Objective: Get The Borgen Project in front of your leaders and their staff.
Make sure your leader knows their district is “Borgen Project country.” We want to make sure that everywhere they turn, they see The Borgen Project…Well for a mile at least! By utilizing simple, grassroots-marketing tactics (flyers, chalk writing on the sidewalk, etc.) you can ensure that the global poverty fight is constantly on their radar.
Getting Started
1. Pinpoint your Target Zone. Select a 1-mile target zone around your leader’s local office. Visit your leader’s website to find the address for their local office. Enter the address into Google Maps or Scribble Maps. The one-mile area around their office is where you want to focus your brand/issue awareness campaign. Anyone passing through the neighborhood is going to become familiar with The Borgen Project.
2. Determine and Implement Tactics. How are you going to make sure that inside that 1-mile zone they will see or hear the words “The Borgen Project” everywhere they turn? We’ve always been impressed by the ability of flyers and stickers to increase awareness. Research grassroots marketing tactics, such as “Guerrilla Marketing.” Draft out an outline of what you’ll do and paste this into your tracker.
Ideas:
- Print flyers that say “I support The Borgen Project and ask businesses to post them in their storefront windows.
- Post Borgen Project flyers on telephone poles within the one-mile campaign. Recruit “Flyer Pilots” (aka. friends) to help you distribute them. **Please do not staple flyers to trees.**
- Write facts about the issues in chalk on the sidewalks or parking lots.
- Ask baristas in the neighborhood to write “What is borgenproject.org?” on coffee cups given to customers.
- Create “moments.” Think of creative ways to capture people’s attention while they’re walking/driving down the street… A person in a horse costume holding a Borgen Project sign? A band playing songs on the sidewalk that work the REACH Act into their singing?
Katie Vanderburg and her team of recruits implement a 1-Mile Campaign in Lodi, CA.
3. Document your Work: Take photos of everything you do. This will help your manager track your efforts and we may use some of the photos on the website.
Next Level Visibility Strategy
Using public records information and reading old news articles you can often learn where the leader lives, gets their haircut and a variety of other information. This information can be used to give you a sense of areas they likely travel or frequent. You can literally post flyers along the paths they frequently drive.
Flyers
- Borgen Poster – Call Congress
- Borgen Poster – Green
- Borgen Poster – Simple Logo
- Borgen Poster – Africa
“During a lobbying meeting, I had a Congressional staffer mention that he and his wife went to dinner the night before and saw a Borgen Project flyer posted on a telephone pole outside the restaurant. The staffer seemed way more engaged in the cause than I would have expected from that particular office. I’m always amazed by the power a 15 cent piece of paper taped to a telephone pole can have.”
– Clint Borgen, President of The Borgen Project