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Your Advocacy Campaign Strategies

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Advocacy Campaign: A Guide

Advocacy campaign is an organized effort to educate the voting general public on your issue and to mobilize them to support your position in the appropriate way. In planning any campaign, remember: only registered voters can vote, and knowing which ones you will need to turn out can be pivotal to your success. Not everyone votes, so using your resources wisely becomes important.

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Communicate values. Effective advocacy communications is predicated upon the strong clear assertion of basic values, moral authority and leadership.

American political disclosure is fundamentally oppositional. People are more comfortable being against something than for something.

Most issues are decided by winning over the undecided. Typically, the percentage on one side of an issue is offset by an equivalent percentage on the other side. If is the undecided or conflcited percentage left in the middle who determines the outcome.

Americans want to be on the winning side. The dominant factor influencing the undecided to choose one side or another is the perception that they're joining the winning side. So, for advocacy campaigns, acting like a winner - projecting confidence, asserting the moral higher ground, aggessively confronting the opposition - is a prerequisite for winning.

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Make enemies, not friends. Identify the opposition and attack their motives. Point your finger at them and name names.

American mass culture is fundamentally alientating and disempowering. Most Americans don't feel they can make a diffrence or that they count, and they feel unqualified or unprepared to make important decisions about complex social questions. They key is to educate, empower and motiveate your target audiences.

Successful advocacy and social marketing campaigns, which generally have limited budgets, mainly utilize communications strategies based upon social diffusion through opinion leaders and not on mass media.

Responsible extremism sets the agenda. To move the media, you must communicate as responsible extremists, not as reasonable moderates.

Social consensus isn't permanent and must continually be asserted and defended. Social advocacy is an ongoing process that doesn't end with the passage of a law or resolution of a specific problem.

In the same way that biological diversity is essential to planetary survival, strategic diversity is critical to successful social movements. Multiple, independent advocacy campaigns on a single issue should be encouraged, while centralised monocultural efforts should be avoided.

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Tips on How to Plan an Advocacy Campaign for Your Coalition

1. Campaign Goals and Issue Focus: Determine your goals around this issue. Remember, pick issues and goals that will help strengthen your group.

TIP: When identifying your goals, ask yourself these questions: What are our long-term objectives? What is a victory? What do we want to accomplish? What are our political goals? What are our organizational goals? Goals must be clear, shared and communicated, well articulated and generally quantifiable.

2. External Communications: What is the key message you hope to deliver through this campaign? Your message (or slogan) should fit on a bumpersticker. What story will you tell to define your issue?

TIP: Message: Keep Our City Moving, Protect Jobs and Our Quality of Life. Story: Tell "Human" stories like: Union worker can't get to work, senior can't get to the doctor, disabled can't go anywhere, commuters spending more time on the road than with the family, etc. Theme: Need planned growth with sensible mix of transportation choices.

3. Strengths and Weaknesses: List the resources you bring to the campaign as well as the specific ways you want your organization to be strengthened by the campaign.

TIP: Seniors provide ground troops and voter mobilization skills, but little money; professors provide stats but no organizing skill, ethnic or business groups can provide known visible leadership good for chairpersonships, advisory boards can provide official public record reports.

4. Targets: A target is always a person (or group of people) who has the power to grant your demands. You must be able to name them by name.

5. Tactics: What actions will you take to make your power felt by your targets and get your campaign story heard? What is your timeline?

TIP: For each target, list the tactics that each constituent group can best use to make its power felt. Tactics should be fun and demonstrate real power. Tactics can raise the morale of your members, get media coverage and demonstrate power directly to your target.

6. Put it in Writing! There's an old organizing statement: "If it ain't written, it ain't a plan." Put your campaign strategy on paper. People need to see it, agree to it, and use it as a road map for their work.

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Services We Offer!

Media planning & buying
Working with our Client's internal marketing team we identify ads that will shine through the internet haze and get top results. Using all types of advertising including rectangles, leader boards, interstitials, skyscrapers, rich media, and rollover ads we place your ads on the websites that are best suited to meet your business goals. Our tracking and optimization capabilities allow us to advise our Clients in real-time so that waste is cut and dollars are optimized.

Email marketing
With years of experience in the industry Optimum Response will partner with you from message creation to list selection and consumer privacy compliance to achieve success.

To ensure effectiveness, we work with our Clients to develop the appropriate messaging and creative approach to deliver their content based on their strategic goals. By optimizing our Clients' internal research data we can select the correct email-list-partner and lists to target according to such characteristics as geography, age, household income, home ownership, self reported interests, and many others.

Lead generation

Network lead generation and co-registration campaigns are powerful, quick ways to build permission-based marketing lists. Target users based on interest and demographics to build your list.

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Your Advocacy Campaign Strategies

Advocacy Campaign: A Guide

Contents at a Glance

Contents at a Glance

Principles for Effective Advocacy Campaigns

Tips on How to Plan an Advocacy Campaign for Your Coalition

Services We Offer!

New Links Plexo

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