From Our Brains to Yours
Integrating Online and Offline Campaign Tactics
Today we published a piece over on frogloop, Care2’s nonprofit marketing blog, with best practices for integrating online and offline tactics to best effect. Click through to frogloop to read the whole thing… highlights below:
Leveraging the strengths of online campaigning – efficient, affordable, trackable, flexible – with those of offline campaigning – targeted, long-lasting, high-impact – can make all the difference, and I’ve developed a few big picture best practices to help guide the way:
Build Momentum
The cardinal rule of offline campaigns is layering: multiple contacts on the doorstep and on the phone build on each other to create momentum. The more times a voter, donor, or advocate sees, hears, reads, or experiences a message and call to action the more likely it is to penetrate the noise of every day life, and each successive layer builds on the last. More than a rule, layering has proven effects. For example, online donors are more likely to donate and donate more if they receive a snail mail reminder.
Be Consistent and Self-Referential
In order to build momentum and truly integrate your efforts, choose elements that are consistent across channels. Use the same images, taglines and branding to clearly tie the layers together. Moreover, reference the other elements of the campaign as much as possible. Remind your audience that they’re seeing you everywhere, and that you’re excited to engage them wherever they want to plug in.
Be Focused on High Value, Strategic Action
A fair criticism of online action is that it’s too ubiquitous to make a difference anymore. It’s hard to find recent examples of online-only campaigns winning the day. Consider carefully what actions are most valuable and drive online and offline enthusiasm to those activities. If an email campaign isn’t going to help win your campaign but calls into a state legislative office will make a significant difference, integrate tools like Advomatic’s Click-2-Call into your emails (no, I don’t get any kickbacks) to make it almost as easy to make a phone call as it is to sign an email petition. Or go low-tech and focus your online outreach on moving your supporters and volunteers to download a PDF postcard, print it, sign it, and send it to your targeted decision-maker (or back to you to deliver in bulk).
Insist That Strategy Drives Integration
Sophisticated databases, exciting new technologies, and marginal costs that allow implementation for ever-more creative ideas for action are all pushing the boundaries of what nonprofit campaigns can look like. Before investing in innovative tactics, test them against your strategy and in the real world. Cool and new may work; but venture in that direction with as much back-up as you can get.
Test Integration
Like all campaign tactics, best practices for integration may work differently for your organization than they have for others. Test them. You might test a phone outreach campaign to your younger activists asking them to patch through to a decision-maker, a snail mail program that includes tear-off and return cards you can deliver in bulk, or even a highly targeted door-to-door canvass to collect petition signatures.
So… what do you think? Let us know in the comments below or over on the frogloop blog!