I just received a mass email from the executive director of Equality California giving a brief description of the No on 8 campaign structure. The main points are posted below, if you want the full thing, email me and I will forward it to you . I will through the grapevine (hopefully) receive a more detailed analysis that is being generated by another consultant who was hired to do the post-op of the No on 8 campaign.
Since November 5, I have received thousands of messages and calls from our community across the state and nation about what worked, and more importantly, what did not work in the No on 8 campaign. Many have asked about the structure of the campaign and how it was run
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Here’s a quick summary of the campaign structure:
When this campaign started in earnest — well over a year ago — we did what every statewide campaign must do: We hired a professional campaign consultant to make key media, strategy and messaging decisions. That hire, Steve Smith from Dewey Square Group, was made based on Steve’s 30-year record in ballot campaigns in California, including twice defeating parental notification initiatives which had been expected to pass by large margins. Steve and Dewey Square Group wrote an in-depth plan and managed its execution.
In May of this year, Steve brought on the media and public relations firm Ogilvy International to design ads and media strategy and brought in a team of professional campaign consultants and staff to run the different components of the campaign.
National, state and local organizations contributed money and staff to campaign. The national field directors of the Task Force, HRC and GLAAD were members of the Executive Committee. The Task Force designed and led the statewide field effort and numerous national, state and local organizations lent staff to the field effort. We should all be appreciative of the many organizations based here in California that did so much to fight Prop 8. And a very special thanks to the senior staff from HRC, the Task Force, Gill Action, the ACLU and other organizations that uprooted their lives and temporarily moved to California to take on leadership roles in the campaign.
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I am so appreciative of all the amazing campaign staff, the donated staff from so many organizations and the incredible volunteers who worked so hard to secure equality. I believe that the team hired was committed to making the best decisions they could. These decisions were based on the information our consultants had from a number of sources regarding what messages had the best chance of success with the undecided voters the campaign had to reach.
Still, given our disappointing loss, the campaign has committed to an external assessment of what worked and what didn’t. While the campaign made many smart decisions, there’s no doubt that mistakes were also made. The campaign is committed to learning from those mistakes so that a smarter and better campaign can be run in the future. As new information emerges from the analysis of the election, I pledge to you to share information so that our movement can move forward with the knowledge and understanding of what it will take to win full equality in California and across the nation.