Campaigning is a core part of being a political youth organisation and can take make shapes and sizes. Large, and well planned campaigns or small to impulse street events or actions. What they do have in common is the goal of delivering and spreading a political message, but they can also do more. Campaigning can be a way of attract creative people to your organisation letting them develop creative ideas, or a way of activating your members getting them into the streets delivering flyers or sharing a campaign picture on social media.
The following pages contains campaigns executed by our members. We hope they will both serve as examples of different organisational aspects of campaigning as well as inspire you to come up with your own campaign ideas
The fundamentals: No matter whether you do a small or large campaign here a couple of tips and tricks:
Before the campaign: write a press release to the local media telling them about what you intend to do, why you are doing it and who they can contact. For more information on press releases refer to part XX in the Toolkit.
After the campaign: write a press release with good quality pictures to local media telling them about what you did and why you did it. Often, the press is too lazy/don’t have resources to cover events personally, but there is a chance they will bring your post-event press release.
Make it fun: Campaigning should be fun and the people taking part should feel appreciated. If not your members will not show up/support you the next time you ask them. If you ask people to join you for a street campaign, suggest that you all go for dinner, coffee or drinks after wards to strengthen the team spirit. If people show support online by spreading your campaign message or liking, then take the time every now and then and say thanks to them for always helping our and showing support.
Learn on the go: Whether you are completely new or have done multiple campaigns do not forget to evaluate. It can be done in many ways, from looking into the social media statistics to asking the members who participated for their feedback.
1) LYMEC Campaigning
2) 15-07-08_US Campaigning Best Practices_final[1]
3) Electoral-Management-Design-Revised-edition-PDF
4) Improving-Electoral-Practices-Case-Studies-and-Practical-Approaches-PDF
5) 2010 Campaign Report
6) Campaign 17th March 2010
7) Campaign 20th April 2010
8) Campaign 23rd April 2010
9) campaign management, methods_techniques, Observing elections 5 steps (in Romanian ), Phone canvassed letter, promoting_candidate
