Save our Schools Arizona is a group of grassroots, nonpartisan parents, teachers & business leaders who support public education in Arizona by fighting for increased funding & tax dollar accountability. They had been working tirelessly for the last two years outside of their day-to-day jobs to build their base and fight against big-pocket campaigns who wanted to siphon money from already underfunded public schools to support a private voucher.
The leaders of SOS approached us in September of 2018 right before the end of midterm election season.
Although they made tremendous headway and had an active base they feared their message wouldn’t be able to reach the masses without a strong online presence. We were more than willing to join the fight.
Political advertising comes with its own set of challenges such as heavy restrictions for copy and images, additional personal identification for advertisers and an altered strategy for campaigns. Selecting and narrowing down on a target audience plays a huge role in advertising but the difficulty in this political campaign was not to narrow down but to broaden the reach to as many Arizonans as possible while finding what messages they respond to best.
Budgeting was also a challenge as we had to hypothesize and test how and when people were going to vote so we knew how to allocate expenditure. All of these factors had to be tested & refined within six weeks.
Save Our Schools Arizona’s fight against Proposition 305 was a resounding victory. Prop 305 lost by a landslide of 65% against and 35% for. As their digital marketing team we were able to reach millions of Arizonans online and help swing the vote. With millions of impressions we increased their Facebook followers by 53%, had thousands pledge to vote no, and drove tens of thousands of voters to their website. By cleverly targeting different age groups, demographics and online hotspots we were able to increase the importance of voting no on Prop 305 and help the SOS spread the word online in a massive way.