New Media Makes Low-budget Campaigns Feasible

Matt Dernoga from UMD for Clean Energy participated in a successful local campaign in Autumn 2009. He shares his thorough insights on social media and campaign messaging on It’s Getting Hot In Here. Below I’ve summarized the backstory via excerpts. Click through for all the advice and details.

“The premise behind our campaign was pretty simple. Traditionally in our College Park City Council elections, it only took a couple hundred votes to elect a candidate to the city council, and less than a thousand to elect the Mayor. Students hadn’t been mobilized to vote locally in a long time, and in 2007 something like 7 students voted from the dorms. UMD for Clean Energy decided we would draft a platform on a host of energy, development, transportation, and environmental issues, and meet with every single candidate for the council(this ended up being 16!) about them. We would then endorse what we felt were the candidates that would champion our issues, and mobilize students on a scale no one had before to vote for the greenest candidates. Basically, almost 100% of the student voters would be voting with the environment as the #1 issue. We decided our efforts would culminate on election day with a green march from the center of our campus to city hall to vote. We called the campaign “Green for College Park”. Classes started at the end of August, and the election was on November 3rd, so we had about 2 months to organize.”

UMD for Clean Energy extensively pursued positive media coverage and engaged local blogs to reach their community particularly.

“Although we were having success on Federal climate legislation by getting into The Gazette, The Washington Post, and The Diamondback, the coverage of our local effort was lacking. Rather than settling for bumping our heads against the wall with Green for College Park media, we turned to online media. This is where I’m grateful that I had an understanding from my own blogging which sites Kenny should pursue. In our blitz, we got co-authored guest posts in Maryland Politics Blog (#1 progressive blog in MD), Rethink College Park (most popular College Park blog), interviewed on Just Up the Pike (popular Montgomery County blog), and Climate Progress(you all know that one!). I also cross-posted our press release from my blog into Itsgettinghotinhere, the main blog for the youth climate movement. The Washington Post’s blog also picked us up from all the noise, as did Greater Greater Washington. Other blogs also linked to the blogs above. We continued the cycle by putting our media on our website and facebook, and the website was linked in all of these blog posts. Thank you new media!

“This avalanche of new media brought us attention in College Park, which coupled with our outreach and lobbying efforts started creating a juggernaut as far as name recognition went. [...]

“What I learned last semester above all is how media work can make a good campaign great. I have a hard time imagining what our efforts would have looked like, and how they would’ve come across if we had not aggressively pursued the media, and relentlessly pushed our message. The great media work by Kenny and our group as a whole amplified every other aspect of our campaign. Grassroots, lobbying, membership, and motivation from seeing your efforts in a positive light in the news. It was all so much stronger because of the media. [... Read the full article]

The result of UMD for Clean Energy’s campaign to get sustainability-minded students to the polls and to endorse pro-sustainability candidates was the election of 5 environmentally-friendly city council members (out of 9) including the mayor. Certainly, their strategy and tactics proved themselves pragmatic.