Forget what politicians say. What truly matters is what they do. And what they do is vote, to write our laws which affect us all.
Political Marketing
Civic Tech
Other Stuff
If you’re just starting out.
📌 It’s worth mentioning that when we talk about marketing and / or communications in this context; we’re not speaking about (offline) PR strategy or media relations - these buckets have clear well established role definitions and are often the most visible and discrete areas to address by a professional in that field. What we’re talking about here is . . everything else.
Creating a political or cause-related brand is really no different from creating any other brand. It requires careful thinking about what you stand for (especially in the context of the local and federal environment you're operating in), how you'll present and express that brand, what your key messaging will be and how you'll market your idea.
Because let's face it, political or cause-related campaigning isn't all that different to brand marketing . . it just operates in a different space, with different rules, challenges and opportunities.
<aside> ⚡ And like all branding, it requires absolute clarity about your purpose, your reason for being and the way you'll connect with people for impact.
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<aside> 🔥 “Story-based strategy is a method of investigating the myths we believe, build and participate in. Bringing intentionality to the words we use and the assumptions we uplift or unearth, we use tools to take apart dominant narratives and construct the stories that will get us closer to liberation, placing our audience in the front row and inviting them to see and build the future we believe we deserve.”
Ruby Pinto • Co-Founder & Creative Director at Shred Magazine • AT2019
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Check out some of the story-based strategy tools 👉 here
An unofficial (community-created) message is a free and beautiful thing. You’re not constrained by the official campaign messaging, and you can be a little pointier and more direct, which we know works well on social platforms. Although it can hinder an official campaign rather than support it, if community campaigns stray too far away from the values of a candidate’s platform.
The language you use matters; because it tells people how you see things.
It’s really worth being clear and intentional in the way you tell your story, and the language you use across community platforms and websites.
How do you see people?
Who are you talking to . . really?
How are you talking? what kinds of words and language are you using?
One of the things that struck me when I was looking at the swipefiles here; is how easy it is to disrupt the political language of our time. Admittedly it’s tough trying to find a disruptive voice in the petfood category or insurance, despite how badly they all want to be ‘disruptors’ 😉 But in politics . . there’s tons of opportunity to disrupt not just by what you talk about (which understandably is the main focus of the candidate and campaign), but how you talk about it.
These moments in history give us an opportunity to think about . . not just what we want to be, but also how we want to be.
Like any communications campaign, understanding the needs and decision-making framework of your audience(s) is the first step. When it comes to politics, there will always be die-hards who follow the news, understand the issues being raised in parliament and have a point of view about what’s being done.
But for the rest of us, politics can feel overwhelming. It can feel intimidating “If I don’t know much about politics, how can I engage without looking silly?”. Those of us who are in the midst of raising families or fur children, working and running households just don’t have the bandwidth to grapple with something outside of our wheelhouse, and for many - this includes politics.
How can you understand and empathise with your community as a starting point?
“What if I'm just not into politics?”
Understanding Australian Politics and the People who vote
Forget what politicians say. What truly matters is what they do. And what they do is vote, to write our laws which affect us all.
<aside> 💡 Encourage users to find out how their local MP votes in their behalf with tools like the Australian Electoral Vote Compass.
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How can you help people to navigate through the political landscape? How can you make it easy to understand the issues, find something that matters to them and feel that they know enough to make a decision for themselves?
What’s an Independent? A person can run as an independent as elections or a sitting Member of Parliament may decide to revoke their party allegiance and become an independent.
Independent Politician | [n] A Member of Parliament who does not belong to or represent a political party is called an Independent.
The role of an independent Member of Parliament is to represent their electorate and achieve the best results from Government for their constituents. Independents are generally able to vote according to their beliefs and the perceived will of their electorate, whereas members who belong to political parties are expected to vote along party lines and usually do.
Why is the shift towards Independents is gaining traction?
The independent movement here in Australia is gaining traction, inspired by the success of Warringah’s Zali Steggall and Indi’s Helen Haines in 2019. Up to a dozen safe Coalition seats now face serious, well-organised challenges.
Most of us tend to think along two party lines and vote either Liberal or Labour but the truth is there's more than two choices. Having an independent Member means that member is not tied to a party line (meaning they don't have to follow what their party leaders dictate) and can vote to actually represent the views of their electorate. Which is a pretty big deal actually. Many of us have visions of a better world but get frustrated when politicians make decisions that serve their party or donors rather than the people they are supposed to represent.
<aside> 💡 You can find out more about Independent Australia 👉 here
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<aside> 💡 You can find out more about the Community Independents Project 👉 here
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💡 You can find out more about Climate200
👉 here
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But can't a Labour or Liberal politician represent us?
If your views or the overwhelming views of the majority of your community differ from their party line, then the short answer is no. When a politician votes against his or her party, they call it a rebellion vote - this is known as crossing the floor (to the other side of the debate away from their own party).
Labour party members are not actually allowed to rebel and although Liberal backers are allowed to rebel, they rarely do. In fact, many liberal members have never crossed the floor and voted against their own party on anything. Ever.
So what does that mean?
It's pretty simple really. Whether it’s a state or federal election, the important thing is to understand who is representing you and how they vote. If you agree with your representative’s party views on say . . environment for example, then you're good to go. If you don't however, then things get a little more complicated. You see . . . your representative is likely never going to represent your views on the environment until their entire party changes their tune. Feels a bit like trying to boil the ocean really doesn't it?
One of the trickiest things working in a remote team or even a team of volunteers, can be giving people both the clarity and the autonomy to be efficient and effective without straying from the path you’ve set out for the social campaign or candidate platform.
Many teams are grappling with these challenges. Adopting a posture that leans toward ‘increasing collective intelligence’ to enable both autonomy and cohesion, lets us see the development of strategic operational systems as a starting point, rather than a finished project.
Collect and organise all the marketing system components in one place.
Design Components: This might include various logo versions, RGB and HEX colour palettes, fonts, images and other assets that could be used in communication and marketing activity. It’s important that these assets aren’t sitting in a document somewhere or being emailed on an as-needs-basis, as that can create more work in the end.
Information Resources: How is information being captured both formally and informally? Who has access? How is the access controlled? Where is there an opportunity to share more, rather than than less? How will you manage this given that some information is more sensitive or not public-facing?
Communication Methods: How are team members currently communicating? Does this make it harder or easier to control access to information? If we’re starting from a collective intelligence makes us better standpoint - then the question becomes, how transparent, accessible and open can we make communication for our core team and core volunteers and which protections / boundaries need to be in place and for what purpose? Rather than, how much does X person really need to be across this? Scary I know. But the idea isn’t to leave yourself open by being too transparent, (remember the old / new power dynamic we talked about in the new block) - it’s about really thinking about how unnecessarily restricting information in the wrong context can weaken this current, and expanding in the right context, can strengthen it.
Identify the key areas to be addressed in an operations roadmap.
and validate the importance of each of the buckets of marketing activity. These might include:
The best way to create impact, is to be super organised with your content. To create one single place where everyone on your campaign team can see the ideas, work in progress, captions, messaging ideas and imagery so that they can contribute and distribute alongside the 'mainstream' communications.
The key thing when it comes to content campaigning is to always be planning. When you think of a new angle, see a new idea you could adopt or an opportunity to stake a claim on an important issue, you want to put it somewhere where you won't forget but, but also somewhere where it can be shared and built upon by others in your team. This will help you to identify key areas for content campaigning, prioritise what matters and what should come next, and then to plan when you should release content, push it out or make it available to your distributed team of influencers.This will allow you to identify themes, prioritize what should come next, and plan out what you want to shoot.
Notion is a great platform for collecting, synthesising and coordinating content amongst a team. It’s super flexible and allows you to track information, include digital creative assets in whatever format you need.