Reach is a powerful tool at every phase of a campaign, from introducing a candidate to the electorate, to ballot access, to persuasion, to GOTV. We encourage campaigns to integrate Reach into their campaign plan from the very beginning, but let’s say you just heard about Reach and your election is right around the corner. Is Reach still the right tool for your campaign? You bet!
Reach is the perfect tool for persuasion, mobilization and GOTV. The main features you want to focus on when setting up your campaign at this stage are your Action Cards, your Contact Scripts, your Survey Questions, and your Content Library. Populating these functions will set your volunteers up for success when talking to their networks of friends, family, and potential supporters.
Action Cards are where you set up actions you’d like volunteers to take. There are a couple types of cards that are most effective at this stage of the campaign:
- An Internal Link Action Card that invites volunteers to go to My Reach – Reach’s Relational Organizing hub – and import their friends and family so they can start communicating with them about your campaign. This will empower your volunteers to share your messaging with people you may not be able to reach otherwise.
- Network Contact Action Cards that invite volunteers to reach out to their networks with pre-loaded messages about your campaign.This will maximize your voter reach in the last months and weeks of the campaign, and you can even ask a survey question to improve your voter IDs for when it’s time for GOTV.
- Content Share Action Cards that invite volunteers to share your content with their social media networks. Amplifying your pre-approved messages after Labor Day – when more people are paying attention to politics – can help you break through the noise.
Contact Scripts are pre-loaded scripts that your volunteers can choose from when they go to contact the people they know. At this stage you’ll want:
- Pre-loaded messages for donating, volunteering and attending events to make it easy for your volunteers to make specific asks of their network.
- Pre-loaded messages on policy positions to make it easy for volunteers to focus on the issues that are important to them and their friends, and persuade those who may be on the fence.
- Pre-loaded messages that ask people how they plan to vote – by mail, early, or on Election Day – and that provide links to request a ballot, vote early, or find their polling location to make sure none of your voters are left behind and that your volunteers can easily answer voting questions.
Survey Questions gather rich data on your voters so you can ID your supporters and learn more about the issues that matter to them most in order to highlight those during GOTV.
- At this stage, a Primary Survey Question that IDs your voters will help you better target your mobilization efforts.
- Focus your additional questions on issues so that you can enrich your conversations when it’s time to mobilize your voters.
Content Library is where you can share approved links, images, and videos that you want your supporters to help spread to their online communities, plus suggested post copy to go along with them. It’s a great way to share your message without the cost of digital ads and texting apps. And you can easily keep the content fresh and relevant to the stage of the campaign by setting expiration dates and elevating your most important messages with a Content Share Action Card.
Bonus Feature: Chat! Our chat feature is a great way to communicate with volunteers, answer questions in real time – including when volunteers are out in the field – and even be in direct communication with poll watchers on Election Day! Make sure you appoint some campaign staffers or super-volunteers as moderators of the full-campaign Team Chat and any user group chats you have set up. If things get a bit too hectic in the big Team Chat, consider turning it to Announcement-only Mode so only moderators can post.
Want to learn more? Check out our Reach 101 Series on Youtube and Knowledge Base!
