Politics & Elections Blog: November 2015

Politics and Elections Blog

Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team

Win the Moments that Win Elections

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Elections are decided over time, in countless moments that invite campaigns to inform, inspire, and persuade voters. The more of those moments you win, the better your chances of winning on Election Day.

With digital media, campaigns have greater opportunity than ever to influence these voter moments. We get immediate, relevant answers about candidate’s stances from Google search. We can easily watch and share a candidate’s YouTube announcement video or debate clip. When we see the right message at the right moment - and on the right screen - we can be inspired to donate to a campaign. Though the Election is nearly a year away, opportunities to influence voters start now. In July - September of this year, there were 650M views of political content on YouTube.Today, we’re releasing a new website to help campaigns of all sizes — from mayoral to presidential — understand how to influence these voter moments.

The site features a campaign playbook for five stages of a political campaign: 1 - Establish: setting up your campaign presence online 2 - Build: growing your base through fundraising and email list building 3 - Persuade: reaching persuadable voters with a variety of digital assets 4 - Respond: reacting to current news or offline events 5 - Mobilize: getting your supporters to the polls during voting season

On the Establish page, campaigns can learn the top mobile design principles for campaign sites
Each piece of the playbook explains which digital tools campaigns can leverage. We showcase examples of past and present campaigns doing these strategies well. On the site, we also put together a Solutions guide that walks through Google tools campaigns can use, from video and search ads to Google Analytics and Google Consumer Surveys.

On the Solutions page, we break down all of Google’s tools for campaigns

We’re excited to see how campaigns and candidates will use digital tools in reaching potential voters. As campaigns innovate on digital in the next year, we plan to update this site with new research and examples, so stay tuned!