How to Plan a Political Campaign

Series Summary

You spend most of your waking hours telling everybody how things should be, how this government official should have never been elected in the first place, how the city council made a huge mistake by passing this or that bill, how the whole country has collapsed in a smoldering heap of poor decisions, mismanagement and general incompetence. Perhaps what the world really needs is you, someone who cares about the right issues, someone to speak out against injustice, someone to preserve the integrity of this great nation. So get up off of your couch, stand up for what you believe in and sign up to be a candidate in the next election.

In this free series of videos on how to run for pubic office, our expert on political candidacy and government media relations tells you step-by-step how to get your candidate (or yourself) elected. You will learn how to choose the right candidate, how to petition to get them on the ballot and how to choose your campaign staff. We even give you insight on how to get cheap furniture for the campaign office.

Once all the basics are in place, Expert Village gives you guidelines for budgeting and financing your campaign as well as publicizing your candidate and their key issues. Wondering how to set up publicity appearances? Jim Goettler draws from his years of PR experience to share tips on how to recruit volunteers and set up advocacy groups. Now you know how to go about getting elected, so it’s up to you to get out there and start shaking hands and kissing babies…

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jim Goettler on behalf of Expert Village. This is going to be a video about managing a political campaign. What I'm going to try to do, is not explain everything there is about any political campaign but give you enough information so that you know what questions to ask, where to go for more information if you want to get into the field of political campaigning and working for or running a campaign yourself. First of all I want to say that I have been very fortunate in my life to have worked on a couple of presidential campaigns of senior staff level. I've run a very successful environmental statewide campaign, I've consulted with a lot of local candidates in their efforts to gain office. So, it's that perspective I'm going to bring to this whole video project. There are two types of campaigns that I'm going to try and cover in the course of this series. One is a candidate campaign where your working for or with an individual running for political office. And, the other type will be an initiative campaign where you're working to put a ballet initiative on a ballet or possibly an initiative to your state legislature. They are very different animals. The approach is somewhat different and I'm going to try and cover at least the general overview of how these two types of campaigns operate and likewise how they're somewhat different. The next segment I'm going to touch on getting a little bit with the candidate campaign of how to manage a campaign for a political candidate for political office. Thanks."