Welcome back, Saturday Campaign D.I.Y.ers! For those who tune in, welcome to the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. Each week we discuss issues that help drive successful campaigns. If you’ve missed prior diaries, please visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide.
This week the focus is on your messaging. If you’ve been through any Democratic guided campaign program, you’ve heard a lot about the three C’s: Connect, Contrast, Compel. The concept of connecting with an audience, contrasting with and audience, and compelling action makes up the backbone of most Democratic training surrounding how your campaign or party handles messaging.
Many candidates, though, struggle before they even get to the point of utilizing those steps. This week, we’re going to talk about how to build a starting point for your campaign messaging.
If you have been through programs by organizations like Wellstone, DFA or others, you may associate messaging 101 with understanding the message box or shaping your message. The truth is, most candidates have their messaging strategy fall apart long before because the real basics of how to make your message work for you and not against you are not in place.
You can die on social media. Don’t.
Your campaign has a great messaging strategy. But before you get started, you realize that your social media accounts are full of posts that may not be productive for your campaign. Off-handed jokes, or some strongly worded content that is public.
The moment you declare for office, your public social media history is easily accessible to anyone doing even basic research on your campaign. That post you wrote about Republicans being in league with the devil? It will take a day or two before someone doing basic research finds it and has it ready for a postcard against you.
If you want your message to succeed, try to eliminate off-ramps before you start. Go through your social media history, all the way back to the beginning, and be prepared to delete or make old items private.
Let’s face it, you aren’t Donald Trump, and a stream of posts you made three years ago can quickly derail anything you want to say.
Always use a second pair of eyes
You know what you want to say, and you think you know how you want to say it. You are prepared to say it to the world in a speech, a Facebook post, or a campaign piece of mail. Before you rush forward, make sure you have had a few people look at your content to make sure it is OK.
In the last few months, several major candidates for office across the country have put out intro press releases that were full of grammatical errors. Hey, it happens. That is what a first draft is all about. Even here on Daily Kos, for this series, I try to run my writing by another writer who can find my errors and correct them before they go public.
Messaging full of spelling or grammar errors distracts from anything else you are trying to say by making your campaign look amateur. You want your message to be heard, and if dissected, you want it taken apart for meaning, not because of poor form.
The difference between internal and external communications
INTERNAL
|
EXTERNAL
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- Talking points / Messaging
- Emails**, phone calls, text messages
- Certain private social media groups
- County and state meetings
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- Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc)
- Website**
- Press advisories and press releases
- Radio, TV, and newspaper ads
|
Identify the venue that your communication will take place. Before you form your message, before you get your words out there, you have to think about who will hear it. The chart above has been distributed for years, but I am making a small change in it, highlighted by the bold notations.
While email is technically a private conversation, all it takes is for someone to forward your message to someone else for it to become not private in a hurry. Websites are generally considered public, but private, secured websites — like Slack and others — have become common methods for private internal communication with accountability.
Once an email leaves your hand, you do not necessarily know where it goes next, but secured team-based websites can tell you who has viewed a document or message, who has not, and can prevent anyone sharing it easily. Yes, they could still copy & paste, take screen shots or print it out, but in most cases, preventing easy abuse solves a lot of issues.
If your messaging is going to work, you have to think about the audience that will receive it.
And with these items handled, you are now much closer to the starting point of most messaging 101 guides, the famous message box.
Next week: Rural America, the basics.