Rosanne Dunkelberger
Between COVID-19 and an Election Day that has morphed into “Election Season,” political campaign managers — from the local town council to national races — are having to finesse their campaign tactics get out the votes.
“In Florida, you really have three completely separate elections — vote-by-mail, early voting and Election Day, and in some in some districts elections are already decided by the time Election Day comes,” said Elnatan Rudolph, a political consultant with Converge GPS, who is currently involved in about 50 races with a focus on text messaging. “You have to treat the day they get that they get their ballot as Election Day. And that’s when you have to start communicating with people.”
No doubt about it, COVID has changed the world of campaigning, according to Rudolph. “More campaigns are using text than ever before … because mail is slower and people aren’t opening their mail as much. But text messaging comes to your phone. You can’t ignore it.”
For all the talk about the difficulty of communicating with people via their smartphones, Rudolph said one of his firm’s data files has about 6 million Florida cellphone numbers, about one for every two and a half voters in the state.
But people are wise to the ways of smartphone campaigning and a bulk text from “Joe” asking you to vote for a candidate won’t cut it. “We have found that people don’t buy that first-person thing anymore,” he said. Instead, cellphones could be used to disseminate videos or information from direct-mail pieces.
Rudolph said texting is a great boon for incumbents but should be used well beyond the campaign season. It can be used as an outreach tool in an emergency — “We did over a million and a half text messages statewide state ride during Hurricane Michael” — or something as silly as sending a happy birthday video to constituents.
High-priced television ads are losing their luster these days. “People are watching TV less and less,” he said. “People are watching streaming services or DVR-ing something and skipping through the commercials.”
Instead, Rudolph said, campaign operatives “are trying to figure out how to think that form of video and get it to people in other ways.”
One solution has been developed by Storyvine, a video tech company launching a campaign-friendly app called Storyvine NOW in September, which can capture testimonials and “automagically” edit and create a professional-looking video using a smartphone.
“The whole idea for designing this product (is the) idea of democratizing video storytelling — making it available all the way down-ballot,” said Storyvine CEO Kyle Shannon.
“You can also download it and use it in any way you want,” he continued, by pushing it on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. “One of the other things we’ve seen that’s very powerful is not only are you sharing them on your social channels, but you’re giving them back to the people who are in them, allowing them to share on their social channels.”
“My goal has always been to infuse technology into political campaigns because political campaigns are usually about a decade behind technology,” Rudolph said. “I don’t have to be the smartest, but if I just bring a little new idea and figure out ‘if this could work for business, why can’t it work for politics’?”
