Today we got called out for sensationalist opinion pieces, which is partially true, we’re excitable creatures here at ViveEcosse. Where we aim to platform as many diverse voices across the independence movement as we can.
However, it’s a good point, we’ve been a little mental recently due to the carnage in the news. So tonight, it’s a little bit softer, we’re going to do a piece on something we’ve discussed endlessly – how to make good campaigning messages. It’s not thrilling but we’re going to make the guide.
First up, you need to have a rather good policy or campaign in mind, running absolute drivel, or copying a national campaign and adding your local area name doesn’t generally work. This needs to be an important topic for your locale.
Secondly, write it up in full, have a full explanation and briefing document for the whole plan, exhaustively written out to its full extent. Share this with your campaign team and ask them specifically, poke holes, find questions, play dumb and work out the oddities.
Thirdly, take your massive campaign document and summarise it, as 100 words, then as 50 words, then as one sentence, and finally as a three/four word ‘sting’. This is where we take a policy and make it a soundbite. The closer to natural language or common phrases it is, the better it will do.
Fourthly, it’s time to format that large document, give it a nice set of headings, give it a front cover, including an upfront summary, and your three short versions of it, on the first page.
Fifthly, create a video – around 2 minutes, explaining what this campaign is, what it aims to do, and what the ‘call to action’ is – such as what you want the viewer to do.
Sixthly, you need to make some square images for social media, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You use these as your promotional tools.
Lastly, you need to find some ‘first followers’, these people will like/share/support your work. They will comment and break the initial ice that stops others from interacting with it.
You may notice something, at ViveEcosse we try to follow this format with almost every post!
First, we write our draft, then we cross-check each other’s work, we then format it properly, we take that article and add a short title, plus add some tags as our short sting on topic, we jazz it up for social media with a link and an image for every article in our house style (you’ll have seen our images on social media – vibrant purple). We then talk about the articles we cover on our podcast to ensure we have a full circle of content. We post the images to social media with links back, before posting to our Signal group of supporters to ask them to assist with the sharing (there’s a link at the bottom of the page to join).
While we do this for our blog, we wanted to share the 7 key steps to making a successful campaign or shareable item. This piece needs your critical opinions as it will feature in a nicer format in our upcoming book and magazine.
