How to Run an Efficient, Winning Campaign (Hint: Online=Victory)

Our firm has been fortunate to play a role in some key winning judicial races during the past decade.  While these races are often overlooked by the media and voters alike — they are often some of the most important races on the ballot.

In 2010, we provided strategic consulting services for the Will County Circuit Court campaign of Judge Michael J. Powers.  Will County is the fastest-growing county in suburban Chicago and one of the key “swing” regions in the state of Illinois.

Normally, winning judicial candidates receive far less votes than those at the “top of the ballot.”  In this election, however, Judge Powers received more votes in Will County than any other candidate.  That includes higher-profile candidates for U.S. Senate, Governor and Congress.

How did we do it?  Simple:  we focused on efficiency and engaged a robust, groundbreaking online program.

• We went against the commonly accepted political tactics by spending more than 40% of our direct voter contact budget for online communication.  We built a targeted email list of more than 25,000 Republican and Independent voters in Will County, and delivered more than 350,000 emails to this list in the months and weeks leading up to Election Day.

• During the final three weeks of the campaign, we also delivered more than 2 million impressions of online, expandable, rich media ads (see graphics at top of this post) within Will County — and garnered more than 40,000 interactions with these ads.  That’s analogous to sending out 2 million direct mail pieces and knowing for a fact that 40,000 people opened and read your mail.

• Our interaction rate was almost 300 times better than the average “click-thru rate” garnered with standard, static banner ads delivered by the vast majority of campaigns.

Quite impressive — and powerful.

We also built a network of activists on Facebook — delivering content and tools that kept these activists engaged.  We also delivered more than 7 million impressions of Facebook ads to a targeted group of voters in the district.

Through email and Facebook, we also deployed a number of tools — including “E-Yard Signs” and a Facebook app that allowed people to share these signs with Facebook friends — designed to empower our activists to evangelize on behalf of our campaign.

In the final weeks of the campaign, we also filmed short “endorsement” videos from local opinion leaders and shared them via Facebook and email, with clear calls to action for our network to share with their friends, family and colleagues.

To be sure, the campaign also engaged in more traditional means of communication, such as door-to-door campaigning and direct mail.  We limited these activities, however, to a very targeted universe of likely voters and favored repetition of message (quality vs. quantity).

All of the above resulted in an efficient campaign that that elected Judge Michael J. Powers to the Will County Circuit Court.