Launching Your Political Campaign | Ultimate Guide

So you’ve decided you’re going to run for elected office. You’re revved up and ready to go, you want to get out the door right now! You’re ready to take that seat and win it. Now what?

This is a scary time, but it doesn't have to be. This guide is a step by step walkthrough of what you need to get your political campaign launched.

There are thousands of things you could do for your launch, but these are the tried and true steps that every campaign has to do to get it right. We've even included a downloadable checklist at the bottom so you can make sure you're not missing anything.

Deciding when to launch your political campaign is more art than science, but there are some hard and fast rules to keep in mind.

What Month?

You don’t need to launch too early, most voters and donors aren’t paying attention to any campaigns until later in the election cycle, so you shouldn’t worry too much about "picking up steam". The reason to launch early is to have more time to collect donations and endorsements, so make it early but not too early unless there’s a good reason. Try to avoid the summer months or the end of year holidays as you can get lost in the shuffle. Most people launch September - Early November or January - April, depending on when your election is. 

When in Month?

Then decide the day of the month you're going to launch. Most people launch at the start of the month or the start of a new fundraising period so they can raise the maximum amount in their first month to show legitimacy as a candidate. This is less important as you get down to more local offices. Try to avoid major holidays in the month that could lower your earned media or open rate on your launch email.

What Day of Week?

Finally, decide the day of the week. You’re going to want to launch during the week so reporters will pick up the story, if you launch over the weekend reporters may come in on Monday and consider your announcement old news. Plus, elections offices aren’t open on the weekends so there’s no one to process your paperwork.

Tuesday-Thursday is the best time to launch generally, as Monday and Friday most reporters are filled up with stories from the weekend or preparing multiple stories to run over the weekend. Plus voters and donors aren’t as engaged on Mondays and Fridays as they’re either preparing for the workweek or looking forward to the weekend.

By the time your political campaign launches you're going to want to have some level of support, people who can vouch for you. Getting this done right before you launch can give you a big boost in your campaign.

Make a List

First, make a list of the people you need to talk to before you run. One thing you’ll find in politics: it’s full of egos. There are many people that expect to be talked to before you announce, they want to be in the know about who’s running for what and they want the respect of person running to seek them out. Giving these old hats of politics proper respect will go a long way in endearing them to you, and will help with endorsements and donations down the road.

Schedule Meetings

Once you've made a list of people that are important in your community, and connected people you know personally, you need to start reaching out and scheduling meetings. Start with those your closest to, it will help you get your pitch down. From there move onto bigger names.

Remember this is essentially a sales meeting, be selling yourself, but also listen. You are a newbie in this, and you should learn from them the ropes. By listening, selling yourself, and treating these community leaders with respect before you run you’ll go a long way to building good rapport during your announcement.

Write it Down

For each meeting write down anything they've said that can be useful to you. Did they mention someone else you should reach out to? Ask them to make an introduction or contact that person and drop the other one's name. Did they say they'll support you for your campaign? That they'd make a donation? Write it down now so you can follow up with them later. You're going to talk to a lot of people, make sure you have a system to log this in so you don't let any great leads slip through the cracks.

I’m reluctant to put this, as you have plenty of time to decide your message over the campaign trail, but your logo, press release, and website will have some of this information so you’ll want to get something you can live with before you launch your campaign.

Create a Bio

You need a concise biography that tells the story of your candidacy. This isn't a job interview, don't make this a list of everything you've done with random bits of trivia. You are now a story. Think of Donald Trump creating a business empire, or Bill Clinton coming from a place called hope. What is your compelling story that draws people in?

Make your biography 1-2 short paragraphs, no one wants to read a Robert Caro biography about someone they don't know, they want to know what drives you. This is particularly hard for candidates, it's hard to boil your entire life down to a simple narrative. Ask for help from a friend who's good at marketing, or is just a good storyteller.

Pick Your Issues

Outline 3 issues you want your campaign to focus on. We also have a guide on how to pick your campaign issues for a more in-depth look at this. In short, your issues are a balance between the passions that drove you to run for office and what your electorate cares about. These don't need to be any longer than a sentence or two to create each.

Word of caution: stay away from controversial subjects early in your campaign unless you feel it's necessary, you can always take those up later, but being cautious at the start is a good idea until you get a better feel for your electorate.

Your website is where people will go to learn more about you and to donate, you're going to want that up as soon as you file, and have something that looks professional.

Decide Where to Build It

You have lots of options for website building. Going to a professional designer can put you into the thousands of dollars, which isn't necessary for 99% of political campaigns. You can have a friend design your campaign site, which can be much cheaper, but you are at the mercy of that designer and all changes will need to go through them.

You can use a political website builder like PoliEngine which is designed to help you make a modern, professional campaign site easily. There are other political website building options, where we've laid out the pros and cons of each in our Political Campaign Website Builders Compared article.

Design a Simple Site

When you first launch your political campaign you don't need a site with all the bells and whistles, and I recommend you don't. You're going to need some time to get your full issues and longer biography in a well-written form, and there's no reason to have that at the start. I recommend creating a simple one-page site with your two-paragraph biography and/or the issues you outlined above. You can see some of our free political website templates to get a better idea, or get inspired by our list of the Best Political Websites of 2019.

Your campaign logo will be on your website, yard signs, donation envelopes, mailers, on everything. Before you launch you should work with a designer to create a campaign logo that you can use for the rest of the campaign. If you can't do this it won't make our break the campaign, you can always do it later, but it's a best practice to get this out of the way.

Pick a Designer

Like most design-related things, going to a big design firm can be expensive, costing you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. You can find a friend to do build you a logo, but campaign logos are specialized, they need to be simple yet interesting at the same time, and most entry-level designers aren't good at them. If you have someone willing to try let them take a crack at it, but make sure it's a logo that's good.

At PoliEngine we offer a political logo design service for $150 to make sure you get your perfect logo at a price you can afford. We've designed hundreds of logos, and are happy to help you find one that works for you. Go to  Just sign up and jump on a 15-minute call with us so we can start getting your logo to you in three days.

You need a way to collect donations as soon as you launch your campaign. There will be a burst of excitement for your run from friends, family, and those you've reached out to. You're going to need a politically focused donation processor to collect employer, occupation, or whatever else your elections rules say you need to collect for public disclosure. That sadly leaves Paypal off the table. Thankfully there are plenty of options.

On-Site Forms

PoliEngine offers onsite donation processing directly from your website through Stripe and Braintree with no added costs, just the 2.9% +.30 that those services charge you. This is nice because you can track all your donations in one place. They can also be an easy way to get something up quickly, but many donors can be hesitant to give their credit card directly into your site, despite the fact that it is fully secured. These donation forms also lack some of the features that software created specifically for political fundraising have.

External Donation Processors

I generally recommend using a stand-alone donation tool for candidates over onsite forms for the reasons listed above. These softwares all come with a number of attractive features, such as direct links for quick donations, integration to other services, and easy to design pages with attractive donation setups. For these benefits, you're going to pay about 1% more, but that's only about $10 for every $1,000, which isn't going to break the bank.

Popular options include ActBlue for Democrats, WinRed for Republicans, and Anedot which is non-partisan. All of these work great, though ActBlue can take some time to approve your campaign.

For better or worse, nearly half of Americans get their news from Facebook, and people engaged in politics use it extensively to stay up to date. If you love Twitter or Instagram you can create a page on those as well, but make sure it's something you have the time to stay on top of, otherwise don't create it at all. At a minimum, you'll need a Facebook page as soon as you launch to keep in contact with your supporters. Thankfully this is the easiest part of the campaign:

Create The Page

To create a campaign page simply click on “Pages” on the left of your screen, then click “Create Page” at the top. Once you’ve set up a name, uploaded a profile picture, and uploaded a header image your page is live. If you'd like to skip this until later feel free, we're going to turn this off for now until you're ready to go live.

Pick a name that is easily searchable and don't try to get too creative here. You don't need your slogan in this, you don't need anything too cute, just your name and office will suffice. Get cute in your posts, not in your name.

Turn It Off

The Facebook page is now live, but you need it to not be. To unpublish your Facebook Page go into your page and click on “Settings”. Then click on “unpublish page” on the very front. This will take your site off of public view, but you can access it anytime you want. Once you’re ready to go live just come back here and publish it and you’ll be live.

Don't forget to add your legal disclaimer to the page to stay compliant.

There are precious few times to get press for your political campaign, and your launch is one of them. You’re going to want an easy story for the press to run the moment you announce to help get your name out to the public. 

Create a Press List

First, you’re going to need a list of reporters to send your press release to. Search Google and find any reporter who talks about politics in your area, and then find their email on their website. Also, find the email the news station puts out for public news stories and tips. Write all of the names, emails, and news stations into a spreadsheet to send to these reporters when you launch your political campaign.

Write the Press Release

From there you’re going to want to write your press release. You can find numerous templates across the internet. Keep it short, sweet, and talk about you and your campaign. Reporters are busy people, they want all the information for their story and want it concisely. Give them information about you, your candidacy, the race you’re running for, other people running for it, etc. The less homework they have to do the more likely they’ll run your story. Be sure to include contact information so they can reach out to you for an interview

You’re going to want to create buzz around your campaign, and bring in that first bit of donations. The best way to do this is with an announcement email.

Get Emails

Export all of your emails from gmail, from LinkedIn, from anywhere you can get an email and clean that list. From there clean that list up, check to make sure there isn’t anyone on there you really don’t want to send emails to.

Set Up Email Marketing Account

Then you need to set up an email account. Through PoliEngine we connect with MailChimp, GetResponse, and Active Campaign. The most popular of these is MailChimp, which is free for up to 2,000 emails. Don't forget to add your disclaimer to the bottom of these emails.

Write Your Launch Email

Import these emails into Mailchimp and start writing your first campaign email! Remember this is to friends, so feel free to be a little more personal about why your running. In fact, I’ve found the more personal the better, so long as it doesn’t flow into oversharing.

Most importantly: make a donation ask. Tell them you can’t do it without them and you need their money. This is the first time of many you’re going to need to ask people for money, so start it strong now. These are your friends, they want to help you, make it easy on them and tell them what you really need: funds to get your campaign message out.

You’ve done your prep work and you’re ready for your big campaign launch, now you need to get your paperwork together. Remember once you turn this in you're filed and it will likely be in the public record within a few hours or the end of the day, so be ready to launch properly that day or the very next morning.

Fill Out Necessary Forms

Go to your elections office website and get the needed forms. If you're unsure what you need they usually have a help section, and you can look at other candidates filing forms to help guide you. You’ll generally need a treasurer, so try to find someone you can trust who will turn in your financials for you.

Open a Bank Account

From there you’ll need a campaign depository, usually separate from your own. You'll do this after you file initial paperwork since your bank will require an entity to file that with. To begin, go to a bank with your filing paperwork and open the account. They may ask you for an EIN number, which you can easily get in minutes from the IRS. From there you may need to turn in your banking information back to the elections office depending on your state.

This is it, the day you’ve been waiting for: launch day. All this time you’ve been talking with people about your candidacy, getting your designs and website up, you’ve got a bank account and you’re ready to go. Here’s what your day will look like:

First Thing that Morning

You’ll wake up in the morning with your press release in an email format and attached as a Word doc or .pdf, with all the reporters and newsrooms whose emails you found placed in the BCC of your email. At about 8:30 am, so they see it as they’re coming into work, you’re gonna send that out.

Now you’re gonna go to your email software and re-read over your campaign email. Just check for any typos last minute. Now you’re gonna send it.

From there you’ll publish your Facebook page and post a link to your new website. Write a brief post to go along with your status update and post it.

The Rest of Your Day

The rest of the day you’re going to want to be fairly free to take calls from reporters. Reporters are on a deadline, they need to get your story and probably a few more into their editors by 5:00 pm so they can spend time with their families. Make it easy on them, talk your campaign through with them when they call and be on message. Only talk about the things you want to focus on with the campaign, there’s no need to ramble. They’re going to quote what you say, so feel free to take time to really think before you speak.

You may need to worry about what reporters will write about your campaign in the future, but these campaign launch stories are usually pretty benign and they’ll simply ask you simple questions like “Why are you running?”, “What do you hope to do in office?”, “Why do you think you’ll win?” They usually won’t try to trap you in difficult questions for this story, these are easy questions you should already think about before they call, so don’t get too nervous.

Once 6:00 hits pop open a beer or a glass or wine because you did it, you launched your political campaign! You’re officially a candidate for office. Congratulations, and good luck.

We've created an in-depth checklist for each of these steps which you can download below. Don't worry, we won't send you any more emails unless you want us to.