Are You Ready For A Campaign?

Many of our team members come from the world of organizing, and there are few things we enjoy more than planning out campaign strategy, writing messages that mobilize people, designing beautiful graphics, and seeing the impact when clients share our work with the world. 

And campaigns can be incredibly effective. As an agency we’ve been a part of campaigns that have secured funding for social programs, built the necessary momentum for policy changes, and even shifted attitudes across our society.

But even when a campaign is the right move, it might not be the right move right now. Often, organizations need to do some foundational work first: building a communications strategy, deepening relationships with their audiences, and making sure they have the systems in place to turn attention into lasting engagement. 

So before you start printing the postcards, we encourage you to ask yourself a few questions.

You can’t decide what your audiences need to hear if you don’t know what they’re already saying. 

How do people talk about the issue when they’re using their own words? What matters to them? What do they already understand? Where is there confusion or skepticism? What would make someone want to get involved? What might make them hesitate?

Finding the answers to these questions might mean sharing surveys with your members and mailing lists, organizing interviews or focus groups with your longtime donors and volunteers, or even holding town halls with the people that you’ll be seeking to sway.

Engaging thoughtfully will help you create better communications. You may discover that the campaign you had in mind isn’t quite the campaign your audience needs from you—or that there’s more listening and relationship-building to do before you’re ready to launch.

No campaign starts with a blank slate. By the time someone encounters your message, they’ve likely heard different perspectives from other organizations, the news, politicians, employers, friends, family, social media, and probably a group chat or two.

So, what are you walking into?

Take some time to research the broader communications landscape. Who else is talking about this issue publicly? Which narratives have already taken hold in the media and online? Who does your audience trust? Who has an interest in maintaining the status quo? And what are they saying?

Scanning your environment matters for any project, but it’s especially important when you’re asking someone to change a deeply held belief or do something that carries some risk such as challenging an employer or taking a political stand.

Understanding what’s happening in the public discourse will help you see where your communications can genuinely shift people, and where you need to build more trust.

We’ve all seen the calls to action:

Learn more.
Share this post.
Spread the word.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these. Sometimes awareness really is the goal. But if you’re trying to create social change, it’s worth asking what role you’re actually offering people in creating it. 

Lasting change rarely happens because thousands of people saw exactly the right Instagram graphic at exactly the right time (If only!). Someone probably isn’t going from vaguely interested to deeply committed overnight. They need somewhere to start, and then somewhere to go, and then somewhere to go next. 

In organizing, we think about each action that we offer someone as a step on a ladder of engagement. Rather than asking, “What do we want people to do?”, we first zoom out and then zoom in: “What’s our ultimate vision of change, and what’s the next most meaningful thing this person can do with us to help us achieve it?”

That little “with us” makes a difference.

Do you know what the most effective CTA is? What actions are your audiences likely to take, and what actions will win over decision makers?

Could they attend a meeting? Talk to a coworker? Sign something? Contact a decision-maker? Tell their story? Volunteer? Become a member? Bring another person into the conversation?

We tend to communicate with urgency when something important is happening: an upcoming election, bargaining has begun, a bill is moving through the legislature, a fundraising deadline is looming. Suddenly, everyone’s inbox is very busy. 

But from the other side of that relationship, it can sometimes feel like:

We need you! We need you! We need you!
And then…
Crickets. 

That’s a tough way to build trust and create lasting change.

We like to think of a campaign as one particularly active moment in a relationship that existed before it, and will continue afterward.

That requires getting out of a pattern that looks like:
Campaign > disappear > campaign > disappear > campaign.

And building something closer to:
Conversation > relationship > invitation > action > repeat.

Imagine the best-case scenario: Your campaign takes off. People join your mailing list. Your DMs fill up. Dozens of supporters want to volunteer. Two hundred people come to an event when you planned for fifty. Workers who’ve never contacted the union before start asking questions. Great! 

Who’s talking to them on Monday morning? Who responds to that new supporter? How long will it take? Where does their information live? Who welcomes them? Is anyone responsible for maintaining that relationship six weeks from now?

There are few things more deflating than raising your hand to help and hearing nothing back. Ensure that your staff and volunteers are well-equipped to respond before sending a public invitation. 

This is where our work at LeBlanc (& co.) borrows heavily from our organizing experience: we see communications as a means of building relationships with supporters and ultimately, of enhancing their leadership capacity. 

Well before the campaign launches, we’re planning how we’ll tell people what their support helped achieve, how we’ll thank them, when we’ll ask for their feedback, in which other ways they can participate, and how we’ll keep listening.

A good email program, a member communications strategy, a thoughtful supporter journey — these things can look less exciting on a project plan than a splashy campaign launch event. But over time, they build the trust and connections that make social change possible.‍

Maybe the next three months shouldn’t be about launching anything at all. 

They could be about talking with members or community members, getting your email program into better shape, creating a thoughtful welcome for new supporters, building systems for keeping track of relationships, and training staff and volunteers to speak about the issues. 

We’d be thrilled to help you build out this foundation. Then, when the time does come for a campaign, you’ll know that your people are ready to hear from you, to participate actively, and to bring others along with them.