This is How We Do It #7- Spending Priorities

#7- Spending Priorities

Some helpful indices to guide your priorities for races that don’t buy media:

Values, conviction, and zeal are more important than anything else, but those are things you can’t buy.

Talking to people (direct voter contact) is the most important thing you can buy.

After you’ve paid for your contact through canvassing, direct mail and phones, you can buy things that reinforce your face to face contact like signs and bumper stickers.

Yard signs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, knick knacks, polly-wogs, and all of the other attending stuff of political campaigns cannot inspire people to vote for you. And yes, they are going to have to be inspired. Contact with a human being is what inspires them.

In fact, I have noticed a tendency over the last few election cycles: The campaign that spends the most on “feel good stuff”, free t-shirts, pens with the candidates name on them, pizza parties for volunteers, etc… loses. This is more than a tendency I think. It may be a Law or Theory, depending on which term applies.

A good way to prioritize your money in a race where you don’t buy media would be something like this:

Literature for canvassing

Website

Yard signs

Direct Mail Pieces

Paid Canvassers

Phone banks

Various stickers and accoutrement