Note: I originally wrote this piece for American Bridge's internal wiki in 2020, before I was president of the organization. It is presented here mostly unmodified from that original form.

What do we do here

We pitch stories? We make graphics and tweet them? We give quotes to newspapers?

Taken in isolation, these all mean absolutely nothing.

We run earned media campaigns. These are a different tactic from our paid media campaigns, but useful to think of in the same way: they work most effectively when well-planned, coordinated, disciplined efforts are used to drive the right message to the right people.

For all the complexity (and yelling) in modern campaigns, they're still about making simple arguments to voters about why they should make a particular choice — and this is something you should keep in mind in all of your work: How does what you're doing relate back to answering the question voters are asking? And voters are asking one simple question: should I vote for this person? The hard part is the details, like what to say to voters and how to reach them.

This is a difficult task, and it's especially difficult if we leave aside the world of paid media. We live in a crowded and chaotic earned media world, and there is an extremely limited amount of space in the minds of voters, reporters, and other influencers.

But the way we drive a narrative into those minds isn't rocket science: Make it simple, make it memorable, then drive it home again, and again, and again. Not by repeating the same content, but by constantly creating new information framed through our preferred narrative.

On this front, we're all good at our individual jobs. Finding hits, creating content, landing stories. But as an organization, our effectiveness doesn't just come from being good at our jobs in isolation — it comes from knowing how to work together towards the same goal.

What does an effective and disciplined earned media program look like
Good earned media program Bad earned media program
Knows its preferred narrative in each targeted race, works to frame events through that narrative as they occur. Purely reactive, talks about the news of the day without a broader narrative goal.
Research products highlight the key points, narratives, and issues in races in a way that's extremely easy to understand. Makes it easy for folks who need to create content to find the research they need. Research is jargon-heavy and hard to read, and requires institutional knowledge of a race. Key points are buried. Research products live in their silo until someone demands access, at which point they languish in somebody's inbox.
Big pitches land as part of a broader slate of actions meant to maximize impact. Pitches stand on their own.
Proactively builds relationships with local reporters, allies, and online activists. Doesn't intentionally work on maintaining local contacts with partners, reporters, or activists; just sticks with whatever connections we happen to already have.
Keeps up a persistent narrative drumbeat, even when races seem sleepy. Ignores races until something interesting happens.
Understands our opponent's media plans and goals, and works to undermine them in any way possible, ensuring they never have a simple, easy messaging day on the campaign trail. Is not focused on the details of what our opponent is trying to accomplish.
Builds itself into a useful resource for reporters, allies, and activists. Only does things with others when its programs stand to benefit most; ignores them the rest of the time.
Uses its preferred narratives as guideposts for future digging and research, but still keeps an open mind to broader investigative pieces that might change the state of the race. Does oppo on whatever seems interesting or fun to the researcher, with no broader strategy or goals taken into account.
Is constantly looking for new ways to impact races, changing tactics with the situations, and innovating. Does what's worked in the past, because new things might not work.
Is flexible when the key narratives in a race shift — like when a race goes from being about healthcare access to being about Coronavirus in the course of a month. Rigidly follows prior plans, because that's the oppo we already did.
Does something every day to push the narrative forward, no matter how small. Inconsistent.
Leadership runs into problems or bottlenecks in getting work out the door, and figures out how to solve them in the future. Organizational problems are seen as insurmountable.

What about messing up the opponent's day just for the sake of it?

The life of a rapid response researcher

There will be exceptions. There are things worth doing that do not particularly fit into our message frame. The message frame should always be the priority, but there's a secondary one: mess up our opponent's goals. On any given day, our targets have an earned media task they're trying to accomplish, be it getting out their message, appealing to some particular group, or strengthening some perceived gap in their resume. Understanding their goals opens up another area of work for us: getting in the way.

Of course, our overall message guidance should be a guide here. But it shouldn't stand in the way of a good opportunity to wreck our opponent's plans. Vetting attacks, hypocrisy, embarrassing statements about the location the politician is visiting, and general mischief-making against the opponent's media plan is a worthwhile game in and of itself.

On the value of being early

Paid media is expensive to sustain and tends to be clustered right before election day. Earned media we can do every day during the course of an election. And we need to be doing exactly that.

There are big earned media days — when you land a devastating attack — but don't underestimate the snowball effect of consistent and frequent attacks.

The time to start being aggressive is today, and the time to stop is the day after the election.

On the state of the media

In most places outside of Washington DC, it is a mistake to count solely on media focus to push out our messaging or measure our impact. There are not enough local reporters, they're too overworked, and their editors don't care. Many national reporters don't know enough about the place to feel comfortable writing about it, they are chasing shiny DC objects, and their editors don't care either.

Of course, we should be landing research with these folks as much as we possibly can. But in places where that's not an option, we can't give up. The lack of local media focus doesn't mean there are no eyeballs looking for information on those races: an information vacuum can be a huge asset to us, if we treat it as such, because it's simply a space for us to fill.