A website and community for campaign planning professionals and political candidates has been a vision of mine for some time and I’m so happy to bring that vision to life with the launch of CampaignPlanner.org.
That’s great Craig, but why do we need this site?
This is the site I wished were around when I started working in political campaigns. I had always looked for a place to network with other political operatives, to learn the best practices of campaign planning, and to find a few templates that would make me more efficient with the very limited resources I had available at the time.
Of course, where were some sites that handled education, like campaign courses or 3-day intensive planning seminars, and a few of them are pretty good. Expensive, but good. There were a few list serves that connected campaign pros, but mostly those were leftover lists of staff members from previous presidential campaigns and most of those lists and teams died out after a few years when the ex-staff all find new jobs. And templates don’t really exist in the political industry because so few people have worked on enough campaigns to actually standardize what they do, or they just aren’t process oriented enough to plan ahead.
Unfortunately, I was never able to find that one site which brought all those separate campaign planning subjects under one roof, so I had to create everything from scratch on my own.
And that’s what makes CampaignPlanner.org so great!
What is CampaignPlanner.org?
CampaignPlanner.org is a place where you can drop in and get advice on a topic where you might be stuck, find some help for your campaign, or to download a few resources and templates that let you do it all yourself! It’s a place where learning is democratized and put back into the community for the common good.
In fact, everything on this site is aimed at giving you the knowledge and resources you need to run your own successful campaign, or the campaign of any other political candidate, and at any level of office you choose.
We do this through:
- article content, like the blog post you’re reading right now
- community forums with discussion topics
- public affinity groups
- coursework, lessons, and private group cohorts
- a document repository with campaign templates and guides
- a private social network to connect with and message other campaign pros
The best part is that our site is also offered as a native application on iOS and Android devices, so you have the power of CampaignPlanner.org in your pocket at all times!
And in just a few weeks we’ll be launching community job boards that bring together industry veterans and hiring managers at agencies, firms, and within campaigns that are running or staffing up soon. More on that in just a bit.
This sounds great, so how do I get started?
We encourage you to take a look around and play with all the features. Jump into the forums and create questions and get answers from our moderation team and other members. Take a course and download some templates to help you with your campaign or your campaign planner business.
And rather than just dump everything on you at once, we’ve created a and introductory video and a “getting started” tutorial that walk you through the different features of the site and helps you get up and ringing quickly.
Make sure to give us your feedback so we can improve the site and make it everything you want it to be. You can do that through our feedback form here.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy your time here and find the site valuable enough to visit every day.
I look forward to seeing you in the forums!
Craig Grella
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