Should your campaign hire a professional consultant?By Kurt Luidhardt
For a number of reasons, from partisan gerrymandering to increased participation, political campaigns are becoming the playground for professional consultants and organizations.
But does that mean your campaign needs to hire a professional?
Every campaign is unique. Some won’t hesitate to seek out the most experienced, most expensive consultant. At the other end of the spectrum, many candidates will attempt to save money for their campaign by not engaging political professionals. Here are two real-life examples of why even a small campaign should consider hiring a professional.
Campaign Finance Laws
We’ve all read the headlines in recent years about campaign finance irregularities and scandals. As Congress often does, it responded with a series of campaign finance laws and regulations that only an accountant could love. Even the “experts” are having a hard time understanding to complexities of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA).
Case Study: A Republican candidate for office was cruising to General Election victory after recently pulling off a stunning primary upset. All the demographics favored the Republican candidate in the General. However, his campaign made a fatal error by misreporting donated money. The resulting scandal cost him the seat. If he would have employed an expert consultant, he could have avoided the problem and won the election.
Setting Priorities
There are dozens of ways to promote your candidate. You can spend money on buttons, nail files, yard signs, TV ads, radio commercials, a fancy website and much more. How do you decide what works and what’s the most effective use of your money?
These decisions are possibly the most important decisions to make in the campaign. You likely won’t have enough money to do everything, so you must know enough to do the right thing.
Case Study: A popular Republican incumbent running for re-election had a lot of people interested in volunteering to help on his campaign. With the influx of help, coupled with good polling, he decided to run his campaign with a committee of volunteers. With volunteers pushing him in multiple directions, his campaign spent nearly all of his funds on things like glow-in-the-dark necklaces, t-shirts and event sponsorships. When October came he found his campaign without the necessary funds to pay for key voter contact items like direct mail and TV ads. If he would have worked with a consultant from day one, he would have planned for these key expenses. He won, but the result was much closer than it should have been.
Does this mean your campaign should employ a consultant? Not necessarily. But in both of these situations, not hiring a consultant actually cost the campaign more money then spending a few thousand for good advice. As I learned from my father when I was young, sometimes saving money by sacrificing quality actually costs more in the end.
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