The Campaign Team

One of the most important pieces to running a successful campaign for NISG President/Vice President is having an effective campaign team. With less than a month to reach out to 13,000 students, it is nearly impossible for the two students running to work on their own. So who is it that makes up these campaign teams? Generally, the candidates will turn to their close personal friends first. This usually includes making a list of your friends that you know will help if you ask. Next you add individuals who you believe are influential over a certain demographic that you want to solicit votes from to that list. Once you have made a list, you assign roles to these individuals. There are many positions that could be utilized on the campaign trail, but here are a few essentials: The Campaign Manager, Finance, Website/Media, Volunteers, Platform, and Marketing/PR. Now lets go over the responsibilities.

The campaign manager usually is one of your closer friends. This individual has to be trusted and is essentially the 3^rd member of the ticket. When choosing my campaign manager, it was important to find someone who was freakishly organized, responsible, and able to handle the large personalities of my running mate (Jake Rudy) and myself. Our campaign manager, Mary Jo, was fantastic for our campaign. She was responsible for organizing the campaign team, making decisions for the day-to-day activities, and purchasing (1,000 cookies to give away or 500?). This person will take a huge chunk of the stress off of the backs of the candidates to allow them to campaign and not worry about the details of how. Mary Jo made my schedule and decided which groups I would speak to and which groups Jake would head off to. Did I mention all this was done for free? Needless to say, the campaign manager is very important. If the candidates don’t have someone like this to depend upon, they will be taking on a significant amount of unneeded stress and it could be detrimental to their health, classes, and campaign.

The rest of the positions are pretty self-explanatory. Finance keeps track of your expenditures. This person plays a pretty critical role with the new spending cap of $2,000 for the candidates. They will need to help the candidates make decisions with the campaign manager about what to spend money on and what the campaign can function without. Website/Media will be building the campaign a website and then depending on budget decisions creating television ads and youtube videos. Volunteer coordinator is an individual that can coordinate where your volunteers will be and when they need to be there. Many students don’t realize that campaigns need to be everywhere, without the candidates actually being everywhere. You need volunteers at the dining centers, the union, hanging up posters, etc. and often times this can become a hectic schedule. Having a great volunteer coordinator can have a positive impact on the campaign’s success.

Then there is an individual responsible for the platform. While the candidates will develop this themselves, just like with any school paper or important document, you want an extra set of eyes to go over it for grammar and spelling. This individual or group of people can also help you do research. In student government campaigns, you don’t exactly have to reinvent the wheel. Many other schools have great ideas that you can bring to UNI. It is just a matter of finding these ideas on the Internet, then figuring out if they could work at UNI and then how you could implement them. The candidates can’t do this all on their own. Again, if they do, it could end up taking time that they might not have.

Finally, Marketing and PR is a critical position as well. This person will design all aspects of the campaign – what it looks like to the student body. Most candidates in the more recent elections will have a campaign logo. Something that students can identify quickly with the campaign. You will need designs for posters, t-shirts, buttons, facebook group pictures, monitor screen slides in the union, and graphics for the website. This person is essentially creating a brand and it is important that it is catchy, sharp, and the message is clear. If this person fails, the campaign fails. Period.

As you can see, the campaign team is vital to the success of the campaign. We are all humans so there will be slip-ups and errors. But the campaign team that can minimize errors and recover quickly will be the one that comes out on top on election night. The candidates are only as strong as the team they can assemble to help them.