Every campaign faces the difficult question: how do we spend our resources?
We would like to suggest spending it by building a simple, 4 layer campaign pyramid even as you continue to raise more and more funds for your campaign.
The base: grassroots organizing and voter ID. It should be as wide and broad as you can make it. Two resources a campaign will never have enough of are time and volunteers.
The second layer: technology that is easy to use (us). Once you have built your army, you need to arm it with simple, easy to use technology that helps you manage your voter data so you can deploy it more easily. ID voters. Create a message that motivates them. Then go out and mobilize them.
The third layer: fundraising. The candidate should be fundraising ALL THE TIME. Many candidates won’t. They are the ones who will lose. Whether people want to admit it or not, money is the mother’s milk of politics. The more you have, the healthier your campaign is.
The fourth layer: Mail, radio and TV. These are big time money crunchers that consultants love to get candidates hooked on. Why? One, they are easier. Two, the consultants make more money from these three, either directly on ad buy percentages (on the latter two) or because they actually own the firms that the campaign is pushed to. Be careful on these three. Ask for full disclosure when a consultant pushes you to a specific firm. The first questions should be: what is your relationship with this firm and how much will you make if I use them?
Once you have built the right campaign pyramid, commit to it, implement it and go win.
