CampaignFoundations.com

Your web site has to be kept up to date, but that's only a start. Make sure you use your email lists as well to stay in touch with your supporters and the public.

Our Basic Hosting Package comes packaged with eight lists preconfigured for your campaign. Our subscription forms are ready to link from your site so you can feed website visitors directly into your lists as subscribers.

We provide the test list so you can practice your mailman administration skills without impacting your campaign's subscribers. The mailman list is how you can communicate with the administrators of your other lists.

And for the campaign itself, we pre-create the following lists. You will get both a media list (for the working media) and a news list and weekly-updates list (for the general public) to support the work of your Press Secretary.

Your candidate and campaign manager have the team list as a private channel of communication among key campaign staff. Keep this list small. Make it by invitation of the candidate only. Every candidate needs a kitchen cabinet and a kitchen table around which to privately discuss campaign developments, opportunities and strategy.

Your candidate, campaign manager and volunteer coordinators can use the vols-annc list to broadcast announcements to any supporter who wants to subscribe. And if you want to let your volunteers communicate among themselves you also have the vols-dx list.

You must make a strategic decision going in which of these lists you are prepared to support with an appropriate flow of traffic which represents the campaign well. It would reflect poorly on the campaign to invite supporters or the public to subscribe to a list who's only traffic was the monthly password reminders. It would reflect poorly to build a subscriber base but then not take the time to proof read and spell check your work. Ask your key volunteers to take appropriate care of their grammar and syntax, or moderate their content so it gets polished by your media team before it goes public.

Roll out your lists as quickly as you are prepared to create traffic to make subscribing to them meaningful for your subscribers.

You might not launch your vols-annc and vols-dx lists until after your volunteer coordinator is prepared to create a base level of traffic on them to make them useful.

You need a commitment from your candidate and each key campaign role to generate at least two paragraphs of material each week for the weekly-updates, even if its the press secretary's job to refine and publish the content.

Engaging your campaign supporters on line means you must both

(1) be careful not to abuse their consent to send your materials to their inbox; and

(2) that you must honor their intent to subscribe by not ignoring them.

Use this medium to send traffic appropriate in content and volume to your subscriber's expectations and it will be reflected in your real world campaign as increased contributions, volunteer engagement and turn-out at events and at the polls.