April 20

Today was a similar day for me. I spent the morning working on lists containing information about contributors to past campaigns. This is an important aspect of fundraising because it lets us find out who our target audience is for events and calls. The more you know about big contributors the more you have to stand on when contacting them. This is a tedious process because I have to use a database that contains tons of information about these people and I have had to sort through it all.

I am starting to become a pro at excel.

Also, we have a major event coming up one week from today and I have been trying to do publicity for that. I have been using the Facebook event invitation aspect and have had a very positive response. I am working on a target publics for the invites. I am trying to get members of the candidates sorority, both active and alum, to come to the event and I have been contacting them with Facebook and phone calls. I am getting more and more experience on event planning.

It was also the arts festival downtown so I got to take a long lunch to go explore that. I have never been and thought it was fun!

WEEK of April12th-16th

This was a week full of some repetitive tasks. I spent a lot of time with getting Google News Alerts and posting them on blogs, Web sites, etc. in order to get good press out about the campaign. It gets tiring sifting through all the Web traffic but has ultimately taught me a lot about social networking. As usual, I made phone calls to volunteers and sent out Facebook invites and event pages. This is something that I am very familiar with and helps to reach certain demographics. We also started a big push to get summer interns to come work on the campaign. I drafted that email and helped start the circulation of that. It is something I hope people from OU will become a part of.
We also received contribution lists from other states. These lists contained the names and donations of people who give to similar parties and candidates. It is important on campaigns to sift through the names of these people and see if there is a possibility for donation. This became my job for the later part of the week was to do background research on certain demographics.

Tues/Thurs 9-6

April 8th

I spent today doing a lot of repetitive tasks. This was a very "intern" work day. There were tons of phone calls to make and a lot of pictures to upload so I was the one to do this. I made phone calls to contact people about events for what seemed like an eternity. I have found that the success rate of getting people to come to your events is highest when you make personal contact with them. I also was able to learn new MAC technology with scanners that I had never seen before. Knowing basics of photoshop helped a bit when it came to retouching and changing the photos to fit on the Web site.

I also worked overtime today to help out with a "volunteer" night. It was a long day but it was enjoyable to watch people dedicate their evening to help out. Basically volunteers on the campaign came at night to help out with little tasks that needed to be done. We contacted these volunteers from the Web site. About 20 people came out to help make phone calls and with data entry.

Thursday 9 am-8:30 pm

Tuesday April 6th. FORUM.

Today I became very familiar with google news alerts and how it can both help and hurt a campaign. Google news alerts you can set so that if anything is posted on the internet, social networking site, etc. it is sent to your alerts and you can then read the entirety of whatever it is. When working for politicians or any government agency, this is an important tool because it keeps you ahead of what most of the public reads. Since most people do not get these types of alerts you are able to deal with the information or manipulate. In some ways, you can minimize any bad press by "flooding" news alerts with positives. I spent a lot of today compiling these alerts for my candidate and posting news releases on the web site subsequent to this coverage.

I also attended a forum today that was for the APAC, an architectural political action committee.This was interesting to see because I got to see how a panel of candidates react to each other and an audience. I was at the forum to help tape and record the panel while sporadically tweeting quotes and updates for followers. This is a way we have found that people can follow the campaign closely to events the public may not attend.

Tuesday: 9-6:30

WEEK OF April 29-2.

This week was a lot like last week with the same amount of work. One of the most important aspects about a campaign is the volunteer database you have. I have spent a lot of time with the other interns separating the volunteer database into quadrants of the state. This is never a fun job to do, especially for someone who doesn't like excel. The other important things to understand about volunteers I have found out is some of them react two ways when you try to solicit their hel. They can either be the type that get upset you haven't asked for help before now or they get upset you are asking for help. They sign up to be volunteers but they do not want to actually do any work. This is where learning professional social graces comes in handy.

I also have been doing more with fundraising event planning. I have been making calls to people who RSVP'ed to make sure they were attending. This is another time when people get annoyed with you for asking to come to something they signed up for! I am still amazed however, at the amount of money that individuals are willing to contribute to a political candidate.

I have never been a person who was big into politics. Being on this campaign has taught me a lot about the government, policy and how public relations is tied into these types of people. Seeing how PR works at a state level, I can only imagine how the federal level public relations practitioners operate. It seems to be a very high stress job. The involvement that you have with a candidate makes you susceptible to criticism as well. This is something I have had to keep in mind, even though I am just an intern.

Tuesday/Thursday: 9-6.