Enter your email address here to receive free campaign advice.
The newsletter is sent on an irregular basis every few months as I get time to put one together. You can unsubscribe at any time and your data will not be shared with anyone.
Sample issue (opens in new window)
Successful campaign sites usually require careful planning and implementation - they rarely happen by accident.
Clear content, a well thought-out campaign strategy, effective supporter mobilisation, and promotion are the four key elements of a successful campaign site. Good design is also important, but without these four key elements, even the most beautifully designed site will not be successful.
A natural campaign period lasts from one to three months. If your campaign period is shorter than this, you likely do not have enough time to build proper momentum for your campaign. If your campaign period is longer than this, there is the danger that your supporters may lose interest - consider breaking your campaign up into a series of shorter push periods.
Here are the ten major steps every campaign site should go through:
You can't promote your campaign to every potential group, and a campaign without effective promotion is not a campaign at all.
New tools like the Technorati or Google blog searches can help you identify major niche audiences. Some questions to consider:
What is the geographic extent of your campaign?
What languages will it be promoted in?
What offline media outlets will you target?
Do you have physical locations where you have real world volunteers who can hand out leaflets or organise meetings?
Are you targeting young women, left wing activists, retired people, tech savvy video gamers, religious groups, students, sports enthusiasts?
The possibilities are endless and the more narrowly you define your audience, the more successful you are likely to be in creating resources and promotions that will appeal to that audience.
Are there specific bloggers or website managers who share your interests and can promote your campaign? Is there a crusading journalist with a sympathetic editor who can link to your campaign site when it is set up? Are there organisations willing to send a link to a large mailing list?
Identifying and contacting allies should happen early on as allies are more likely to help promote a site that they have helped to influence or develop.
The time when creating a campaign site simply consisted of writing text and choosing a few good images is long over.
Possible resources now include:
Having said that - don't ignore short, clear text and good images either.
A campaign site normally contains three levels of action. The primary action is the main action that you want everyone visiting the site to do. There should be only one primary action for a given campaign and that action should be prominently displayed on the front page of the campaign site. A primary action typically involves signing a petition or sending an email to a government or corporate decision maker. It should be something that takes only a few seconds to do.
After a visitor has taken a primary action, they can then take a small number of secondary actions, which are typically promoted on the thank you page displayed after the visitor has taken the primary action, or through small links on the front page. This can include sending an e-card or HTML message to their friends to tell them about the campaign, or registering to join an online community or discussion site.
Finally, tertiary or third-level actions are sent to email lists or supporter discussion/networking sites that either previously existed or were created by people signing up at the campaign site. There can be a number of tertiary actions, which could include letter writing or additional requests to promote the campaign to their friends or colleagues. It is not uncommon to have a different tertiary action (and email message to supporters) each week during a campaign period.
Detailed tracking of how people are getting to your site and participating in your key actions is very helpful in determining the success of a campaign and improving it part way through. Consider adding a tracking or referrer field to the URL for your front page and primary action page and use different field values for email, Google ads, external banner ads, ecards, your own website and other referring sites so that you can determine how people are getting to your site and how many of each group of people are actually doing your actions.
Make sure that view and click tracking are turned on for whatever program you are using to send email messages to your supporters.
Assign one person in your team the responsibility for producing weekly stats and progress reports.
One-time launches are often over-rated. It is very common for a campaign site to have several launches. The first can be restricted to be visible (using an IP-block or a password) only to people in your organisation. Next, you might make the campaign site public, but promote it only to a small mailing list of key supporters. Finally, you could link to it from the front page of your main organisational website and send out a news release.
Having several launches that gradually escalate the number of visitors to the site makes even more sense if you have public blogs or discussions - you want to make sure that your site is well populated with content from your staff and key supporters before a larger scale public launch might attract opponents or people who don't understand your campaign and might post irrelevant content to your site.
It is natural for a web team to send out a press release or supporter email message to launch a site and then relax a bit after an intensive planning and development effort. But launching a site is only the beginning of a period of intense promotion. If you have the resources, consider splitting your team into pre and post launch staff to give your site developers a break and reserve a group of people whose full focus is promotion.
Promotion is a huge topic on its own, and includes traditional media, bloggers, advertising, viral marketing and much more.
Many successful campaigns have a different weekly action that supporters can take during the campaign period. Even if you don't, you should consider sending weekly or biweekly updates to your supporters during the campaign period to keep them involved. Make sure that you have real news, however - boring your suppporters by sending email messages with no interesting content will train them never to open your emails, even if they don't actually unsubscribe.
Most serious campaign sites now include blogs, discussion boards or other places for public content. Even email lists often have subscriber's replies to respond to. Make sure that you have a staff person, an enthusiastic group of volunteers, and ideally both, dedicated to welcoming new participants and steering discussion into useful directions.
Organisations that set up and then ignore places for public discussion often find that they become places for opponents and angry former supporters and hence are more of a liability than a helpful campaign support.
The conclusion of a campaign is much more important than the beginning. Many successful campaigns that have engaged large numbers of people have failed at the end because they simply fizzle out without giving their supporters a feeling that their actions made a difference, or a clear suggestion for what they should do next.
If you have collected signatures on a petition, you should plan a dramatic way to present the petition to the person or organisation targeted. The presentation should create a good image and preferably good media coverage.
Send an image and inspiring report of the petition presentation to your supporters so that they know that their participation has been worthwhile. Tell them clearly that the campaign period is over and suggest ways for them to continue being involved with the issue or with your organisation.
Successful campaigns convince many people to join an organisation's main campaign mailing list so that they can be contacted during the next campaign push.
Subscribe to our email list using the form on the upper left if you want to get free campaign advice from Radagast Solutions.