Perhaps the greatest curse of digital marketing in politics is that we can measure everything that we do. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of the metrics available to you as a digital practitioner (or as someone trying to make campaign decisions), but because we can put a number on everything we do, we’re […]
Blog
Pete Buttigieg’s Design Toolkit Invites Supporters to Make it Their Own
Designing a logo and visual brand for a campaign is really difficult. That’s why I typically stay out of the peanut gallery and leave things to the men and women actually in the arena. But Pete Buttigieg’s campaign has decided to take a different approach and open up their design process to broader scrutiny. You […]
Don’t Hoard Your Email List if You Want it to Grow
Kamala Harris was one of the first Democrat presidential candidates to make a splash with her headline-grabbing fundraising numbers and while it’s difficult from the outside to cut through the hype, this New York Times piece gives us a big clue about how she built up her small dollar donor program. “At first glance, there […]
The Truth About “Geofencing” in Politics and Advocacy
In the advocacy space, geofencing is a popular go-to buzzword for online advertising, but does it really work? I’m skeptical and think companies, coalitions, and organizations would be better served allocating their resources differently. It certainly works in the sense that it makes decision makers and clients feel clever and you’ll usually be able to […]
New Data Sheds Light on Email Marketing Engagement [Infographic]
You can safely assume that most of your marketing emails are deleted without being read. That’s according to new research from Movable Ink and Toluna about consumer behavior towards email marketing. As AdWeek reports, “over half of consumers (54.4. percent) say they delete at least 50 percent of brand marketing emails they receive without opening […]
Make the Most of Your Moment
In politics, it’s inevitable that sooner or later something is going to happen that shines a spotlight on your candidate or cause and suddenly the pressure is on you to take advantage of the moment. There’s no shortage of stories about a moment coming and candidates or groups raising big sums of money. These are […]
Why Campaign Branding is Difficult
With the first of dozens of presidential campaigns beginning to launch and nothing much to talk about, everyone is a design critic when the new logo is unveiled. As a general rule, I’d recommend everyone in the peanut gallery – especially professional designers – stop and read Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech before […]
2018 Year in Review: Sources
I’m continuing my look back at 2018 via the LTO newsletter. I’ve previously shared the most popular stories and the least popular stories. Here, I dig into the sources linked to in the newsletter. Each week, I scour hundreds of different news sources via Feedly (for RSS), Throttle (for email), and Twitter for stories to […]
LTO 2018 in Review: The Duds
Last week, I shared the most popular links from the Learn Test Optimize newsletter, as judged by YOUR clicks. But I want to revisit the dozens of links that got less than a one percent click through rate. These were the duds. Even though these links didn’t get any (statistically significant) love, they’re worth re-upping […]