Insights
The campaign digital timeline: what to set up, and when
Every campaign we’ve worked with has asked some version of the same question: “Is it too early for this?” And almost every time, the honest answer was no. It was already slightly too late.
Digital campaign work has an order of operations. Get it right and each piece feeds the next. Get it wrong and you’re building the plane during the announcement speech. Here’s the sequence, working back from election night.
Twelve months out: claim your ground
Before you’ve told anyone you’re running, quietly secure the raw materials:
- Your domain. Buy it the moment you’re serious, along with the obvious variants. Domains cost twelve dollars; buying yours back from a squatter after you announce costs considerably more. This is the single cheapest insurance in politics.
- Your name on the platforms you’ll eventually use, even if the accounts sit empty.
- A bank account and compliance setup, because everything downstream (donation platform, ad accounts) needs it.
Nothing here requires a designer or a firm. It requires an afternoon.
Six to four months out: build the hub
This is the website window, and the timing matters more than people think.
You want the site finished before you announce, not after, because announcement day is the biggest free traffic spike your campaign will ever get. A “coming soon” page on announcement day is a fumbled kickoff.
A proper build takes two to four weeks (here’s what drives the cost at every race size), so start the conversation six months out and use the buffer for the things campaigns always underestimate: photography, biography drafts, and deciding what your three priorities actually are. The writing, honestly, takes longer than the website. When you get close, run the launch-day checklist.
This is also when your brand gets settled. Logo, colors, type. Do it now, once, and everything that follows (site, signs, mailers, social graphics) comes out matching. Campaigns that skip this step spend the whole cycle looking slightly different everywhere.
Four to two months out: fill the pipeline
With the hub live, start the systems that compound over time:
- Email capture running from day one, because the list you build in month four is the list you email in the final week.
- Content that answers voter questions, in plain language, on your site. Search engines and AI assistants need time to find and trust it. Publishing in the last month is shouting into a room nobody’s entered yet.
- Donation flow tested and humming, including on a phone, on cellular data.
The final two months: spend attention
Now, and only now, paid advertising makes sense. Ads are the most expensive thing you’ll do online, and they work by sending strangers to a destination. The campaigns that run ads before the destination is ready are paying to introduce voters to a weak first impression.
Retargeting, matched landing pages, get-out-the-vote pushes: all of it lands harder because the foundation underneath it has been quietly accumulating trust for months.
Election night and after
Decide before the polls close what the site does next: a thank-you message either way, then an archive, a redirect, or the beginning of the next campaign. A site that still says “vote Tuesday” in December tells every future opponent how your operation runs.
The pattern under all of it
Notice the shape: own things first, build the hub second, feed it third, amplify it last. Every step is cheaper and calmer than the one after it, which is why waiting always costs more than starting.
Wherever you are on this timeline right now, the best move is the same one: figure out which step you’re actually on, and do that one next. If you’re not sure, that’s a thirty-minute conversation, and we’re happy to have it.