The Early Years: Making the Most out of Campaign Events

My boss (Chris Faulkner) isn’t always a chatty person in the office. But this week, I got the pleasure of listening to him talk for 15 full minutes on his latest podcast, “The Early Years: Making the Most out of Campaign Events”. By listening to it, I learned more in 15 minutes than I did in an entire semester’s worth of “Elections 2008”. Then again, I didn’t expect to learn much when I realized my professor was incapable of moving past his slides plastered with Sarah Palin photographs. Sick old man.

But seriously – take a few minutes out of your day and listen in.

Chris offers a step-by-step way to improve the “usual” campaign event strategy. He talks about the importance of what can be taken away from an event. Sure, coming in and firing up the crowd is important, he says, but that fire will cool off soon after the event ends. To be successful, a candidate must have a system in place at the event to churn up support afterward. Nothing butta’ than that. (Laugh.) To do that, utilizing volunteers effectively is necessary.

Campaigns shouldn’t just blindly herd a group of volunteers. Rather, assigning specific responsibilities will produce better results, he says. For example, Chris talks about creating a “bumper sticker team” (not to be confused with Bloomington liberals). The team will be at events, armed with campaign bumper stickers, Windex, and paper towels. As people exit (and when enthusiasm is high), the volunteers can ask the drivers if they’d be okay with having a bumper sticker on the back of their vehicles. This way, the bumper stickers actually end up on cars and not small children’s t-shirts. And, as we all know, car travel is much faster (and therefore effective) than kid travel. Unless your child is a Transformer.

The bumper sticker team is just one of Chris’s suggestions. Listen to the rest of the podcast to learn how to gain contact information from prospective voters and volunteers and how to engage event attendees with some simple photography.

To hear more of Chris’s suggestions, you can download his podcast on iTunes (search for Chris Faulkner) or by going to AmericanMajority.org.