It's no secret government relations and advocacy professionals have been using technology to execute campaigns for years
It's no secret government relations and advocacy professionals have been using technology to execute campaigns for years. Online petitions, email campaigns, social media accounts - all of these have become standard practice for advocates of all kinds.
But they've also lost some of their effectiveness as political offices - which have found ways to filter, block or avoid certain content - have become immune to them.
Fortunately, the pace at which technology moves means there are always new ways to grab someone's attention.
Here are the top four digital tactics used by advocacy professionals today.
If your campaign involves advertising, forget spending thousands for a half page in The Australian that won't even make a politician's media monitors. Thanks to location targeting, you can now get your message to a super targeted audience. How targeted? Think 'Parliament House on a sitting week' kind of targeted, which means potentially engaging every Facebook-scrolling politician and any Googling staffer.
Businesses and nonprofits alike have seen strong results when incorporating Snapchat filters into their advocacy campaigns, and are particularly great for public facing campaigns. W Hotels did a great job of using the popular social media platform to raise awareness around LGBT rights when it commissioned filters for the 2016 Pride Week in the US. ## 3. Email tracking. Also known as read receipts, this is a no-brainer if you want to work smarter and be more strategic with your stakeholder engagement. Email tracking services like those offered by Hubspot, allow you to see who's opening your emails and when, allowing you to follow-up immediately when you're front of mind. In government engagement, it means you can be more strategic - you're much better off targeting an engaged backbencher, than a Ministerial adviser who hasn't opened even one of your last 10 emails.
Creating a dedicated landing page for your campaign, or even creating a standalone page on your existing website, is a simple but effective way to say that your organisation is serious about an issue. For larger more bureaucratic organisations, the hardest part will be getting internal approvals. But once you've got the green light, it's very easy to set one up. And as sites like Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace have shown us, they don't need to cost much!
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