Building a powerful community of support.

While voters in most communities rank education as a top priority, turnout rates for school board elections remain low. One reason is that school board elections often occur on dates that are different from more well-known state and national elections. Candidates for local school boards cannot achieve their goals without effective communication tools that can help break through the digital noise to share their campaign platform and ensure a higher voter turnout.

I partnered with an incumbent board member who was seeking re-election to the District 202 Board of Education in Evanston, Illinois, to develop a collection of marketing materials that would activate long-term supporters and new voters while communicating information about election day to bolster voter turnout.  Looking at the candidate’s previous campaign website, branding, and marketing materials from the prior election, I created the project goals and scope and determined trends from other local school board campaigns.

For the website, my goal was to build an action-oriented, responsive site that grew support for the campaign and advertised school board election information while providing a universally friendly web experience in multiple languages. I engaged with the campaign team to determine needs and developed a refreshed brand for the re-election, created the website design and content, built a fully responsive site via WordPress, and developed forms and functionality linked to MailChimp and PayPal. Additionally, I created branded marketing materials for the campaign trail and social media, including campaign cards and yard signs.

Deliverables:

• Project Management & Campaign Support
• Public Outreach Strategy
• Stakeholder Engagement
• UX and UI Strategy
• Site Content
• Website Development & Management
• Communications Strategy
• Marketing Materials Design (Yard Signs, Campaign Cards)
• Social Media Support
• Web Analytics

Results:

The campaign marketing services, including a refreshed brand, website, and marketing materials, exceeded expectations among the campaign team and placed a much-needed focus on the candidate’s platform, friendraising and fundraising, and school board election information, which led to the candidate’s successful re-election and the highest votes received. When the candidate decided to run again for school board, she hired me a second time to provide campaign marketing services.

Design Samples (from both campaigns):