Digital media is an essential component of any campaign. Digital 8 is a tool that makes it easier for you to connect with your constituents online and integrate all of your digital media operations into a single, easy to use tool.
The digital world is where today’s voters connect with friends, strangers, and influencers. In this Tools Episode, Joe speaks with Mike Liddell about Digital 8, a tool that makes it easy for you to reach your constituents and move them to action. When your constituents use Digital 8, all they need to do is click to donate, sign up, or get involved. It's that easy. Tune in to find out if Digital 8 is a good fit for your campaign!
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Joe Fuld
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Instagram: @joefuld
Martín Diego Garcia
Twitter: @gmartindiego
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Presented by The Campaign Workshop
Joe Fuld (00:00):
Hey folks, it's Joe Fuld. Every campaign needs a good set of tools. And so as part of our, How to Win a Campaign podcast, we're putting together some supplemental information on campaign tools. Today. We're lucky enough to have a guest who really understands campaign tools, almost like no one else. Our friend Mike Liddell, who's the general manager of digital over at Every Action NGP VAN. Hey Mike, how are ya?
Mike Liddell (00:28):
Hey, great. Thanks for having me.
Joe Fuld (00:31):
Absolutely. Thanks for coming on. So for those that don't know, tell us what Digital 8 is.
Mike Liddell (00:38):
Yeah, so Digital 8 is really everything you need to run a sophisticated digital marketing effort, whether you're a political campaign or a nonprofit there's, you know, there's kind of two core tools that are part of that, which is our online forms and our email tools. So that's the ability to, to have people sign up, whether it's a volunteer, attend events, sign a petition, make a donation. And then the ability to send out emails and contact you know folks in your database and ask them to take those actions and that sort of thing. There's a number of other tools that are involved, but that's the real, the core is really the, the forms and the email. And, and basically what we're trying to provide is everything that a digital director would need to run a, a sophisticated campaign.
Joe Fuld (01:32):
Mike, what sets Digital 8 apart from other tools that are out there?
Mike Liddell (01:37):
So I think there are probably three main things that really set us apart. So one, I really think we have the best forms out on the market. So we've really done a lot of work to make sure that when someone comes to a website, someone comes to one of our forms, we're gonna make it as easy as possible for them to convert. So we have you know, done a lot of testing. We've built a lot of cool features so that when someone comes, it's easy for them to make that donation, it's easy for them to sign up, to take action and to join your organization. So that's the first thing. Second our email tools we've really gone, I think, above and beyond what other folks out there are doing around email deliverability. We've really focused on making sure that when you send an email, we're going to do everything that we can to make sure that email actually gets delivered to somebody and that they actually read it and it doesn't end up in their spam or their junk mail inbox, you know, that sort of thing. And so we have an in house deliverability team, we've developed a number of sophisticated tools that we use to make sure that those emails are actually getting delivered and you're getting as many of them delivered as, as possible. And so that's, that's that's probably my number two thing. And then lastly, I'll just kinda throw in you know, one of the things I think is, is definitely different and that no one else really out there in the market has is that our Digital 8 tools are tightly integrated with NGP and VAN, if you're a campaign or if our Every Action development product, if you're a nonprofit. And what that really means is that you can run a digital program that isn't siloed off from what you're doing in the offline world. Your digital program can be part of your overall campaign, and it can take in the data. The supporters that you have from the offline world can also be contacted in the online world and vice versa. You know, we're in the past, it really was that you had to kind of have a digital program that was separate, and it wasn't part of the overall effort. We're really trying to break down those silos, combine all the data to make the overall campaigns and organizations a lot smarter and give them that visibility across all their data. So it's not just off of one place or the other.
Joe Fuld (03:57):
Great. So you mentioned VAN, right? NGP VAN. What is the difference or you say between Digital 8 and NGP VAN or Digital 8 and Every Action or Smart VAN? I think folks get confused sometimes with the different products that you have. So can you explain that to folks? What is the difference?
Mike Liddell (04:20):
Sure, sure. So there's really, there's kind of three main ways of three main types of products that we have. So digital is kind of the, the, you know, what a digital director would use when they're going out there. And they're communicating with people. NGP or our development tools, that's really what your fundraising director, your development director is using or in the political world, compliance folks also use those tools. So those are tools that are for offline fundraising and that sort of thing is really the NGP world. And then the VAN world is our organizing set of tools. And when we say organizing, we're really talking about voter contact or volunteer contact and organizing events, things like that. And so, so that's kind of the VAN world. Some people know uh VAN tools, uh Smart VAN or VoteBuilder but that's, those are really kind of the differences between those three main sets of tools. And again, the, you know, one of the real advantages of our tools that we built them, so they can all work together. They can all communicate with each other instead of having, you know, those historically being three different sets of tools that never really talked to each other, I didn't talk to each other well, we can really integrate them in our system.
Joe Fuld (05:34):
And so Digital 8 has both VAN tools and NGP tools built in together.
Mike Liddell (05:42):
Yeah, the way I would think about it is that you know, say you're an organizer or you're a fundraiser. What we can do is we can turn on our digital tools and provide the same level of kind of sophisticated tool that maybe only a digital director or a digital team used. Those same tools can now be available for organizers to use or for fundraisers to use. So if you're an organizer, if you're someone who's doing offline fundraising events, you can send emails using our digital tools that have all these sophisticated deliverability features built in and, but are still easy to use and still accessible. If you're an organizer, you can create an event and publish it to a website with digital aid and that sort of thing. And so, so that's really what we're trying to do is say, you know, digital, isn't just for the digital directors or somebody who knows HTML or CSS. We want everybody at an organization or in a campaign to be able to use these tools and take advantage of what we've built.
Joe Fuld (06:46):
So one of the, one of the integrations you have is Digital 8. Now works directly with Facebook ads manager and integrates with that. Talk to us about how this feature works with the current iteration of Facebook and their restrictions on political ads. Talk to us about that.
Mike Liddell (07:06):
Yeah, for sure. So what our tool basically does is it allows you to come in to our tool and select a universe and select an audience that you want to target from our tools. So you may say, I want to pull down a list of everybody who has donated online in the last six months. And I want to pull that list and I'm going to set it up in our system. And then I'm going to push that list out to Facebook, and I'm going to run a campaign. It might be like a lookalike campaign. For instance, you might say, I want to target I want to find people on Facebook who look like these donors. Who've given to me in the last six months. Find me some other people who are similar to this same audience, I want to try and get them to make a donation or sign up as well. Um and so that's essentially what our tool does. It allows you to push that universe up and then it also allows you to kind of track the ROI of your buys. So you can then come into our tool and say, all right, we're spending $500 on this ad by and you can connect the actual ads so that when someone comes and they make some donor makes a donation, we're going to track that and tie it back to the ad as well. And the end result is kind of a, a report that comes out that says, Hey, you spent $500, but you actually made a thousand dollars. And so, you know, you had an extra $500 ROI there, ROI being return on investment for, for folks who don't know. So, so what we're really trying to do is track, make it easy for people to, you know, upload those audiences into Facebook, and then also track the effectiveness of the ads, how much money they were making, how many signups they got on a per dollar kind of basis.
Joe Fuld (08:46):
What is your favorite or the innovation that Digital 8 has made for the 2020 iteration that you think is the most exciting?
Mike Liddell (08:55):
Yeah. So I'll try and just give you three quick ones. I have a lot of them.
Joe Fuld (08:59):
Yeah. Just go. It's the lightning round, so.
Mike Liddell (09:03):
So one of the really cool things where we just launched is our new version of our marketing automation tool. So this is a tool that lets you set up automated emails that get sent out. Whenever someone performs an action, or if they're like a new signup, you can send a welcome series. We have, it's a really powerful tool. You can do branching and all these complicated conditional setups, but it's also really easy to use. So we have recipes that people can just click a button and set one of them up. So that's a really cool tool. Another thing I'm really excited about is we just combined the blue state digital quick donate fast one-click pool with our fast action pool. And so what that really means is we have millions of additional credit cards that have been saved that people can use to take one click donation actions with us. So that is helping people raise a lot more money. The Audubon Society just did a case study with us where they you know had almost a 10, 10 X increase when they were using fast action. And the last thing is something we haven't actually released yet. It's coming and just a couple months, but I'm really excited. We're going to be integrating SMS into our tools. So you're going to be able to send out a text message from our tools, targeting your audience. So, so that's another thing we're really excited about. But, but, but again, that, those are just three of a lot of the different things that we're building.
Joe Fuld (10:24):
We'll link in the show notes to more information on Digital 8 and Mike Liddell, general manager of digital at every action NGP VAN. Great to have you talk with us about this. Thanks so much.
Mike Liddell (10:37):
Thanks for having me.
Joe Fuld (10:38):
Thanks for listening to this episode of How to Win a Campaign: Tools Edition. To learn more about great campaign tools, check out our blog and remember to like review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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