Tips and Tactics Advocacy Campaigns Can Glean from 2016 Political Campaigns for Successful Digital Advocacy Digital Advocacy is on everyone's mind. Last month, I attended the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, D.C. and one panel caught my eye: New Tools From the 2016 Elections That Nonprofit Techies Need to Know About. Given that our clients are both campaigns and nonprofits, it was a perfect fit.  There were some really valuable takeaways from the session that I wanted to share with you all.  1. Email is not dead, but it’s not the only game in town. Email is still an incredibly effective Tool for campaigns (political and advocacy alike) to use for fundraising and getting people to take action. It’s extremely important to test with email – test subject lines, test images, test message, test everything. Email makes testing easy. While email is essential, campaigns in 2016 explored other forms of communication with their supporters. Podcasts, text, social media (even channels like Reddit worked in some instances), proved very effective for campaigns. The key here is making the message match the format and communicating with your audience where they live.  2. Make donating easy for your supporters. It sounds simple, but many organizations are making donating money to their causes a barrier to entry. Having a mobile-friendly donation page, utilizing one-click donations when possible, and tailoring content to a donor based on their history helps make donating frictionless for a user which will turn into more donations for you.  3. Tools to make your job easier. Those who work in both political and advocacy campaigns are often working incredibly hard with limited resources. Tools that can contribute to making your job easier are always useful, and the panelists talked about a few that are worth highlighting for digital advocacy campaigns: • Frackture – this can help with data management especially if your organization uses different platforms for different teams. Frackture can help integrate these.  • Tableau – helpful tool for looking at reporting over a long period of time.  • CRM – there are a ton of different CRM tools to use, but the important things to look for are whether or not they will help you track engagement, segment your list, report on your list, enable testing, use one-click donations.  • Texting tools – Tools like Hustle make it easier than ever to text with your supporters.  • Slack – this is one tool that came up again and again with both political and advocacy staffers. Slack can help streamline communication within your organization and makes setting yourself up for a rapid response much easier.    I always love attending the Nonprofit Technology Conference to learn more about what cutting edge tactics people are using for good, especially any new digital advocacy tactics . For more information about tools that your Campaign can use, check out our roundup of 100 Campaign Tools.