Acquiring Media Finances for Political Campaigns

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jim Goettler on behalf of Expert Village and this is a video series about managing a political campaign, be it a campaign for public office or a campaign for an initiative. Most staffs for a political campaign can be divided into three areas. You need to think in these three areas what help you're long range planning for the campaign. One is to think in terms of media group. Can people who will be working with the media know how to pitch stories and write in a manner that's acceptable to the media. The second group is the financial group and these are folks whose responsibility is not only raising the money but just as importantly, tracking the money that comes into the campaign and is spent. Finances, as you well know, are often the weak link of a campaign because people make mistakes, oftentimes very honest but as a point where the opposition is ready to pounce at any moment if there are some discrepancies, as innocent as those discrepancies may be. So we have a media portion, we have a financial portion and then we have what's usually called field, or a field office. Now a field office, I think, is the fun part. The field office is that which goes out with the candidate or into the field and takes the message of the campaign, again be it a candidate or an initiative, to people who are probably not thinking about it at all. The idea is to convince these people to either contribute, to vote for or participate in your campaign. So again, our office is made up of three very distinct sections: finances, media and field. In the next section I'll go a little more detail into the finances of a campaign. Thank you."