4. How to involve your staff and volunteers: Best practices
Guidelines for constructive campaign support
It’s great to have your staff and/or your supporters contribute posts or comments to promote your campaign. Your staff members and supporters are welcome to help promote your campaign here, too.
Volunteer posters in support of a candidate are like volunteer canvassers. For someone to feel strongly enough about a candidate to give their time to their campaign affirms the candidate’s appeal and offers another, often illuminating, perspective on the candidate. It's a different matter, of course, for campaign staff to post content promoting a candidate, though such posts can also be compelling and effective. Here are a few specific rules about these staff and supporter posts.
- Staff disclosures: Transparency required
- No “sockpuppets” allowed
- Boosting your campaign on and off Daily Kos
Staff Disclosures
Campaign staff and high-level volunteers with major campaign responsibilities MUST disclose their relationship with the candidate up front. It’s deceptive to keep such relationships under wraps. If staffers hide their affiliation and pretend to be ordinary voters with no direct connection to the campaign, they may face site discipline up to and including banning. (See Daily Kos: Rules of the Road, DO NOT #23.) If staff members post stories under the actual name of the candidate, they must disclose they are posting "on behalf of Candidate XYZ."
No "sockpuppets" allowed
No one person may create and use multiple accounts. That’s called sockpuppeting and is prohibited. (See Daily Kos: Rules of the Road, DO NOT #22.) However, it’s okay for one person to rally support for a candidate, and to suggest postings by multiple people under their own usernames. This collective activity is one of the key features of Daily Kos Groups, and that system of Groups, described more fully below, is one that you can use (with some administrative support to start) to help generate interest in your campaign.
Boosting your campaign on and off Daily Kos
Support may come from unanticipated sources
Comments and Recommends are not the sole measurements of engagement. We have many regular readers who never comment, but they do pass along information they find here. So always make sure your contact information is visible and easy to access in every story you post. We also encourage you to share the campaign articles you post on Daily Kos with your own social media networks and with local community groups around you.
Daily Kos Groups
The Groups feature of Daily Kos is a powerful tool to help coordinate collective activity on your campaign's behalf. It's likely that there are already affinity groups that would be happy to promote your campaign, both inside and outside of Daily Kos. These groups can help republish or promote your article among Daily Kos members who live in your state and community. Visit https://www.dailykos.com/groups for a current, searchable list of Daily Kos Groups. You can always reach out to a staff member for help connecting with Daily Kos Groups or to start one of your own, time and interest permitting.
NEXT: How other candidates have made an impact via Daily Kos