How to run a National Campaign

A tale by

Cody Green

When one of your clients requires you to run a national campaign (eek!), say to raise funds for a nonprofit, there are a few things that you need to consider and put into place for things to run smoothly. Before you can roll out the campaign, a template needs to be set-up and followed as a guideline.

Here’s the national campaign outline template we use:

  1. Promotion concept: What is the concept and how will it benefit collaborators
  2. Intended dates of implementation
  3. Goals: What you are hoping to achieve
  4. Mechanics: How the competition/campaign will be run
  5. Creative: Design of the campaign (Posters, stickers, social posts)
  6. Prize details
  7. Budget

Once you have these steps set out, send the campaign outline to the necessary people for approval. Once approval has been given, start making your to-do lists and organising your planners – it’s time to get things in order.

If it is an SMS campaign, organise with a service provider to receive an invoice. Arrange a photoshoot if you are using props, and use the images on social media. This is a must to promote your campaign! Start preparing content for your creatives. This means posters, social media campaigns and any other exciting media to engage with your audience. Once approval has been given for these creative elements, establish how many people would like to get involved and keep an updated list of participating collaborators.

Once you’ve uploaded and scheduled the final artworks creative executions, start promoting the campaign. Do this via emailers, website and social media! A press release is also an option to locally-identified publications. Once your campaign is up and running, keep communication channels open between all campaign collaborators. As soon as the campaign has ended, don’t forget to remove all promotional items off-website and social media.

Throughout your campaign, it’s important to keep a tally of all earnings received, as well as expenses incurred, and send these to the relevant people to calculate total campaign profit.

Things I’ve learned:

With some experience in the field of a campaign running, I’ve learned a few things along the way.

It’s better to run short, fun campaigns. The longer the campaign runs for, the faster consumers get bored and distracted. Next, your communication with collaborators must be consistent. For collaborators to be interested in participating, they must see a benefit or incentive as to why they are getting involved. And lastly, I learned that if costs are struggling to be covered by a set budget, run a fundraiser!

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