One of the biggest issues that I deal with when taking over a campaign where the campaign manager is a family member, or a good friend, with little to no experience in campaign management is efficiency. While stepping into that emotionally sensitive environment of “we’re bringing in a professional” it’s usually best mitigated by keeping the friend or relative as the manager and I’m there to simply help. However, that’s when teacher mode is the best practice.
Where I usually start with “Teacher Mode” is to ask some probing questions and bring solutions in the form of, “Have you thought about it this way?” The thing that I’m bringing forward is how to efficiently use scarce campaign resources in the most efficient way possible to get to the end result… The win. When I was in my masters program, they called this Constrained Optimization Modeling. I simply call it good campaign management.
The biggest place where efficiency can be leveraged is through microtargeting. Simply put, usually less than half of the people, in a given district, will vote. So then why are we spending precious campaign resources (time, money, and volunteer/candidate effort) on those who will never show up to vote in the first place? By microtargeting the district, the campaign focuses on those who do vote, which makes the return on investment and return on effort much greater for less money, while not wasting time and wearing out volunteers on efforts that won’t bring results.
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