Welcome back to Digital Strategy Quick Hits.
This month’s newsletter is about one word:
Consistency.
Consistency as a practice and a power building discipline and what it means for your organizing and digital strategy.
1. Consistency as a function of strategy.
Are we being consistently strategic – from the minutiae of daily social media posting to the overarching campaigns we are running.
A campaign is dead in the water if it’s not consistently being worked. Is your organization subtly and not so subtly pushing that campaign to your supporters and potential supporters? If not, you aren’t actually running a campaign, you are slap-dashing content to people in the hopes of getting some kinda response whether that response moves your work forward or not. As my friend Alex Rich said when we were talking about this topic the other day:
“that vis of time in the x-axis and “actual touches on this topic” on the y-axis is the EKG of a campaign.
When it’s flat, campaign is dead.
Political pressure is a practice with a pulse.”
Political organizing isn’t episodic (tho it may often feel like a soap opera some days). It’s ongoing. Doing a big push on something in order to ride the wave of the news cycle at the expense of your ongoing campaigns and long term work sacrifices your long term odds for success. Rapid response is a great campaign tool, but it’s not the only campaign tool and risks sacrificing long term winning for short term dopamine.
2. Consistency as a function of escalation.
Are you making the same type of ask over and over again without deepening your community’s engagement? Are you only making low bar asks like online petitions without asking for stronger action like showing up at an event? If you are doing either of those that is repetition,not escalation. Without deepening the relationship of your community with your work you will eventually bore your audience into disengagement.
3. Consistency as a function of follow through
Are you doing online petitions and not reporting back to your audience on success or lack of success and next steps? When supporters don’t hear what happened as a result of their action, they assume nothing did. People need to see that you aren’t just list building but are trying to sustain meaningful momentum towards your stated goals.
4. Consistency as a function of content cadence.
While it’s true that you don’t need to be posting on social media daily, you do need to be posting consistently in order to keep the algorithms and recommendation engines happy. You also don’t need to be emailing your community daily, but if you aren’t emailing them regularly when they finally see you in their inbox again, they may not remember why they signed up for your emails (assuming you are running consent opt in as your status quo) in the first place and are more likely to either unsubscribe or more dangerously mark you as spam. What you need to do is train your community what to expect from you.
Are you using a content calendar to ensure a modicum of cadence in your content output? If not, here’s a link to a sample template I use in my trainings when talking about content calendaring.
5. Consistency as a function of data best practices.
Are you practicing good data hygiene ie tagging your actions and segmenting your outreach based on that tagging? Are you consistently cleaning your data to ensure your emails are going to actual email addresses instead of first names or zip/postal codes?
6. Consistency as a function of community engagement.
Are you honoring opt ins and opt outs? Are you asking for explicit consent or are you hiding behind pre-checked boxes and implied consent? A respected community is an engaged community.
7. Consistency as a function of brand identity.
Do your online profiles feature the same image avatars? Do your social media handles directly name your organization? Do your online bios specify the work your organization does and invite people into that work? When you put out online content, could someone look at that content and immediately recognize it as yours? And just as importantly, does it consistently reinforce what you stand for?
8. Consistency as a function of authenticity.
At its core, authenticity is about consistency in how we represent ourselves to others, online and offline. As I often say in trainings, you really don’t want me writing email blasts for you because I write like I talk- a lot of words! Consistency in voice builds trust. When your content shifts tone like a burnout out social media manager’s mood swings, supporters notice it, even if they can’t articulate it. This lack of trust dooms your work to failure no matter what else you do.
At the end of the day, consistency is organizational infrastructure. It’s the discipline of showing up and following through. It’s habitual escalation, not repetition. It’s tracking your community’s engagement, instead of chasing trends.
Consistency builds trust.
Trust is how supporters stay with you. Trust is how decision makers learn you can’t be ignored.
Without consistency, you don’t have a campaign, you have moments.
Moments don’t build power.