Sorry, wasn’t sure which title to go with. It’s been a crazy 4 weeks and I’ve had very little sleep. Follow along as I show you what happens when your average DailyKos reader (mostly lurker) realizes that he may have some useful skills and reaches out directly to a few congressional campaigns in order to help flip a few seats (including GA’s two Senate seats!)
[Or just click here and throw a few bucks to a great candidate. Literally every $5 you donate banks 8.5 Democratic votes in GA for Biden, Ossoff, Warnock and Griggs – which is actually 34 votes now that I think about it...]
As some of my friends here know, I’m just your average mechanical engineer turned Realtor down in Atlanta. What my friends here don’t know is that real estate has nothing to do with houses — it’s 100% lead generation and conversion. A few weeks ago I realized that the process I use to generate real estate leads would apply really, really well in the political arena. And I could use those skills to help flip our two Senate seats over to Team Blue.
Just imagine --- instead of candidates airing more generic TV ads or mailing full-page glossy postcards (or junk mail as I call it), candidates could be targeting Democratic voters directly and showing them exactly when, where and how to vote.
And I’m not talking about, “hey, go to this page and look at this big list of places you could vote, and guess which is the closest, and/or request your absentee ballot here.” I’m talking about highly targeted, highly refined, laser focused messages such as:
I know you have a ballot sitting on your desk at home that you haven’t returned yet. Here’s how to make sure you fill it out so that your vote counts, and here are turn by turn directions to your closest ballot drop box so that you can skip the post office.
Or
You haven’t voted yet. While you’re lying in bed scrolling through Facebook, click here to have turn by turn directions to your closest early voting place sent directly to your phone so you can vote tomorrow.
So anyway, with my little mini-eureka moment and both Senate seats on the ballot and Biden just announcing hires in GA, I decide to reach out. Now, I’m not in politics. I don’t know anyone in politics. I’m not a consultant or anything. I don’t have any contacts. So, like a total noob I just start reaching out via snail mail, phone and email.
As you can guess, despite multiple attempts I didn’t hear anything back from the Biden, Ossoff or Warnock campaigns. (In retrospect, I probably should have sent them a glossy full-sheet postcard.) And with COVID, I can’t just go sit in a campaign office, handcuff myself to a chair and demand to speak to someone. However, John Lewis was my congressman (yes, THAT John Lewis) and when he passed in July my district was scheduled for a September special election to fill the remainder of his term. Since that race was coming up and it was the only one on the ballot, I started reaching out to those candidates.
And one called me back.
Here’s how that conversation went:
Me: “Hi, um, so I have some ninja level advertising skills that I use in real estate and they’d work really well for politics.”
Them: “Tell me more, but also, we can’t pay you and I can’t afford a glossy full-sheet postcard mailer.”
“That’s fine, I’m not a vendor. I’m volunteering. I just want to show these techniques work so that Ossoff and Warnock will use them next month. I really want both Senate seats in the blue column this year. Are you doing any mailers or Facebook advertising or anything?”
“Yeah, I’ve boosted posts before.”
“Uhhh, ok. That’s like the Facebook version of using crayons. Did you know that you can take your campaign list and bla bla bla.” [I’m not going to give away all my secrets on a public forum.]
“You can do that?”
“Yeah. And there are 5,742 unreturned absentee ballots sitting out there. How are you reaching out to them?”
“What do you mean? How do you know who has ballots?”
[forehead smack]
Anyway, let’s just say each party on both ends of the line was shocked during the call.
Ok, this post is already getting long, so I’m going to have to break it up into a series. (Wait until I tell you what I uncovered when talking to professional political marketers, which I was forced to do thanks to a facebook snafu… It’s mind boggling insane. Soooo much money is getting flushed down the toilet and EVERYONE loves their freaking glossy full-page postcards.)
The short version of what happened with Candidate 1 is that they had very little money for advertising and there were facebook advertiser issues [which have since been solved], so instead of reaching out to the whole 5,700 absentee ballot list, I sent a highly targeted mailer to those households with 2 or more outstanding ballots, since that stretched our dollars the furthest.
58% of those households voted within days of receiving my letter. An “average” direct response result is on the order of 2%. “Great” is like 6-7%. Over HALF of the people who received my single mailer sent in their ballots, even when those ballots had been sitting on their desk for weeks.
And my mailer wasn’t even a full-page, glossy postcard.
[Want to know a real tragedy? Over 4,100 absentee ballots were never returned in that race and we didn’t have any more money to reach out to them.]
So that race is over, but politics is apparently all connections, so one of the campaign people said, “hey, you should reach out to Joyce Griggs’s campaign. They could really use a hand. Talk to [this person].” So that’s what I did.
Joyce Griggs is a pretty amazing candidate. She’s a retired veteran who served in Iraq and earned a Bronze Star. Healthcare, climate change and criminal justice reform are all main issues she wants to tackle. She’s trying to flip US House district GA-1 which is the southeastern part of the state, bordering Florida and including Savannah.
The mechanical engineer in me dug into the numbers and this seat is 100% winnable with a smart outreach strategy. The bigger groups have pretty much written this district off because glossy full-page mailers aren’t going to cut it. The good news is that republicans are unlikely to dump any money into it. That bad news is that the Griggs campaign really needs donations.
I wish everyone who has ever said, “Democrats need to contest every election” would step up and make a donation. Joyce stood up and is fighting for the seat, but she needs resources. Using my advertising strategies, we can flip this seat on the cheap. Not only that, but every ballot we bank for Joyce will have a vote for Biden, Ossoff and Warnock on it, which means every dollar that goes to Joyce’s campaign will be directly helping to flip GA’s two Senate seats.
As I mentioned before, I’m a mechanical engineer. I really dig into the numbers. My strategies are cost effective, trackable and scalable, and I have data from the other race that shows for every $1 we put into our advertising, we banked 1.7 democratic ballots.
Can you throw a little love Joyce’s way? $5 turns out 8.5 votes, $15 banks 23 votes and $50 gets 85 democratic ballots into boxes. If we can hit $5,000 that’d go a long way in such a low-turnout district.
I guarantee that every dollar goes directly towards turning out voters. Not a single penny goes to consultants or advertising company markups or whatever. This is a true grassroots campaign. And even if we come up short on GA-1, every single one of those ballots counts towards Biden, Ossoff and Warnock’s vote totals as well.
Since I’m turning this into a series, in subsequent posts I’ll show exactly how the money is spent and what the results are. All of the things I do are trackable, so if I target 100 voters today, I’ll see in a few days how many of those 100 actually ended up casting votes.
Please go throw $25 in the pot to turn out another 42 GA voters.
So just out of curiosity, how many full-page glossy mailers have you received this year?
Have you seen any particularly good advertising pieces (mail, tv, signs, etc.)
What do you think is more important, messaging or turnout?
Thank you and stay tuned…
(Not paid for by anyone. Well, I paid for it with another half hour of sleep down the drain.)