Responding to Campaign Challenges Brought on by the Current Crisis
By Melissa Feldsher, Kaitlin Funaro, Jacob Hay, Pi James, Manny Rivera, Kevin Singer, and Dana Variano
One key component of running a successful campaign is the ability to adapt strategy when the circumstances around you change. The COVID-19 crisis has upended even the most carefully planned campaigns and challenged us to find new ways to help our clients achieve their goals or even identify new goals altogether.
What are some ways you have adapted and found flexibility in your campaigns?
Kaitlin F: I’m channeling our Fighting for Change work here but I think one of the hardest steps is recognizing the need to change your strategy. On an effective campaign — an organized effort with a specific, concrete goal and a limited time frame — you’re going to have multiple strategies and it’s most likely that some or all of them are going to need to change now in this new environment. A lot of thought, time, and effort went into those strategies and to reassess everything you thought you knew — or what has worked before — is hard, but it’s also necessary sometimes. In this case, it took weeks (or months!) to recognize that this wasn’t a short term blip that we could ride out and then just carry on as usual. It’s going to fundamentally change our society for at least the medium term — and likely forever. Good campaign leadership starts with the courage to say what we’ve been doing isn’t going to work anymore.
Jacob H: For the most part — unless it’s a group that’s truly at the center of the COVID-19 storm — a major shift in strategy right now is a sign it wasn’t a very sound strategy in the first place or even a strategy at all. Chances are the goals a campaign wants to accomplish and it’s major premises to achieving them are unchanged in a COVID-19 environment. It’s the ways and means of getting there that may need to change now.
Kaitlin F: But a lot of our clients — from education to healthcare to more general organizing and mobilization — are at the center of the storm. There are new priorities and goals that didn’t seem as urgent before that are critical now.
Melissa F: How organizations act and respond today will be a barometer for how they are seen moving forward. So it’s imperative that clients look at campaign planning through the lens of how the landscape has changed and react in a way that’s authentic, empathetic, and responsive to their target audience’s mindset. That may not result in changing the campaign drastically, but more often than not, I think it results in a renewed urgency around the issues our clients are working on.
Pi J: Agreed. COVID-19 has actually magnified the disparities and heightened the challenges on issues we’re campaigning to change — homelessness, health equity, criminal justice, access to education, support to student parents, climate change. The needs have become greater, more urgent, more complex. So we’re adapting our strategies to build on this urgency. Our digital strategies are changing and becoming more important than ever. To Jacob’s point, having a strong strategy to begin with means we can more easily pivot where needed to make sure we’re still pushing forward. And to Melissa’s point, we also need to make sure that we are doing this authentically for our clients and in a way that does not feel opportunistic. We’ve all seen how it goes when brands or organizations get it wrong.
Manny R: COVID-19 has created a moment that’s unique in our history where every client and organization seems to be focused on one thing: how to respond to the challenges brought on by the pandemic. And because we’re all on the same boat right now, one opportunity COVID-19 provides is the opportunity (and the strategic switch) to focus on building partnerships and coalitions around a shared goal to broaden the tent for your client’s campaign.
Many of the campaigns that we work on are about building a movement for change, which requires awareness and action by others outside of our immediate client. It’s rare for a single organization to single-handedly drive perception change, policy change, infrastructure change, or behavior change — that requires friends.
Kaitlin F: How do you determine what’s less relevant now (or impossible — like door-knocking and in-person events)? What has that process of adapting your strategy been like?
Melissa F: I would first look to how audience behavior has changed. For better or worse, you have a captive audience (pun intended?). Are people more motivated to participate because they now have the time? Are they seeking virtual connection? Do they want to make their voices heard more now? I would start with these questions and motivations to inform your outreach strategy. For example, voting by mail has been a progressive priority for years but the recent Wisconsin primary election created a huge opportunity to raise the profile and make it a ‘must have’ issue for future elections. When we’re adapting strategies for our clients, we should think about how to ride these kinds of tailwinds.
Pi J: As part of one campaign, we were scheduled to deliver a messaging training, as well as a communications and media capacity building workshop, at Africa Climate Week in Uganda last month. With the conference canceled and shelter in place orders in effect across countries, we’ve had to move these trainings online and come up with additional ways to reach participants in multiple countries who may not have the best internet connectivity. It’s required creative thinking and further research into what tools are out there, as well as asking the right questions, to make sure we’re going to be able to deliver something that people want, need, and can actually access.
Beyond in-person events or trainings, the part of the strategy I’ve found we’ve had to most consistently rethink is digital advertising. As people are scrolling through the never-ending feed of COVID-19-related posts and news, an ad promoting anything feels out of place, let alone one that’s trying to make a somewhat obviously tenuous COVID-19 connection. However, when social media channels are more “pay to play” than ever, how do you still get your message out? In the medium to longer-term, we’re re-strategizing and exploring if there are ways to promote strong campaign content to a wider audience that feels relevant and genuine.
Dana V: I think people should always be careful about ads, and like everything else, COVID-19 is bringing that to the forefront. Ads are showing your community you have enough money to spend to give some of it to platforms to help grow your base, and that act in itself will make some balk. So you need to be careful: make ads feel less like you’re selling something, and more like your regular organic content. In my experience, a great way around this is to work on organic posts that are authentic and meaningful, and connecting with your audience, and boost them. Avoid writing posts that sound like you’re selling Tide — because you’re not. You’re working to grow connections and build a base, not sell an object. Be careful about your tone, and how this may come off to somebody as they scroll by (this was true before COVID-19, too). Ads look and behave differently for issue advocacy, and I think brands may have to learn a thing or two from us right now, rather than vice versa.
Kevin S: I’ll be the dissenting voice. Paid digital, ironically, is one of the few things I can think of that can stay on the same trajectory. In fact, since paid digital is often used as a tool when you can’t get something to take off organically, it’s even more important. That said, because social media ad performance is related to ad shareability, ads that are related to COVID-19 will likely perform better — because that’s what everyone is talking about. As you noted, sometimes better ad performance doesn’t lead to better outcomes, and tenuous COVID-19 connections might put people off.
Bottom line with regard to paid digital, in my opinion, is stay the course unless a) an opportunity presents itself to tie your message to COVID-19 or b) your digital ads were leading up to some analog moment that isn’t happening anymore.
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That’s it for today’s chat on adapting strategy. Check out our posts on earned media, messaging, and digital engagement here and stay tuned for more.
Thank you to our clients and partners who are on the frontlines supporting the communities most affected right now.
RALLY is an issue-driven communications firm | Certified force for good by B Corporation
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