you should also ask yourself how much pressure your advocacy campaign can exert via Facebook. Often, the answer to that question is very little. One of the challenges of Facebook for advocacy or other campaigns is getting people to act outside of the Facebook cosmos (and indeed, within it, beyond a like).

There are certainly always new ways to put the Facebook network to work, à la NGP VAN’s Social Organizing Tool, but that’s a strategy that uses likes as a means to an end, rather than an end goal. That’s also a strategy that would

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require additional budget, beyond advertising costs. If your Facebook for advocacy advertising plan and budget do not account for how you’re going to move people to take action, it’s probably beneficial to think of other, more direct ways to exert the pressure you need.

At the end of the day, the advocacy benefits of a platform like Facebook are still evolving. Facebook is cheap and has incredible reach and shouldn’t be discounted as an asset when it comes to building an advocacy campaign (including as a cheaper way to increase the reach of video content), but its use should always be weighed against other methods within the context of a clear and concrete goal.

Leveraging Your Facebook Audience

How to Grow Your Email List from Your Facebook Followers

What’s all the rage right now? Leveraging your Facebook audience to grow your email list. A well-targeted Facebook campaign can obtain “Likes” at a fraction of the cost of running traditional digital ads.

Facebook gives you an invaluable opportunity to turn followers into voters, volunteers, or even donors. Obtaining a Facebook “Like” and converting that Facebook follower into an email subscriber can save you thousands on large-scale digital advertising. Here at The Campaign Workshop, we are always looking for fun, new and effective ways to engage your Facebook audience beyond serving them straightforward Facebook ads.

Here are a few ways that you can convert your Facebook followers into email subscribers:

Online petitions

We have all likely signed a petition to save the puppies (or the kittens, if you’re a cat person). But in all seriousness, online petitions are a great way to engage your Facebook audience and highlight issues you and your organization are fighting for.

Cards

This is a fun way to get people to provide their email address. Simply offer up a “Sign [Insert Figurehead for Your Cause’s Name]’s Birthday Card,” or “Tell [Insert Name], ‘Thank You for standing up for our families.’” These kinds of cards give you a chance to leverage everyday goings-on as a means to engage your followers in your campaign.

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Splash pages/Standard sign-up

Adding a splash page or a sign-up field to your Facebook page is a simple and free way to give your followers the option to sign up for your email list when they visit your page. These people are already taking the initiative to get information about you, so it should be no surprise that they are also more than likely to sign up if prompted.

Incentive sign-ups

People really like getting free things, but as we all know, nothing is ever actually free when you’re running a campaign. In the end, this means that most people will give you their email for a “free” sticker, a yard sign, or a chance for a photo opportunity with you or a well-known person at your next event. Make sure you balance the utility of adding names to your list against the cost of these freebies (remember, chum doesn’t vote, nor does it make phone calls to targeted legislators!).

Event sign-ups

Get your Facebook friends to commit to attending an actual event like a phone bank, lobby day or coffee with the candidate session. If you get them to show up for something, you are successfully building a relationship, which you can continue to engage offline.

Now, not all of these will necessarily work for your advocacy campaign, but you can still have fun testing some of these strategies (and others — don’t be afraid to get creative) on your Facebook page to see which work best with your audience.

ActionSprout and Facebook — Integration For AdvocacyWe’ve written a lot on our blog about how your Facebook presence should go beyond looking for likes. Digital advocacy is about engagement and capacity building—likes are just a starting point. Over the last few years, Facebook’s algorithm has evolved, as has its advertising options, making it easier than ever to capitalize on the audience you’ll find there and turn likes into actions that advance your advocacy goals.

One of the best ways we’ve found to help take clients’ Facebook programs to the next level is to integrate ActionSprout into the picture. Digital advocacy works best when you can reach people across multiple platforms. ActionSprout will help you turn Facebook followers into email subscribers and

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action takers with the click of a button. What’s more, it offers helpful tools designed to maximize your Facebook presence and engage your supporters.

Petitions and Pledges

ActionSprout works within the Facebook environment so your audience members can use their Facebook credentials to sign actions, and they won’t have to leave Facebook to sign up for a featured petition (hosted as a tab within your Facebook page as well as via its own URL). When Facebook users see your petition on Facebook, they can sign the action with the click of a button, so there’s a lower bar for conversion overall.

We find that the best way to really drive traffic to these sorts of petitions is a combination of organic promotion and paid Facebook conversion ads. To run the ads effectively, you’ll need the $99 per month Gold ActionSprout account, which will allow you to place a pixel on the petition to track conversions and help optimize your campaign.

Curated Content

A successful digital advocacy strategy on Facebook hinges on people seeing your content and engaging with your organization. But it’s increasingly difficult to stand out in the Facebook newsfeed. What you post on Facebook does not automatically show up in the newsfeeds of your followers. Facebook simply doesn’t show every user every post. Some articles estimate that about 5% of your fans will get any one post in their newsfeed. If they don’t see or don’t interact with your post, future posts are even less likely to be distributed/pushed to the top of someone’s feed. What’s more, in June, Facebook announced that it would be prioritizing posts from friends and families. All of this means that to gain traction, you have to post regularly and multiple times per day. Most organizations don’t have the capacity to create unique, original content multiple times per day — this is why curated content is so important. Best-practices for an active Facebook page suggest posting 2-4 times per day with an 80/20 ration of curated to original content (obviously, this can shift if you have more capacity).

This is where ActionSprout is really useful. You can follow similar organizations and ActionSprout will automatically collect their posts that are top-performers, allowing you to share content that you already know has been successful. It will also tell you which of your own posts are performing well (and by how much, comparatively speaking) so that you can analyze what works and build that into your overall strategy.

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Track Action-Takers

Lastly, integrating ActionSprout with your Facebook page can help you track individual action-takers within the Facebook ecosystem. Knowing who is doing what and the frequency with which they’re engaging is an important part of any digital advocacy program. Keeping an eye on which of your followers are engaging and how they’re doing it will help you to identify people who may be ready to take offline action, as well as providing you with a roadmap for the types of Facebook engagement that work and where you may need to invest more time and effort in order to show improvement.

Have questions about adding an ActionSprout integration to your Facebook presence for your digital advocacy efforts? Feel free to reach out.

Twitter for Your Advocacy Campaign

Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter.

The simple concept of Twitter is to post short thoughts- 140 character thoughts to be exact. In a just a sentence or two, millions of people worldwide (310 million monthly active users) engage in conversations, find information, and express their feelings on a multitude of relevant topics. Whether it be a large event like a presidential debate, or a local issue like a ballot measure, Twitter has become an increasingly significant social media platform for political and advocacy campaigns.

Twitter is a unique platform in that it is a constant stream of live, mostly public thoughts or conversations. Think of it as a digital Town Hall- it allows all voices to be heard, organizes how these voices are heard, and most importantly it offers lawmakers or influencers a platform to listen and engage. Through hashtags, Twitter allows users to hyperlink keywords that pertain to a certain topic. Hashtags organize thoughts; they lead to the discovery of information, conversations, concerns, and feelings surrounding an issue. Successful advocacy campaigns tend to have a hashtag and it’s a powerful tool. Some great examples are #BringBackOurGirls, #WhyIStayed, #LoveWins, and #Ferguson.

Twitter for Advocacy Best Practices:

A central part of an advocacy campaign is garnering that grassroots momentum to induce change in a community, town, state, nation, or the entire world. Understanding what Twitter has to offer in your advocacy campaign is essential to overall strategy. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when using Twitter for advocacy.

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1. Relevancy is Key- The best and the worst part of Twitter for advocacy is the importance of staying relevant. Strong campaign targeting through ads, targeting keywords, and staying on top of your tweet game is critical. Most well known twitter accounts tweet at least 2-3 times a day.

2. Optimize your Tweets- optimizing for a social media platform you are using is a given when expanding efforts of engagement. Twitter rewards tweets that include an image or video; the platform is integrated to bring those tweets to the forefront of a user’s timeline. Include hashtags. Specifically, provide a hashtag that will be used as the keyword surrounding your advocacy issue so people can organize their thoughts and find information.

3. Be Authentic- Tweets that appear scripted tend to be sidelined for tweets that are authentic and show the true voice of a campaign.

Although there are plenty of best practices to use for Twitter, it’s important to remember that Twitter is constantly changing. Keeping up with Twitter and its updates is the most important best practice for your campaign to follow!

Snapchat and Advocacy

Why Snapchat is a valuable advocacy tool:

Snapchat has created a new way to have conversations — from consuming content and messages to creating and broadcasting it. Through Snapchat, conversations are held in video and picture form rather than through texts, messages, posts, or speech; making Snapchat not only a creative way to get your political and advocacy campaign’s message out, but a new way to communicate it to a specific group of people. In just the past year, Snapchat’s daily views and users have grown over 400%. Per day, the average number of video or picture views can be anywhere over 10 billion (surpassing Facebook’s 8 billion daily video views) by the 150 million users (surpassing Twitter by 10 million users).

Although Snapchat filters are the main way to reach a lot of individuals, it will specifically help engage a younger user group. Millennial’s account for 7 out of 10 Snapchat users, and around 60% of all users are between 18-34 years old. This makes Snapchat a unique digital tool to reach a growing and important demographic.

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Snapchat for Advocacy:

One of the best aspects of Snapchat is the ability to engage a younger demographic of people to jumpstart their involvement in the advocacy campaign your organization is conducting. Snapchat is easy, it’s accessible, and most importantly it’s relatable. Think of it as the digital yard sign. Creating a Snapchat account and live-snapping a protest, a conference, or taking pictures of a recent volunteer event and sharing them through a direct communication method is a unique way to reach a new base of people, and keep them engaged. Further, geo-fencing a legislative district or state capitol with a unique filter that showcases or highlights your issue can be an effective way to spread your message to key targets.

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What Is Digital Programmatic Buying?

Programmatic Buying Helps You Find the Right People, Wherever They Are

There is a lot of talk these days about programmatic buying and how digital advertisers will be moving to it whole-scale going forward. But what does programmatic buying mean exactly? We’re here to help.

In the past, digital buying was done in a similar fashion to broadcast buying, where specific publications were contacted directly and ad space was purchased on a publication-by-publication basis. Programmatic buying is a term used to describe the automation of the buying process we use today and the move away from purchasing inventory for a specific publication.

These days, we are able to use a wealth of information to help target ads to the right people. With cookie matching and 3rd party data, we can ensure that ads are reaching our intended audience wherever they are online. This means that purchasing ad space on a specific blog or publication isn’t always the best way to reach your audience. Having an automated way to buy media means that we can buy more efficiently and more effectively, finding users wherever they are online.

In addition to automating the buying portion of a digital campaign, we can use a programmatic buying model for the creative and messaging portion of campaigns. This means that we can use multiple iterations of content and messages within one campaign, and ad servers automatically optimize for the creative and messaging that performs best.

All of this means that we can use programmatic buying to create and serve more effective and efficient campaign through digital than ever before. As the landscape continues to change and evolve, we continue to stay on top of trends in order to deliver the best product to our clients.

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Content Marketing and Your Issue Getting your issue out organically through blog posts, videos and infographics might seem like a heavy lift, but most organizations are publishing all the time. The big issues organizations have, are harnessing the content they already produce. Most of the time you don’t even know what different parts of your organization are publishing. A true content marketing strategy is when all parts of your organization come together focused on publishing content promoting their key issues and using the right language to describe it.

A cross-department problem:

Content marketing is a challenging for organizations large and small because the content is created across departments and therefore it is useful to build a process to organize it. A universal content calendar (CoSchedule, Teamup, HubSpot) is a great tool to do exactly that.

You need to change the way you write.

Folks have developed bad writing habits over the years, and they don’t understand the new reality of non-profit communications.

Research your issue.

Understand how many people search for your issue and how they phrase the issue. The actual way they talk about the issue is more important than the way you say it. Most of the time the way groups discuss their issue is not how people search for it. To be effective with content marketing you need to talk about the issue in a way that it is easily found.

How can you create real engagement and conversions around your issue?

Think about what a good action for your cause would be. Is it writing a check? Calling a lawmaker? Volunteering time? What is a call to action that will get folks to complete an action? Remember to create urgency and to ask for action at the beginning, middle, and end of the post.

How do you talk about your issue?

Proactively answering questions that folks have about your issue, sitting your team down, asking them what are the most typical question clients ask, or answering what you want clients to know about what you do is a great way to build content.

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How do folks find what you say?

By researching keywords that people search for around your issues and writing content around those keywords, you will be able to show up in Google searches.

How often do I need to write?

If you want to build engagement for the long term, you will need to publish at least three times per week. Posts can be a mix of video and written content.

How tough is my issue to rank for?

It may be tough to rank for, but that should not matter if it is an issue that you write a ton about. You will eventually rank for it if your site has a following, credibility, and you engage on the issue.

The power of video and storytelling

Video story telling is an “it” topic in advocacy and advertising circles. How you deliver a story in the digital age that gets folks to engage seems to be the latest goal for many nonprofits. But how can you do it in a consistent, scalable way that achieves your goals? Here are our tips to make an impact with advocacy video storytelling:

Video matters now more than ever.

For nonprofits and anyone trying to stand out in the digital world, written content is just not enough anymore. Video content has an emotional advantage over written content, and it gets higher engagement levels.

Can really you do it?

Yes, you can. For advocacy video storytelling, planning is important. Understanding the message you want to get across in video and building a script could be as easy as taking your highest viewed blog post and converting it into a video, or listing five questions and getting someone to answer them.

Message Matters.

The real power of advocacy video storytelling lies in the message delivered with emotion. Video allows you to bring emotional content to life in a way that is hard to do with a blog post. You can see and feel what is going on and that

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is why it is so engaging. You see, your organization’s message comes to life, and that can help with engagement and donations.

The right messenger.

Who is delivering the message, matters as much as the message. Especially for advocacy video storytelling, you want to make sure the messenger relates to the subject matter in a way that connects with folks on an emotional level. A strong delivery of an easily understandable message can persuade and engage quickly. It is more important to get the message right and delivered well than have great production value. Though it is always nice to have both!

Not a big production.

The cost and time of video production can seem daunting, but with serious editing tools like Adobe Premiere and iMovie, we have seen nonprofits produce solid work without spending a lot of money. There may be times where you want to shoot something with higher production value, but there are also times where footage captured on an iPhone 7 is just what you need.

The biggest mistake folks make.

Folks think making a television spot is the same as creating a good digital video. It is totally different. Most folks will watch your video on a mobile device. That means they have an even shorter attention span than on their desktop. So you need to front load content it also means that they may be watching some or all of your video with the sound off so captioning is also really important.

Tips for equipment.

Most folks don’t have a big equipment budget and have not pieced together their equipment. Basics start with an iPhone and a wired mic. More advanced: We use a few different pieces of equipment such as, a cannon camera, a Mevo camera, a wired lavalier microphone, a Blue Raspberry microphone and a wireless microphone. But we have bought this equipment over the years and still feel like we are just getting proficient at it.

Platforms we use.

We use Wistia to host our video, but I am a fan of Vimeo Pro. Youtube is a fine place to start with video, but if you are serious about it, you will want to

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host the videos on your site and get the benefits of metrics and keywords that Youtube does not give you.

Video Styles.

Testimonials with a strong, thought out message, short interviews that are broken up by captions, interviews between safe members, photo animation.

Practice at Digital storytelling: Just do it.

The more you make video a part of your routine the better you will be. There is a lot of technology out there that can help you deliver a good clear product.

CHAPTER 7: Other Digital Strategies and Tactics

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