Digital Campaign Wrap Up Checklist [2024]

Win or lose, the active period of your campaign has come to an end and its time to prepare your digital assets for the post-election period. You cannot simply ignore your digital campaign and dust it off two years from now.

Unlike TV ads, mail, or phones that can be turned on or off and work instantly, content and distribution are inseparable with digital campaign marketing channels. It took your campaign months to build up the email list and sender reputation to have a successful online fundraising campaign. All of your campaigns online activity boosted the ranking of your website on Google Search.

Here are some key steps for keeping your digital campaign going after the election.

Keep Your Website Updated

Your website was focused on winning an election. Now it needs to help you stay in touch with your supporters. Change the content to reflect this, including updating your calls to action to reflect the post-election posture of your campaign.

Youll still be sending visitors to your website from social media and email, so make sure you provide periodic updates so the content isnt stale. This also helps with ensuring your campaigns website ranks well on Google Search.

Inevitably, a contentious issue will arise drawing attention from voters. This ensures theyll be able to find you and show their support for you politically through an email signup or donation.

Create Email Automations

New people will be signing up for your email list every month between now and your next election. At a minimum, make sure your welcome email doesnt mention an opponent who has been defeated or an election that has passed.

Even better is to write a series of email automations that simply run in the background and engage these new supporters. Spend this down time to collect as much information as you can about them and build a relationship so you can activate them during election season.

Keep Posting on Social Media

All of the posting youve been doing on Facebook, Instagram, and X has built up an engaged audience. Dont ignore them until the next time you need their votes or a crisis emerges. Social media platforms rely on signals like comments and replies to gauge whether your posts should be distributed. When they dont have data for months, it will be slow going to reactivate your social accounts.

You dont have to post as frequently in the off season as you did leading up to the campaign, but a few posts per week to your political social media channels will do the trick.

Keep Sending Emails

Your sender reputation is a key factor determining email deliverability (whether your messages go to the inbox or spam folder), and it is built by sending emails regularly and getting engagement through opens and clicks.

If you ignore your email list for months, youre more likely to be flagged as spam by email inbox providers like Google and Yahoo. Also, some of the supporters on your list will forget why they signed up and report you as spam or their email addresses will have changed and you get bounce backs. These are all detrimental to your sender reputation.

Again, the volume should be lighter, but plan to send an email to different segments of your list once a week. Each email needs to have a clear call to action, like taking a survey, signing up to volunteer, or donate. Otherwise you wont generate the clicks needed to maintain a strong sender reputation.

Gather & Change Passwords

Your campaign has a lot of passwords. They may live in a spreadsheet, a post-it note on someones desk, or in your campaign managers head. Dont get locked out of your website, email, or social media because you cant track down a password.

Get setup on LastPass to securely store all of your passwords in one place and take the time to update them. Dozens of staff and volunteers may have had access to various services.

Update Billing for Paid Services

Your campaigns website domain, email marketing platform, and web hosting are all paid for with a recurring automatic payment. Dont risk your URL being snatched by a squatter or your website going down.

Adjust your plans according to off-season usage and then make sure up-to-date credit card information is in place.

Conclusion

You may want nothing more than to forget your campaign for a few months or a year, but youll be grateful you took this time to prepare for re-election. Most importantly, you wont be left building from scratch.