Ready for Launch Day? Here’s Your Campaign Kick-Off Checklist

As your campaign launch day approaches, the excitement builds and builds. And rightly so—the day you kick off your campaign is truly exciting! But before you grab the confetti, there are some important steps to cover. Luckily, we’ve put together a handy campaign launch checklist that will help you get (and keep!) everything organized ahead of your campaign kick-off announcement.

Below are the ten most important steps to setting up your campaign, from registering as a political committee to setting up your website and settling on staff.

Let’s start with the first steps to starting any political campaign, the paperwork.

File

One of the first steps in launching your campaign involves completing essential administrative tasks to establish a strong organizational foundation. These tasks are crucial for making your campaign credible and legitimate in the eyes of donors, supporters, and legal authorities.

First, you’ll need to register as a candidate. What does that entail? You’ll need to fill out the forms necessary to form a political committee. Where you find the necessary forms depends on what kind of office you’re running to fill:

Running for federal office? The FEC has the registration and reporting forms you need.
Running for state or local office? Visit your state’s Secretary of State or elections board website to access the forms required to run for state or local offices.

You can find more information about filing to register your campaign by visiting our administrative guide to setting up your campaign.

Pick an Announcement Date

Be strategic about the date you pick to announce your candidacy. You want to pick a time that maximizes the impact of your announcement and fits your campaign timeline.

For instance, candidates often try to time their announcements close to the start of a quarter. Doing so means you’ll have the most time to raise cash and have the best possible cash on hand for your first round of campaign finance reports, which signals to potential donors that you have a strong campaign.

What else should you consider when planning your announcement date? Here are a few suggestions:

Don’t announce during major events (e.g., holidays)
Prepare your press release kit ahead of your campaign announcement.
Have your social media presence and payment processing established before you launch, ensuring you can make the most of the interest you generate.

Having a launch date in mind will help you plan when fundraising begins. Before you can start fundraising, though, you’ll need an appropriate bank account.

Open a Bank Account

Once you’re ready to begin fundraising for your campaign, you must first have several things in place before accepting a single contribution:

Employment Identification Number (EIN)
Accredited bank account
Treasurer to help you stay in compliance with campaign finance laws (more on this later)

Legally, political campaigns must have their own bank accounts, separate from the candidate’s personal finances. The campaign accounts must be with a state or federal bank or an FDIC- or NCUA-insured institution.

Beyond opening the bank account, you’ll also need the EIN for tax purposes.

A campaign bank account, however, is just the first step in accepting contributions. If you’re going to run an effective campaign, you’ll need ways to organize and collect your payments.

Set Up Payment Processing

Payment processing platforms such as ActBlue or Numero can organize your fundraising from various streams (from call time, events, and campaign merchandise sales to website donations). Services like PayPal are also great ways to supplement the ways you accept donations. These services are helpful because they have built-in political campaign tools.

Design a Logo

Branding is a huge part of any political campaign branding. Accordingly, you want a visually interesting and memorable logo.

You can approach designing your logo in several ways. You could incorporate popular colors for the party or elements that reference your state. Many style choices are currently trending, so be creative. Have fun with it!

Depending on your budget, you can have a logo designed by a campaign consultant, hire someone from a site like Fiverr, or use a site like Canva to design the logo yourself.

Once your logo is ready, you’ll need to add it to your website and social media.

Set Up a Website

It might seem intuitive to have your campaign website set up before your announcement, but we can’t stress enough the importance of this step of our political campaign checklist. If people see you’re running for office and Google your name, you want them to find carefully crafted campaign messaging about you—enter your campaign website.

Your website should include several elements:

Donate button to encourage grassroots donations
Clear, visible messaging that conveys your ideals, qualifications, and background
Key issues page that further develops your campaign messaging and tells supporters about your public service goals
Robust About Me page that helps familiarize supporters with you, the candidate
A place for people to sign up to volunteer for phone banking or canvassing

Above all, ensure your website is dynamic, engaging, and user-friendly. Hiring a vendor specializing in website design will help you build a site that funnels users to important parts of the site (e.g., donate buttons, volunteer recruitment, or voter registration pages).

Here’s a final tip for your website: Set up a site that can evolve as your career unfolds. If you choose an evergreen URL, you’ll be ahead when setting up your next campaign.

Having your website in place means you’re closer to fundraising. But, as we said earlier, there are a lot of rules to follow when accepting money from supporters. Let’s make sure you’ve got everything sorted.

Find a Treasurer

Finding a treasurer is crucial for political candidates. The compliance laws around political campaign fundraising are abundant, so the treasurer is usually the first campaign staff position you’ll fill. A treasurer can help you set up your bank account and ensure you correctly handle all your campaign finance reporting.

You’ll need to appoint a treasurer before you can fill out essential paperwork to register your political committee. In fact, a treasurer must be listed on the Statement of Organization for your campaign. What is the treasurer’s role? It’s twofold. A treasurer will organize and file the appropriate paperwork at the necessary times. You also need a treasurer to collect contributions or disburse funds for campaign expenses.

Hiring a treasurer, however, is just the first of many staffing decisions you’ll need to make.

Decide on the Rest of Your Staff

The staff you hire for your campaign will majorly impact your budget needs. What size staff do you need? Honestly, the number of staff and hours required for your staff will vary. For example, a treasurer—while indispensable to any campaign—is typically a part-time position. For other positions, such as field organizer, you might not even need to hire until much closer to election day.

Who you hire and when will depend on your campaign plan and various factors:

The size of your budget
Whether you’re running for federal, state, or local office
The phase of the election

Running in the primaries requires a smaller staff than the size of staff needed in the general elections. Running for state or local offices usually means that you’ll be working with smaller budgets and smaller staff. Alternatively, if you’re running for a federal office, you’ll generally have a much bigger campaign to manage, better-funded opponents, and greater staffing needs.

Making wise staffing decisions is integral to maintaining a healthy campaign budget and successful campaign strategy.

Another way to balance your budget is to have a solid fundraising plan. A major factor in preparing a healthy budget is to map out where the funds will come from. Knowing your limitations will be vital to accurately mapping out a fundraising plan.

Identify the Fundraising Limits for Your Campaign

As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of campaign finance laws to navigate when running a political campaign. One of the primary laws you’ll need to familiarize yourself with is campaign contribution limits.

The FEC sets these limitations for federal offices and by your state and local governments for state and local offices. Your responsibility is to know what laws apply to your political campaign. Federal limits are listed on the FEC’s website. State and local limitations can be found on your state’s election board website or Secretary of State website.

Notably, contribution limits can vary drastically from area to area. For instance, New York’s limits are calculated using a complicated formula, while Florida’s limits are relatively clear-cut.

Your treasurer can help you navigate the intricacies surrounding campaign finance laws. Before you build a fundraising plan, it benefits you to have a strong working knowledge of these laws.

And now you’re ready for the final item on your campaign launch checklist.

Kick-off Your Campaign

If you’re at this checklist item, you’re officially ready to launch your campaign! It’s time to roll out your candidacy to the world.

Use your campaign kick-off to generate as much buzz as possible. Organize a launch event showing people that your campaign is worth backing. Better yet, try to turn the announcement into a fundraising event or a canvassing or phone banking recruitment opportunity.

Setting up a campaign launch party helps raise awareness of your campaign, kick-start your fundraising, and highlight your messaging. Want to expand your campaign’s reach even further? Add a livestream component. Such tactics help launch your campaign without breaking the bank—even if you’re running for a local office with a tight budget.