How Can Bel Strategy Help My Campaign?

By Patrick Abbs, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF OF STRATEGY

We founded Bel Strategy to help political campaigns championing positive change and responsible stewardship spread their messages through the new and powerful communication avenues of the internet. Our innovative and rigorously proven approach to digital outreach has helped Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations we have partnered with across the U.S. extend their fundraising, list acquisition, GOTV, and persuasion strategies to the critically important internet landscape. For partner campaigns and organizations already doing digital outreach, we have more than doubled the impact and cost-effectiveness of their online messaging in motivating constituents to donate, volunteer, and vote.

Bel Strategy’s success in digital outreach comes from how we spread our partners’ messages. Criss-crossing the internet is an amazing abundance of communication avenues that only exist in the digital world. We have learned how to navigate these avenues to connect each individual campaign message with constituents whose views most resonate with that message. The aggregate effect of this approach over the lifecycle of a campaign is that each of your constituents has an individualized window into your campaign’s platform that uniquely highlights the issues they care most about and the positions they most passionately support.

Let’s take a look at how this actually works.

Sally is an impassioned and involved member of her community who is running for the city council. She has a wide range of issues she plans to take on if elected, including increasing women’s access to reproductive healthcare, expanding and renovating local parks, and introducing programs to help her city’s homeless population find housing and employment.

Each of Sally’s platform issues will resonate to different degrees with different voters. Arjun, who frequents his neighborhood park with his family and volunteers at a homeless shelter once a month, would be very interested in and supportive of Sally’s parks and homelessness initiatives. Meanwhile, Margaret, who is a passionate advocate for women’s reproductive rights and has experienced homelessness herself earlier in her life, would be galvanized by Sally’s homelessness and healthcare initiatives.

Now, imagine that Sally’s campaign has a magical mailing list.

The core of this mailing list’s magic is that it only sends mailers about specific campaign messages to the people who care about those messages. When Sally’s campaign sends out a mailer about reproductive rights, it goes to Margaret but not Arjun; a parks renovation mailer goes to Arjun but not Margaret, and a mailer about her homelessness initiative goes to both. Sally’s campaign doesn’t need to know anything about Margaret or Arjun for the mailer’s magic to work; it just does it on its own.

And hey, since our mailing list is already magic, let’s also say that each piece of mail only costs about a penny to send.

With their magical mailing list, Sally’s campaign can now reach and engage Arjun and Margaret (and each of the thousands of other voters in Sally’s district) with an individually tailored set of campaign messages that resonate with their passions and worldviews. And at a cost that is a hundred times cheaper than a non-magical mailing list that just sends every message to both Arjun and Margaret whether or not they care about that message.

Let’s see how this magical mailing list is made a reality through digital outreach.

Digital platforms such as Facebook and Google continuously develop and maintain thousands of topic-oriented ‘target audiences’ each containing people who engage with those topics online. So, for example, if Margaret reads about Planned Parenthood on Google then she will be included in Google’s “reproductive healthcare” audience, and if Arjun follows community parks on Facebook then he will be included in Facebook’s “local parks” audience.

When we distribute a political campaign ad through one of these digital platforms, we can tell the platform to send the ad to only people within one or more of these target audiences in addition to whatever voter universe targeting a campaign wants to do. For example, we can tell Facebook to only send an ad about Sally’s parks renovation plan only to people who are both in the campaign’s persuasion universe voter file list and Facebook’s local parks audience.

Since Arjun is in the local park's audience, he will see the park renovation ad that resonates with an issue he personally cares about. Meanwhile, Margaret will not see the park's ad, which both spares her from a campaign message she doesn’t care about, and saves Sally’s campaign the money it would have otherwise wasted showing Margaret that message.

By election day, this digital outreach strategy results in Arjun, Margaret, and countless other voters in Sally’s district having an individualized window into Sally’s platform that highlights the issues they personally care about. Arjun knows that a vote for Sally is a vote to improve the parks he loves and help address the homelessness crisis he volunteers his time towards, while Margaret knows that a vote for Sally is a vote to expand her reproductive rights and to save others from enduring homelessness as she once did.

So how much did this digital outreach strategy cost Sally’s campaign? Well, for the cost of getting a mailer in front of a single one of Sally’s constituents, we can pay for about 50 people to see a digital ad. And since each digital ad goes out to only the people within a voter universe that care about that ad’s specific campaign message, we only pay to get each ad in front of half as many people as the mailer. This means that each of our digital dollars goes a hundred times as far as each of our mail dollars. For the cost of a single “vote blue” mailer ad, Sally’s campaign got 20 messages about everything from parks to homelessness to healthcare to gun laws to infrastructure in front of each constituent who specifically cares about each issue 5 times. Wow!

And Bel Strategies doesn’t stop there. Catch our next blog post to learn about how we adjust ad spend across target audiences even after a digital ad is launched to account for real-time feedback about how each audience is responding to each ad message.