Best Practices
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      Tailor Campaign Tools to Your Audience

      To optimize the language and tone of your campaign, you need to know your supporters, and your potential supporters.

       

      Ideally, you are already keeping a database of supporter info, including contact details, and a record of actions they've taken in the past. New/Mode tools provide a lot of this submission data, but it’s also crucial to the success of a campaign that you are able to interpret that data, and turn it into a story about who your supporters are, and what you can do to build and grow your relationship to them.

      To get to know your supporters better, try answering these questions:

      • Who is your ideal supporter, the person you know engages with your campaign 100%?
      • Who is your textbook supporter, the person whose level of participation you can anticipate based on your existing supporter data?
      • Who are your interested bystanders, those outliers you don’t expect to be involved but who occasionally appear at an event, on a thread, or in your CRM?

      For each of these supporter types, answer the following three questions:

      • How do they communicate? What social networks – both online and IRL– do they participate in?
      • Where does your supporter go for news? What types of media do they consume?
      • If you had to associate an emotion with each supporter’s relationship to your campaign issue, what would it be?

      Based on your responses, try crafting an elevator pitch – a short, pithy description of your campaign and its goals – for each type of supporter. Compare the three pitches and try to notice:

      • What does each pitch have in common?
      • Where do they diverge the most?
      • Are there particular terms, turns of phrase, or points of data (information, statistics, research citations) that you use for one type of audience and not for another?

      You can now use your responses to these questions as guidelines for developing campaign calls to action, talking points for supporters using One-Click Calling and LTE tools, and to help you determine whether you want letters to targets to be editable or not.

      Try going through this exercise at the beginning and at the end of a campaign action, and take note of how your responses change. Develop a database of pitches that you can draw on and curate for future campaigns.