Posts by Campaign Solutions

Fundraiser of the Year… and more!

Campaign Solutions and CDI Ads took one of the top awards at this year’s American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) conference in San Juan Puerto Rico.

The annual Pollies conference is the political consulting event of the year, bringing together an incredibly talented, bi-partisan group of politicos to share experiences, build connections and expand their businesses. Helmed by our own President and Founder, AAPC President Becki Donatelli, kicked off the conference interviewing former governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour.

Congratulations to the Campaign Excellence Award for Fundraiser of the Year (Republican) winner, Jenniffer Ortiz-Alizieri and her team of Campaign Solutions, CDI Ads and Winning Tuesday for their outstanding work on Larry Elder for Governor. We were thrilled to be a part of this outstanding team.

Our team had a huge presence at the awards, which included a panel appearance by our Executive Vice President, Mike Alm, on The Future of Fundraising.

We also received a Gold Pollie Award for Best Use of Social Media for Fundraising on behalf of the work we did for Elder for Governor.

It’s exciting to see our work and our passion to deliver award-winning results every day for our amazing clients recognized by our peers in the industry. We are grateful for the opportunity to serve our clients and deliver innovative solutions that help them win.

How We Created a Successful Virtual Onboarding Program

Like many organizations, our transition to a fully remote company during the COVID-19 outbreak has required our team to adapt quickly to this “new normal.” With several new employees joining this month and knowing an immersive onboarding experience would be critical to their success, we quickly implemented a virtual version of our onboarding program to ensure the transition from the physical to digital was seamless and effective.

Virtual Onboarding is a dynamic idea, which means we won’t get it perfectly right the very first time, but we’ve quickly learned a few fresh and innovative strategies that have made it a successful program so far:

• Clear and Concise Communications: When working remotely, it’s nearly impossible to over-communicate. Where things tend to break down is when there’s a lack of clear direction and information sharing, so don’t be afraid to communicate more than you’d typically do with in-person onboarding. Send a welcome email before the new hire even logs on for day one, set up face-to-face video introductions with team members, and setup an end-of-day virtual happy hour. Most critical is to formalize everything: timelines, objectives, responsibilities and all supporting resources. This is especially true for leaders, the new hire’s “buddy” (more on that later), and for the entire team contributing to a high-quality onboarding and training experience.
• Invest in Technology – and Encourage Digital Engagement: Technology alone won’t solve the challenges your business faces as we all shelter in place and work from home. But not having the right technology solutions will quickly halt any progress your team is trying to make. From video conferencing like Zoom to instant communications platforms like Slack and Teams, make sure your entire organization has access to the technology they need to perform, and that training on these platforms is top of mind during new employee onboarding. With so many options, don’t assume your new hire has a grasp on your company’s cultural use of each program or has even used your choice of technology before. Be sure to make technology solutions the primary way you communicate with new hires during onboarding. Video is almost always better than email, for example. When the new hire joins your company, they want to be part of the team – and that means seeing the faces of your current employees – not just the faceless email correspondence they could have.
• The Onboarding “Virtual Buddy:” The idea of assigning a current team member to be the “buddy” of the new hire isn’t new. A trusted team member to show a new hire the ropes is a well-proven technique. The right onboarding buddy sets the tone, welcomes a new hire into the culture of the organization and boosts their confidence, and ultimately makes it easier to answers questions both big and small. With virtual onboarding it’s even more important to find the right person to act in this role. The “Virtual Buddy” shouldn’t be someone who just has some extra “free time” but instead they should have proven strengths in communications, adaptability, and effectiveness.
• Make a Schedule: While most onboarding programs stick to some sort of a schedule, they’re often setup where a new hire “shadows” multiple coworkers for a few hours or days at a time. With virtual onboarding, a solid schedule that keeps the process on track is more critical than ever. The new hire will likely be bouncing from video call to video call with multiple members of the team, and without the assigned buddy being physically in the room, things can quickly get off track. A clear and well thought out schedule of all the critical onboarding activities is essential. And don’t forget to build in some breaks occasionally. Whereas breaks naturally happen in more typical onboarding, the virtual process can quickly fill up every available hour. Build in some breaks and give your new employee some time to take in everything they’ve learned during the first few days as part of the team.
• Don’t Forget About the “Required” Steps: Every new hire needs to fill out paperwork from human resources, get setup with equipment from IT, and many other straightforward, common onboarding steps. Make sure your leadership is prepared for this. Just like in real life, no new hire wants to show up for the first day of work to find a disorganized pile of forms to fill out and a computer not ready for their use. Make sure to pay close attention to these “basics” and make a strong first impression of your organization.
• Have a “Virtual” Open Door Policy: Not everything will run perfectly especially when working remotely. Technology may be what connects us together, especially these days, but “lost in translation” has never been truer. Ultimately, make sure that as leaders, you’re creating real-time opportunities and listening to feedback from your team, especially from those new hires in whom you’ve already invested so much.

Our newest team member, Marissa, just completed the Virtual Onboarding program. “It was a great experience and extremely helpful,” Marissa said. “Obviously, it’s not easy to train a new employee virtually but I feel like I have a really great foundation to start building on. While I definitely missed seeing everyone in person, I may not have met so many coworkers from across the country so quickly or had as much personal attention as I did without the Virtual Onboarding!”

Right now, no one knows for sure when things will “get back to normal” so it’s best to get your processes in order. Even when we return to offices in the months ahead, the lessons learned from having an adaptable onboarding process will go a long way toward the long-term success of your entire team.

Right County Lists Names Mike Alm President

Alm Maintains EVP Role with Campaign Solutions

Alexandria, VA – Right Country Lists (RCL) announced today the appointment of Mike Alm as President of the Conservative email list company. RCL was founded in 2016 by the digital firm Campaign Solutions and manages more than sixty of the top Republican and Conservative email lists on the market, with new lists added every month. RCL lists are a mix of known donors and activists from right-leaning causes, candidates, and organizations, with data updates and additions constantly added to the files.

Right Country Lists founder Rebecca Donatelli said, “I am so pleased Mike has agreed to take on this additional role. There is nobody that knows the email list business better than Mike. RCL is in the best of hands.”

In addition to his new role, Alm will continue to serve as Executive Vice President of Campaign Solutions where he manages teams of digital fundraising professionals and some of the top fundraising candidates in the country.

“Right Country Lists is 100% committed to helping you grow your email file so you can achieve your objective. Whatever your cause, project, or goal, with more than sixty lists to choose from, Right Country Lists will be able to find an email file that works well for you,” Alm remarked upon his appointment.

Contact: Rebecca Donatelli (703) 684-1072

Google Goes Back To The Future

Google recently announced a ban on political microtargeting starting January 2020. What this means is that political advertisers can no longer upload voter files for targeting, use Google’s political audiences, remarketing audiences and look a like audiences.

We also have earned numerous industry awards for our search marketing efforts and those techniques are still available in Google’s post microtargeting world. For your display advertising efforts, we can use combinations of BTR for optimization as well as Google’s back to the future targeting tools to deliver great results. For persuasion advertising efforts we will contrast Google’s options and potential results with other digital advertising partners, bringing you the best results for your marketing dollars.

Experts in Residence

We are always on the lookout for a few “Experts in Residence,” but leave it to our own President and Founder, Becki Donatelli, to actually get a few to sit down together in the same room. Becki, a proud graduate of the University of Southern California, recently had the honor of creating a new program called the Donatelli Experts-In-Residence at USC’s prestigious Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Bringing together industry leaders and experts, these panels, roundtables, and discussions will focus on political analysis and media and feature some of the biggest names in the field.

This week, veteran journalist Cokie Roberts headlines a panel discussion with experts-in-residence on Politics, Strategy and Media. Joining the discussion will be James Barnes of Facebook (and Campaign Solutions alumnus!), Matt Rodriguez of Rodriguez Strategies, and Democratic political consultant and USC Political Science Professor Robert Shrum, moderated by Annenberg’s Geoffrey Cowan.

Can’t make it to USC to watch the discussion? Join virtually by watching the webcast this Wednesday, September 16 at 4:00pm PST by clicking on this link.

Enjoy the discussion and check back soon for more from the Donatelli Experts-in-Residence program at USC.

Latest “Debate Bingo” Online Game Isn’t Actually All That New

Tonight marks the official start of primary debate season, with the first GOP presidential primary debate at 9 PM EST in Cleveland, Ohio.

To “prepare” their own supporters for the GOP Debate, the Democratic National Committee recently emailed a link to fundraising page with a printable “Debate Bingo” card, which would allow viewers to participate in an interactive game focused on the possible phrases used during the debate.

But this idea isn’t actually new to the campaign world. Our own Senior Database Administrator, Jeremy Kenney, created a similar game way back in 2003 for primary debates on behalf of the Republican Nation Committee. Jeremy’s digital bingo card featured a series of predicted phrases, allegations, and confrontations, as well as the faces of Democrat debate participants. The game was a hit—attracting nearly 39,000 registered hits and attention from major news outlets like The Washington Post. Unlike today’s DNC version, the 2003 debate bingo card could be printed out, or played interactively online. And that was over ten years ago.

We’re excited by so many of the innovations our team members have brought to the table, especially those that have stood the test of time, like “Debate Bingo.” Much of what are now standard online political tools and tactics were first designed and executed by members of the Campaign Solutions team, and we’re proud to be the first to introduce these pioneering strategies. What new ideas do we have up our sleeve for your campaign or organization? Contact us today to find out. And enjoy tonight’s debate!

Republicans Close The Digital Gap As Web Gurus Go Head-To-Head

Campaign Solutions Founder and President Becki Donatelli was profiled by Reuters. Take a moment to read how we are helping to shape the digital environment.

Republicans Close The Digital Gap As Web Gurus Go Head-To-Head
By Emily Flitter and Grant Smith
Reuters

She’s thrived through two decades of elections; he’s blown his competitors out of the water in a few short years on the scene.

Now the two digital strategy gurus are facing off on opposite sides of the 2016 presidential race, as Republicans get serious about closing a digital strategy gap with Democrats that cost them dearly in the last election.

Campaign disclosures filed last week revealed the two biggest players so far in shaping the increasingly high-powered analytical tools used to tailor messages to donors and voters – a bigger priority than ever for candidates.

On the Democratic side is Andrew Bleeker, a 30-year-old wunderkind who founded the digital consulting firm Bully Pulpit Interactive after whipping up President Barack Obama’s digital outreach strategy for his second presidential run in 2012.

Bleeker cut his teeth in a low-level role on Secretary of State John Kerry’s unsuccessful run in 2004, worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign, and is now playing a leading role in Hillary Clinton’s digital campaign.

The leading guru for the packed field of Republican runners is Becki Donatelli, 61, who began her career working on Ronald Reagan’s 1976 bid for the Republican presidential nomination and who says she was first person to raise political donations on the Internet. The veteran strategist helped sweep several Republican senators into office in 2014, including Iowa’s Joni Ernst and Arkansas’ Tom Cotton.

The campaign of Democratic front-runner Clinton has paid Bully Pulpit $1.4 million, while four Republicans – the senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham – have paid Campaign Solutions a combined $1.7 million. It’s not clear exactly what services the candidates are receiving.

For the first time, Democrats and Republicans are agreed on the importance of good digital strategy and they are investing in it earlier and more heavily than ever.

Since failing to win the presidency in 2012, activists from the conservative Tea Party and the Republican establishment have been talking frankly about where they went wrong.

Obama – building on a strong digital strategy that helped mobilize supporters and voters in his 2008 victory – deployed a complex system for the 2012 race to determine which voters needed the most attention and how to reach them.

Republicans, meanwhile, including those running former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, were still sending out volunteers to knock on doors in neighborhoods they barely understood. They blasted out mass emails with little heed to the sensibilities of their recipients and spent tens of millions on one-size-fits-all television ads, political strategists say.

HIGHER LEVEL

Now they know that sending mass emails, composing witty tweets or getting Facebook users to click “like” on a post is far from sufficient. Through people like Donatelli, they’re ready to square off with Democrats on a higher level.

The most sophisticated operations now use a combination of psychological profiling and data management to talk to people on in highly personal ways. Much of their ammunition for doing so comes from people’s preferences expressed on social media.

Remember that last Facebook quiz, the innocent time-waster during a ten-minute office break? It promised to determine your likeness to characters on the cast of a sitcom, or perhaps your dating proclivities.

It also had another purpose: to gather personality data that could be sold to marketing and digital strategy companies.

“Not only do we know now that Joe is a plumber, we know he has a personality that responds to fear-based advertising,” said Barry Bennett, who is managing Republican Ben Carson’s presidential campaign.

Strategists use the wealth of information to come up with highly precise ways to talk to people. Some of the ads that pop up in the margins of their favorite websites, for instance, are now designed just for them.

The goal is twofold: To raise money and to get people to show up at the polls. Increasing voter turnout for a candidate by just a few percentage points can flip an entire election.

The strategists are also responsible for assessing how people felt about the messages in the ads and whether they were influenced by them.

Donatelli’s latest work involves designing targeted ads using psychological profiles created by London-based firm Cambridge Analytica based on tens of thousands of phone interviews. The firm’s staff includes people with PhD.s in physics and is owned by the Ted Cruz mega-donor Robert Mercer.

Donatelli said her firm maintained strict firewalls between the teams devoted to each of the candidates to avoid any information leaks that could give one an advantage.

Bleeker declined to be interviewed for this story.

Though Bleeker and Donatelli may seem like opposites – the Millennial versus the seasoned insider – they have much in common. Both are constantly on the lookout for new technology and aren’t inclined to scrimp, according to media interviews they’ve given.

They’re the cream of a very small crop of strategists competing in a field so narrow they sometimes cross paths working for non-political clients.

Donatelli told Reuters last week her firm’s longevity had its advantages: “We’ve been around long enough to see trends come and go,” she said. “We have a healthy skepticism and a really healthy desire to try new things.”

The original article appeared in Business Insider.

Welcoming Two New Team Members

Election Day 2016 may still be about 18 months away, but for us, it feels right around the corner. As we get prepared for what will surely be an exciting cycle, we’re adding members to our team to make sure the most innovative digital and social strategies, fundraising advice, and advertising campaigns are part of our client’s arsenal of tools.

Just in the first few months of the year, we’ve welcomed two new team members to the Campaign Solutions family: Dustin Call and Matthew Hurtt.

Dustin Call

Dustin is based in our Sacramento office and brings a wealth of experience in California’s political world to the team. A skilled political professional, Dustin won the first race he managed and has worked in a variety of other campaign staff positions at nearly every level of elected office throughout California.

In addition to his experience working on campaigns, Dustin has completed RNC Political Education programs and even ran for elected office himself. Understanding the needs that campaigns have enables Dustin to provide our clients with the very best service.

He has also served in the California State Legislature as a legislative aide to a member of the State Assembly and as a district representative to a member of the State Senate.

Dustin studied political science at the University of California, Davis and is an alumnus of the Policy Program at the University of California Center Sacramento. He and his wife Stephanie reside in Woodland, California, where he serves as Chairman of the Yolo County Republican Party, the youngest county party chair in the state.

Matthew Hurtt

Matthew joined Campaign Solutions in April after spending years writing and designing direct mail fundraising appeals for more than two dozen Republican candidates and committees.

Matthew got his start in national conservative politics at the Leadership Institute, where he identified, trained, and mobilized thousands of activists across the country. During the 2010 campaign cycle, he managed a state senate race in Maryland, overseeing the fundraising, message development, and ground operations.

Additionally, Matthew serves as Chairman of the Arlington County Young Republicans, one of the largest Young Republican organizations in the country, and was an At-Large Delegate from Virginia to the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012. He has been published on Reason Magazine’s “Hit and Run” blog and a number of other national conservative and libertarian outlets.

Matthew grew up outside Nashville and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 2009.

Dustin and Matthew are ready to share their experience and expertise with a wide range of clients. Looking for someone to give the best digital advice to your campaign, organization, or PAC this year? Contact us today.

Campaign Solutions Team Takes Home Five Awards at the 2015 Pollie Awards

Our amazing clients inspire us to do great work every day. In the 2014 cycle, Campaign Solutions served as strategic digital consultants to over two dozen campaigns, sent over a billion emails, raised tens of millions of dollars, and had over 66 million views of our social and advertising content.

We’re proud this work has led to an amazing honor – a total of five Pollie Awards presented by the American Association of Political Consultants at the 2015 Pollie Awards and Conference:

Best Use of Internet Radio
Gold – Allen West Guardian Fund

Best Use of Twitter
Silver – John Bolton Super PAC

Internet Advertising (Online/Social/Mobile) – Best Use of Voter File-Matched Advertising – Banners
Silver – John Bolton Super PAC

Internet Advertising (Online/Social/Mobile) – Best Use of Search Engine Marketing
Silver – Lindsey Graham for Senate 2014

Website – U.S. Senate
Bronze – Lindsey Graham for Senate 2014

During our almost two decades in the industry, Campaign Solutions and sister company Connell Donatelli have won over one hundred Pollie Awards from the AAPC, along with a number of Reed Awards, Golden Dot Awards, and other amazing honors.

We are thankful for this great honor and the opportunity to help our clients achieve and exceed their goals. Congratulations to our winning clients!