Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 28
Hi everyone! My name is Parker Butler, and I am the Democratic National Committee’s Digital Rapid Response Manager. The Digital Rapid Response Team at the DNC is dedicated to creating shareable content across social media platforms that amplifies the Democratic agenda and holds extremist MAGA Republicans to account.
The News Environment
While Americans still count on television, print, and radio for information, more folks than ever get their news online – and often, that news is filtered for them by social media algorithms driven by engagement.
In this constantly changing information landscape, our team is focused on cutting through the noise with approachable, fact-based messages that are designed to be screenshotted, reposted, copied-and-pasted, downloaded, and shared in as many ways as possible.
What We Do
When news breaks, we work to get our content live on our channels and distributed to our partners as quickly as possible.
How We Break Through
Our program involves creative uses of graphics, video, and copywriting to reach a wide and diverse audience across the DNC accounts and the campaign accounts of the White House principals. Below are some key examples of this:
This post has the 4th-most impressions of any @TheDemocrats post in the last year, 30.2x more impressions than our average.
We collaborate closely with teams across the DNC, including DNC Communications and Research, to execute creative concepts on the latest news, combat disinformation with unvarnished facts, and highlight out-of-touch comments from extremist Republicans. Our most successful content has garnered millions of impressions and driven conversation — such as this simple question that is our 3rd most-impressed post in the last year, generating over 2 million impressions on Twitter alone:
We cut right to the chase to provide supporters with the facts they need to know:
Through this work, we are constantly building reliably successful formats that align with our principle of simple shareability. For example, one of our top video formats is what we call a “side-by-side,” which often juxtaposes two voices or points out Republican hypocrisy (of which there is no shortage of source material):
In collaboration with the Design Team, we also apply this format with static graphics to convey visual contrasts:
Delivering Our Message
In a world where algorithmic feeds scramble users’ timelines and people are bombarded with notifications, repeating our message is one of the most important strategies we have to make sure it breaks through. That’s why we sometimes post the same high engagement message over and over again.
Thanks to our partnerships team, this content has become a central, dependable resource hub for state parties and other partners , and we have also received organic pickup from many of the biggest names in politics. We are consistently breaking new impression and engagement records as we build out our program’s capacity, experiment with content strategy, and grow our audience.
In the months ahead, we are planning to continue innovating how we inform voters of the Republican Party’s radical MAGA agenda and sharpen the contrast between their plans and the values and actions of Democrats across the country. Developing and delivering content that breaks through is crucial to shaping the conversation online and reaching voters where they spend their time in 2022.