Breathe new life into your Campaign - Campaign Yoga Breathe new life into your Campaign - Campaign Yoga    
Special Campaign 2008 Double Edition - Campaign Yoga How to End and Begin a Campaign How to End and Begin a Campaign How to End and Begin a Campaign How to End and Begin a Campaign How to End and Begin a Campaign
 

YOU ARE INVITED TO THE BIGGEST ELECTION PARTY 2008 IN DC
Don’t Forget the Party!
The biggest event of the year is something you should not experience alone. It’s time to get out of your living room and share election results with others. “Vote. Then Party. It’s Your Duty.” is the theme of ElectionMall’s biggest party just blocks away from the White House and the Capitol. Someday people will ask where you were on Election Day November 4, 2008. Bring your political team, friends, and colleagues to Ultrabar, one of DC's hottest clubs for live election coverage. Come join former American Idol contestant Antonella Barba and begin a tradition of celebrating Election Night! For any of your guests, elected officials, or members of media that require special attention or security, please don’t hesitate to contact us .Visit ElectionMall’s newest launch, www.ElectionNight.us to reserve your spot or email antonella@electionmall.com, Manager of Public Relations.

SEE ELECTIONMALL
Make sure to view ElectionMall’s video and power point presentation from this year’s Campaign and Elections Politics Magazine September Seminar. “Effectively Using the Internet in the Final Days” can be viewed at www.electionmall.com/video/simerCE1.htm. Don’t miss out on campaign secrets that could swing the election your way.

EDITOR’S NOTE
Those who respond to this edition of Campaign Yoga will be entered into a contest for free stuff. Win a McCain or Obama t-shirt or life size cutouts. You can also win buttons and other stuff with your pick of presidential candidate. Just email kk@electionmall.com, the editor for Campaign Yoga. Indicate if you would like republican or democratic stuff.

THIS MONTH’S CAMPAIGN TACTIC
Use ElectionMall’s Facebook applications as a Get Out the Vote strategy. This is a great way for your supporters to pass their message along. Choose from e-yard signs or web stickers and send them as gifts to friends and family. These virtual gifts send to your recipients profile for approval and then post directly to their landing page. Call our web strategist for these mobilizing messages at 1-888-932-2946 or email aaron@electionmall.com. This is an easy and effective campaign tactic essential for these last weeks before November 4.

Meditate On This
In the last weeks of campaigning, ElectionMall’s business metrics shows that candidates who win on Election Day contact voters eleven times through consistent email blasts, text messaging, live calls, robo calls, direct mail, and polling questions. Simply put, those campaigns that execute a few email blasts and maybe a robo call or two, lose. Contact ElectionMall for all your Get Out the Vote services. Take advantage of our speed of delivery and affordable pricing by contacting Savina at 1-888-932-2946 or email vp@electionmall.com.

Breathing Exercise
Start your campaign infrastructure with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This is a great way for campaigns to set up one of the most important ways of communicating in the campaign and keep costs down.

ElectionMall provides Voice over IP phone services that allow unlimited calls between staff members, phone banking, polling donor, and the all important Get Out the Vote services so that you secure the votes you need to win. Remember it’s all about building infrastructure for success. Visit www.electionmall.com for details.

New Vocabulary
Zinger: A barb; or, a punch line; or, a short stirring conclusion to a speech. Zing is a word with many slang meanings, from “punch” to “liveliness.” In politics, a zinger is a verbal jab at an opponent, often on the light side, well short of a denunciation, or “blast.” Common usage in this sense: “give him a zinger in the debate and see if he comes apart.”

Unflappable: Cool under heat; calm in a crisis; unmoved by furor. Flap, according to H. L. Mencken, originated with British aviators in World War I as a word for “air raid.” The mental picture of the flapping wings of birds when frightened is apt; a political flap is a minor crisis, with assurances by professionals that “this, too, shall pass.” Flapdoodle, or nonsense, can be traced back to the American Civil War. A frequently used synonym for flap, milder than a feeding frenzy or a firestorm is brouhaha, a fifteenth-century French word for “commotion” or “hubbub” which was introduced into English letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in 1890.

Source Safire's New Political Dictionary

Did You Know?
Did you know that ElectionMall is offering Candidate Schools for the 2009 and 2010 campaign season? ElectionMall will have certified trainers coming to your area soon. ElectionMall’s products and services are based on the 54 behaviors campaigns must execute to win. Our Candidate School will walk you through the key products and services that have helped over 600 campaigns achieve elected office. Call ElectiomMall for details.

Table of Contents
Start Your Campaign Right
Tips for Winning the Next Round

   Generating Funds
Secrets to Better Donor Prospecting

   Building Awareness
Tactics for the Last 30 Days 		  Voter Space
What Do Your Voters Want to Hear?
 
Start Your Campaign Right
Think Infrastructure

The earlier you start your 2009 - 2010 campaign, the easier the win. The Internet has extended the campaign lifecycle meaning the end of one campaign is easily the starting point for the next run for office. Besides having a brilliant, charismatic candidate and an irresistible campaign platform, your first few days of the campaign are critical for your success. The fundamentals for any campaign include these four pillars: infrastructure, communication, organization, and strategy.

Develop a plan first so that you create a strong foundation. Maybe you have the ideas but not the infrastructure to turn these ideas into effective campaign strategies. Once the infrastructure is in place, organizing your staff and volunteers, your donors, and your voters becomes easy. Organization and infrastructure allows you to communicate and win the money, awareness, and votes needed to achieve elected office.
Set these four strategies in place within the first seven days to ensure you have both an online and offline strategy:

  1. An interactive website that results in action taken for your campaign. This means fresh content updated regularly, a contributions page, volunteer signup, voter registration, embedded video, and the ability to buy campaign gear.
  2. Online fundraising that incorporates donor data into permission email. Use email to update supporters on a regular basis, write personalized messages, and ask, ask, ask your supporters to forward relevant campaign emails.
  3. Targeted online ads and polling that measures response rates to help identify potential donors and supporters. Make sure you purchase not only your name but your opponents names. Focus on three issues, use landing pages, and capture important data.
  4. A virtual headquarters where all staffer information is available in one location. Provide simple devices such as blackberries and PDAs for downloading images, data, and spread sheets to your staff and volunteer coordinators.
    A classic mistake candidates often make is in not investing in infrastructure early on. Technology has made setting up infrastructure both easy and affordable. ElectionMall offers a campaign website starting at $99, a branded one for $295. Contact our web strategist today to get your campaign started in the right direction. Call 1-888-932-2946 or email aaron@electionmall.com

 
Generating Funds
Use Campaign Tools to Improve Donor Prospecting

When it comes to identifying donors, ElectionMall has a unique system that combines online fundraising, donor data, polling, permission email, and real time metrics called Fundraising by Net. The ability to take online contributions alone does not make for a complete fundraising strategy. You must combine your online and offline fundraising efforts with a permission based email system. Email allows you to interact with donors and keep their attention.

A key campaign behavior is the constant process of refining your targeted donors. ElectionMall makes this easy by offering donor data that includes address, email, and mobile numbers broken down by ethnicity, income, education, etc. Add polling through your website, email, and in your online advertising and you have a dynamic donor list sorted by key issues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By measuring donor responses, campaigns can execute more effective GOTV strategies. ElectionMall can even determine which donors are more responsive to offline methods such as direct mail or phone banking versus those who are more comfortable with online approaches.

ElectionMall guides you in all areas of donor prospecting using the effective campaign tools that have been around since politics became a science. We offer online ads and landing pages in all search engines, contribution pages, and our new Virtual Fundraiser –where donors can actually choose from multiple funds within your campaign to fund a commercial or a batch of yard signs. As always, ElectionMall offers donor tracking, polling, email marketing, data, and metrics that translate into usable data to win your election. Visit us today and start funding your best campaign yet.

 
Building Awareness
How to Win in the Last 30 Days

Whether you have 30 days, 15 days or just 3 days left in the campaign lifecycle, touch on these five strategies:

  1. Calculate the number of votes needed to win
  2. Contact voters eleven times
  3. Get Out Your Voters
  4. Organize your volunteers
  5. Be ready for the unexpected

One of the most important strategies you can do in these last days is a reverse timeline. Start with November 4 and work backwards – how many votes do you need to secure in your district? How many will you have a week before the election? The best question of all – how many votes will it take to actually beat the other guy?

In the last 2 – 3 weeks, successful candidates consistently contact their voters eleven times. You must consistently execute email and fax blasts, robo calls, text messaging, door to door canvassing, polling and direct mail to make an impact.

Use your supporters to get the voters out. Through your established infrastructure, mobilize your volunteers to bring the issues to the voters. Make sure they are wearing identifiable campaign gear when approaching potential voters. Give mobile devices so they can be effective in the field.

Get ready for the absurd during those last days before Election Day. Desperate times makes for desperate measures. Bring a drill in case your headquarters door is super glued shut (yes, this actually happened). Mentally prepare your staff for stolen yard signs. Come up with a quick strategy for your opponent’s misinformation and dirty trick tactics. Stay cool as a cucumber. Anticipating your opponent’s campaign disruption is your best last strategy.

 
VoterSpace
What You Need to Tell Voters Now

 Voters are not messing around. Keep your slogans to a minimum. Focus on substance. How will voters’ lives improve if your candidate is elected? Answer how your candidate would tackle the problems and face the challenges that matter to your community and the nation at large. Keep your voice strong and consistent and don’t forget to say thank you. Don’t underestimate the power of “thank you” for your staff, volunteers, donors and voters.
We’re so confident in helping you raise money online that
we will setup a branded web page free of charge.

1-888-WEB-2WIN (932-2946)
Electionmall.com - where every day is a campaign