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Draft Rand Paul Gallery
Following the historical presidential campaign of Ron Paul, members of our team set off to draft Congressman Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul, to the United States Senate. The small town Kentucky opthamologist is now a serving member of the U.S. Senate thanks in part to our team’s initial ingenuity, and the wonderful people of Kentucky who made his historic election possible.
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Choosing the Race
After watching Rand Paul give a campaign speech for his father at Ron Paul’s Boston Tea Party in 2007, it was quite clear Rand Paul had political appeal. With the Tea Party revolution brewing and a vulnerable Senate seat in Kentucky, the time was right for a fiscally conservative, non-career politician to run in Dr. Paul's home state. Our team had actively discussed the idea of “drafting” candidates since the earliest Tea Party protests. After successfully drafting Peter Schiff against the controversial Connecticut Senator, Chris Dodd, we felt that our Internet grassroots campaigning model could yield the same results for Rand Paul.
The Campaign Seeds team worked intimately with a Political Action Committee (PAC) called PEACPAC, which had been started by a former employee of Campaign Seeds. PEACPAC, at the logistical direction of Campaign Seeds raised over $50,000 mostly through a one day online “Money Bomb” event to help fund draft campaigns around the country.
Political Technology
Campaign Seeds set up a professionally designed website at RandPaul2010.com for PEACPAC in early 2009. Corresponding groups we created on Facebook and Twitter promoted the website along with different initiatives relating to their cause.
Using the same guerrilla marketing strategies used when one of our developers worked with Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, we initially set up a few “splash” pages to gauge the level of interest activists might share in our goal to run liberty minded candidates for political office.
Our splash pages included live Flash based “pledge tickers” which rotated through the names of supporters as they signed up to receive updates. This engaging technique provided instant feedback to supporters which encouraged immediate action and collaboration. Campaign Seeds leveraged this contact information to boost fundraising, awareness, and prove that Rand Paul could be a successful candidate in the newly emerging Tea Party.
Campaign Management System
Since Rand was not yet a candidate, it was up to our team to write up where we felt he would stand on most of the issues facing our country. After much research, we categorized Rand’s stances on pamphlet style pages in our Drupal content management system.
Campaign Seeds created “share” widgets on all of our content so that media and grassroots supporters could virally pass pertinent information around popular social networks including Digg, Myspace, and Facebook.
Campaign Seeds created a website where our three different draft campaigns could be managed from a single content management system. Our our team of 5-10 editors, authors, and administrators had separate privacy permissions giving users the ability to update the output of different campaigns from one place.
Getting the word out with Adwords
Campaign Seeds ran an ambitious Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaign for PEACPAC and spent thousands of dollars garnered via our fund raising campaigns with Google Adwords to direct targeted traffic to RandPaul2010.com.
This initial investment helped us capture over 10,000 email addresses from potential supporters, donors, and volunteers.
Utilizing a national baseline of fundraising support, spending was aimed at targeting supporters in Kentucky who could make a real difference on the ground.
E-mailing Kentucky
Our team of bloggers and social networking strategists culminated news and opinion from around the web into weekly e-mail newsletters that kept the momentum mounting.
Our team of programmers worked along-side our writers who wrote motivational calls-to-action to our supporters while tech team branded, monitored, and A/B tested e-mail campaigns to ensure their effectiveness. Our subscribers followed through with our requests to spread the word throughout Kentucky and the nation.
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Handing over RandPaul2010.com
Rand announced his exploratory committee on The Rachael Maddow show later that month. Our team created his initial website and tapped the supporter base we built to give him the funds and ground team he needed to hit the campaign trail running.
"I did not think I would get the support to run... thank you for putting this website together for us" ~ Senator Rand Paul
Following the success of Draft Rand Paul, Campaign Seeds has worked on many more political campaigns for candidates for U.S. Congress, Governor, and local office.
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