A Guide to Different Types of Political Consultants: Part 1, Building Your Campaign Team
A political TV commercial shoot can involve anywhere from 1–5 consultants!
Choosing your campaign team is one of the single most critical decisions you will make. Campaign teams have a lot of power and autonomy (on properly run/healthy campaigns) and will make various decisions on your behalf, represent you to the public, and keep the campaign going when you have to focus on the rest of your life.
If you are just entering politics, either as a candidate or a campaign operative, the world of campaign consultants can feel quite opaque. At Evinco Strategies, we strive to decrease barriers to entry to politics and increase transparency where we can. We’ll be bringing you this guide as a part of a series to demystify the process of choosing your campaign team.
In part 1, we will be walking you through general, communications, field, fundraising and digital fundraising consultants.
General Consultants
General consultants, or GCs, usually handle some combination of communications, advertising, field, political strategy, budgeting, and operations. In a GC model campaign, they will act as the campaign lead, only second to the candidate themselves, and have all other consultants, vendors, and team members directly or indirectly report to them. GCs will work with the candidate and campaign manager to create the campaign plan and ensure a campaign-wide strategic vision is being followed. Depending on the consultant or firm, GCs can be very hands off or super involved. Some will write and load campaign emails, lead meetings, manage on-the-ground staff, and meticulously track the campaign budget, and others will only provide guidance and advice on a weekly basis. There is a lot of diversity in the kinds of services provided by GCs, so it’s important to understand what your campaign needs (more on this in a future part of the series)! Very often, due to the amount of time spent together, GCs will also act as confidants and advisors to the candidate.
Communications Consultants
If communications is not being handled by the GC, specialized help is needed in the area, or the campaign chooses not to have a general consultant (or can’t in some jurisdictions), there are consultants who handle communications only. This can consist of some combination of the following: mail, TV, radio, digital, OTT (“over-the-top” meaning streaming services), social media, press and media, and pollsters (which are usually specialized). Communications consultants are most often used by larger campaigns, think state and congressional-level races and above. The bigger the race, more likely it is that each of these deliverables will be handled individually, meaning one person or firm for TV, one person or firm for mail, and so forth. In smaller races it is likely the GC handles most of these deliverables.
Field Consultants
Field is the campaign term for direct voter contact and the strategy behind it. Field consultants are used by campaigns for similar reasons communications consultants get brought on, but field can also be handled by an experienced on-the-ground team quite well with the guidance of a field-focused GC or campaign manager. Field consultants (or sometimes a GC, campaign manager, or an on-the-ground field director) will create a field plan for the campaign, calculate the win number (number of votes needed to win), and put the plan in action to get to the win number with a combination of canvassing, phonebanking, meet-and-greets, texting, and other methods of direct voter contact.
Fundraising Consultants
In order to hire all these professionals and/or pay for all the ads and field supplies, the campaign needs money to spend. That’s where fundraising consultants come in. These consultants work with the candidate and the GC or campaign manager to create a finance plan that allows the campaign to meet its stated budget and ensure the campaign is staying on top of its weekly and monthly goals. This will usually involve a combination of call time, fundraisers, solicitation letters, meetings, house parties, finance committees, and bundlers. Depending on the size of the campaign, fundraising consultants will often work with an on-the-ground finance director, call time manager, or campaign coordinator to stay on top of the finance plan and keep the data clean.
Digital Consultants
Digital Consultants guide online campaign strategy and execution. Digital consultants work with the candidate and team to produce content in the digital space (emails, social media, digital advertisements) to raise small-dollar donations and increase name ID. Similar to traditional fundraising (call time, events, etc.), digital fundraising is critical for most campaigns to reach their finance goals. Congressional-level and larger campaigns will often work with a dedicated digital or fundraising consulting firm to handle these deliverables, while smaller races might opt to go with an in-house model to save costs on staffing.
The world of consulting consists of an almost-unlimited number of specializations and sub-categories. See Part 2 of A Guide to Different Types of Political Consultants to figure out how to choose which combination of consultants is right for you.
This piece was written by Mari Latibashvili, Vice President of Campaigns & Political Affairs at Evinco Strategies.
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