Voted Best Web-Based Political Campaign Software 2 Years Running

Getting the Strong Urge to Run? Get Started Right After Election Day

As we approach yet another Election Day, all politically-minded eyes are focused on this year’s big races.  There are a small number of people, though, who have already begun to look beyond Election Day: next year’s candidates.  For them, while this year’s campaigns are important, the most important campaign, their own, is just beginning. 

Whether you’re just thinking about running for office next year, or you’ve already decided to throw your hat in the ring, you may be asking yourself, “When should I start my campaign?”  The best answer anyone can gi

Using the Net in your Small Budget Campaign

Jim Fleming

This article originally appeared in Winning Campaigns Magazine .

I can’t e-mail my love. I can’t fax you my heart. I can’t see your face in cyberspace. I don’t know where to start.  -Jimmy Buffet

In the first edition of Winning Big in Small Budget Campaigns, which was first published in 1997, we dedicated just a few pages to an increasingly important campaign medium. In fact, we didn’t even include it under the media chapter, but relegated it to the leadoff item

What the Internet Teaches Us About Designing Good Direct Mail

Hal Malchow

For years, my firm has been a leading direct mail company for Democratic organizations and candidates.   We have worked for the AFL-CIO, all three of the national Democratic committees and hundreds of candidates for office.   We think we know what we are doing and how to reach voters with a piece of mail.  But this past year, we learned some lessons and we learned them in a surprising place.

The Internet.

Early this year, our firm decided to open an Internet division.   There were a lot of reasons for our decision.  

Campaign 101: Learning from Major Campaigns, Offers Insights into Running Local Elections

Brad Bannon

In the same way that high school football players can learn a lot about the game by watching the pros play in the Super Bowl, local political activists should be able to learn a lot about campaigns by watching the players in the presidential race.

By the same token, the people who work in presidential races can easily forget the basic rules of politics they learned when they started out as local political activists. In fact if you examine closely the inside workings of the Kerry campaign, as the editors of Newsweek did in the new book, ‘Election 2004’, it is clear that

Distributed Campaigning

Benjamin A. Katz

Politics & the Internet in 2004 

In the 2004 election cycle, websites, email and online fundraising assumed a growing prominence. In each of these areas, new high marks were established in both volume and audience-reach.

However, 2004 also saw the emergence of a powerful new set of web-based tools that I have come to call Distributed Campaigning. While these second-generation Internet tools could eventually prove even more valuable than on-line fundraising, they also have the potential to inflict serious damage to a campaign.

What is Dis

Online Politics is Also Local

Benjamin A. Katz
Cheryl Katz

The other 99% percent

Presidential candidates, most  notably the Dean campaign in 2004 and McCain campaign in 2000, tend to dominate discussions of online campaigning. While Presidential campaigns are often using some of the most exciting technology, these discussions miss the vast majority of online campaigns – those on the Congressional, state and local levels.

Exempting Gubernatorial, Presidential and a few other highly publicized races, most campaigns do not benefit from the free media that drives donors, volunteers and voters to their websites.

For