Tools by our friends
Not finding what you need in the Arena Toolbox? We like these tools, resources, and trainings.
Kate Catherall
Hiring a campaign manager can be a daunting task. A campaign manager sets the strategy for the campaign and is responsible for the ultimate success or failure of the team. The relationship between a candidate and her campaign manager requires trust, respect, vision, and courage. Here, you’ll find a toolkit to help you recruit, assess, and hire a campaign manager. As in many parts of a campaign, building a strong relationship is at the heart of hiring a good campaign manager.
Abby Witt
By its very nature, GOTV is the sprint at the end of the marathon—volunteers, staff, and even the candidate may be on their “last legs.” And yet, they will be asked to do more than they’ve done at any other point on the campaign.
The good news: the pull of Election Day is an unparalleled motivator. Staff and volunteers will naturally be ready for a big challenge.
The bad news: lack of clarity and disorganization easily drown out motivation. Staff and volunteers will disengage if they feel there’s no plan or their help isn’t needed.
The challenge: creating a GOTV program that is transparent and organized, so that the campaign team can focus on turning out voters is no easy task. This means planning well ahead of time, training, and practicing to make sure department leads and volunteer teams understand their goals and execute towards them.
This guide is intended to walk you through all the components of a comprehensive GOTV plan.
Santiago Martinez
The Shift Form + Report Tracker will help you manage your volunteer resources that are dedicated to canvassing, phone calling, and texting voters to remind them to vote.
This tool takes data entered by staging location captains and organizers via a google form to track shifts and packets.
The guide will help you set up the tracking of your volunteers in VAN’s My Campaign. Organizing your volunteer data in one system will help ensure accurate reporting and allocation of resources. This guide will also show you how to export your volunteer data and how to use it in the Shift Tracking Report.
Santiago Martinez
During the final four days of GOTV, you will be talking to more voters than you have at any other point in the campaign, which requires a lot of volunteer power to get the job done. You should be recruiting shifts weeks in advance. This spreadsheet helps your campaign track shifts in the weeks leading up to the big weekend before Election Day.
Julia Leitner
Do you ever feel like your digital content is at best disorganized and at worst reactive? The Digital Program Calendar helps you take a holistic approach to your digital media strategy. Using the calendar template, you can plan out your emails and social media posts, which allows you to:
In this toolkit you’ll find a best practices guide for producing content for email, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as a calendar spreadsheet so you can plan ahead and review everything you are posting.
Julia Leitner
Earned media events are an opportunity for your campaign to drive the campaign narrative and reinforce the story you want to tell. These events are owned by your campaign and allow you to proactively highlight your core message. They are also an important moment to engage volunteers and allied organizations. As such, the key to a great event is plenty of planning, messaging relevance, and follow up.
From planning to debrief, this guide will help you tackle all the elements you need to consider when drawing the press to a campaign event.
Julia Leitner
One-on-ones are an incredibly valuable aspect of your campaign’s organizing program. Getting to know your volunteers will not only increase their commitment, but it will also help you understand their strengths and skills, and how they can best support or even lead your team.
This guide will walk you through how to hold effective one-on-ones. We’ll go over how to ask someone to sit down with you, and then how to have a conversation that will help you determine someone’s passions, strengths, and role on your neighborhood team.
Santiago Martinez
Our budget template is an essential tool for any campaign. Used in tandem with your campaign plan, the budget will help you allocate resources from now until Election Day. This tool can also be helpful in establishing fundraising benchmarks based on the needs of the campaign.
The Arena Budget helps campaign managers track detailed spending in the following areas: Staff Salary, Equipment, Research, Rent, Office Expenses, Voter Contact Program, Data, Website, Compliance, Consulting, and Paid Media.
The template goes month-by-month and allows you to customize the different phases of your campaign spending. It also helps you track incoming fundraising dollars and cash on hand.
Any budget is meant to be a living and breathing document that is updated and referred to throughout the campaign. Using this template, both the candidate and campaign leadership can communicate and collaborate on budget decisions in real time.
Kate Catherall
Do you feel as though there are one million things to consider while running a campaign? The Campaign Plan Template brings together the essential elements of a campaign into a single document that you can continue to refer to and adapt from now until election day. The Campaign Plan Template will help you work out strategies for messaging, organizing, communications, staffing, scheduling, and data and begin to understand how all of these elements fit together.
Santiago Martinez
The Arena Snapshot will help you calculate your pathway to victory and set the foundation for your campaign’s voter turnout and persuasion programs. The Snapshot draws information from voter files, past election results, and polling data to show you what would likely happen if the election were held today. It then allows you to simulate the effects of a targeted, programmatic campaign on the electorate in your district. After you have completed the Snapshot, you will be able to determine: 1) how to get to your win number; 2) which sections of the population you need to focus on for turnout (by geography, ethnicity, age, etc); 3) which segments of the population you need to target for persuasion; 4) your conversation goals for voter contact.
Kate Catherall
It’s come to our attention that campaigners use a lot of jargon. We hope the definitions in this glossary will help you to build your campaign vocabulary and successfully navigate a world where “universe” refers to a list of voters, and not the cosmos. If, in your work, you come across a term is not defined here, get in touch and we’ll add it to our glossary.
Kate Catherall
This guide is designed to help Campaign Managers plan and facilitate effective meetings and calls with their teams, consultants, vendors, and key stakeholders. This guide will help you avoid “meeting just to meet,” by laying out an approach for designing your meetings with purpose, monitoring progress toward goals, gathering input and feedback, and making asks of critical stakeholders.
Santiago Martinez
This guide provides best practices for crafting your GOTV Universe. This for campaigns big and small as they navigate how to use various targeting tools. Following these best practices will help your campaign target the right voters during GOTV and tailor your approach to your method of outreach and campaign capacity.
Kate Catherall
The GOTV structure is implemented for the final four days of the campaign, and sometimes sooner (depending on early voting in your district or state). During GOTV, staff will transition roles, and it is essential that everyone understand her and his responsibilities within the new structure. This structure is designed to optimize your efforts, streamline communication, and to ensure that all of the resources at your disposal are well-used. In this guide, we describe how each role functions during GOTV, and where they are located from HQ to the field.
Ron Klain & John Neffinger
Since 2006, Ron Klain and John Neffinger have separately written a series of general distribution memos each election year, based on lessons they have learned preparing top candidates for debates. In 2018, they decided to combine their efforts to provide their shared insights in one place. While every campaign is different, this memo offers a good starting place for thinking about how to make debates a part of winning your race.
Kate Catherall
Whether you are running for statewide office or state legislature, mail should be an important component of your efforts to turnout supporters. In the digital age, good old-fashioned mail is a reliable way to break through the noise and reach voters.
In this guide, we equip you with some basic best practices and key considerations for designing your GOTV mail plan.
Julia Leitner
It’s GOTV, and what do we do!? It’s time to convene, connect, and train staff, organizers, and volunteers. GOTV trainings help you align everyone on what exactly needs to happen and how you will go about executing your GOTV plan. This is an important opportunity to gather before heading into a hectic period during which you’ll need everyone on the team to act responsibly, with integrity, and according to plan. You also don’t want to waste time. So, invest in preparing top-notch GOTV trainings that will motivate your team, and equip them with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets they need to be successful.
This guide will outline what to cover in your GOTV trainings, how to adapt trainings for different audiences, and how to facilitate inspiring, constructive learning experiences for staff, organizers, and volunteers. We’ll walk through each stage of planning your training—from determining attendance to choosing a location to developing your content.
Julia Leitner
Voter turnout is a community effort, and you want to be present locally so you can remind friends, neighbors, and family to get out and vote for your candidate. In the final days, you'll set up Staging Locations in each precinct. The purpose is to expand your presence so there is a campaign location that is easily accessed by volunteers in every neighborhood. That way, you can deploy canvassers efficiently and monitor local polling locations without wasting precious time driving great distances.
In this guide, we’ll go over the different volunteer roles you need to recruit for each Staging Location. We will review how the reporting structure works for volunteers. And, we’ll cover how to find and set up a Staging Location.
This is a great tool to share with with volunteers and Staging Location leaders.
Kate Catherall
Turning out voters is part art, part science. But it’s mostly science. Conversations with voters in the final stretch can win elections, though it’s important to remember that, in most cases, we are talking about moving a few percentage points of the overall vote share.
We’ve also learned a lot about what doesn’t work, and sometimes it’s counterintuitive. We’ve laid out some key GOTV conversation principles in this guide. We hope you will incorporate these into your GOTV scripts, and share them with organizers and volunteers.
Santiago Martinez
The Progress to Goal (PTG) Report helps campaigns of all sizes maintain organizer accountability and measure progress. We've designed this tool to be comprehensive yet flexible for different types of campaigns.
Start by reading the Arena PTG Report Setup guide and then choose the spreadsheet and Google Form that best fit your campaign's structure and capabilities. You can then set up your spreadsheet to reflect your campaign's specific goals, priorities, regions, and momentum.
Santiago Martinez
The Organizing Goals Calculator is designed for campaign managers and organizing directors to set meaningful goals that will build the campaign’s volunteer capacity and voter contact programs. The Goals Calculator helps organizing directors create accountability for organizers each week and helps plan ahead the next week’s organizing priorities.
This tool establishes weekly goals to keep the campaign on track. You can also generate weekly progress-to-goal reports that track key organizing metrics such as contact attempts, conversations, shifts recruited, and shifts completed.
The organizing director should update the Organizing Goals Calculator periodically throughout the campaign, as goals are hit, missed, or exceeded. Once you’ve completed the Goals Calculator, the campaign will have goals in these key areas:
Julia Leitner
House meetings are a fundamental part of the organizing playbook, and there’s a good reason why. At its core, organizing is about bringing people together to make positive change. Your candidate represents that change, and through her message, values, and promise, she is bringing people together. We need people power to get her elected because face-to-face voter contact is one of the most effective tools we have. Not only does your campaign rely on people power, but this election is a remarkable opportunity to unite communities and have meaningful discussions in-person.
So, there’s no better way to do that than to gather a group in a living room or kitchen for a house meeting. House meetings are one of the most effective ways to recruit volunteers and build teams. This guide will help you develop a strategy for running a house meeting program and expanding your volunteer base.
In essence, a house meeting is a space where neighbors will:
Kate Catherall
This guide is designed to help you arrive at initial messaging for your campaign. This process is iterative, and takes time. As your campaign organization grows and you move through the election cycle, you will test, evaluate, and refine your message.
That being said, investing in message development early yields high returns — a strong message will help your campaign recruit volunteers, secure donors, and persuade political influencers and validators to throw their support behind you. And as the saying goes… if you don’t tell your story, someone else will.
Not finding what you need in the Arena Toolbox? We like these tools, resources, and trainings.
