During the 2021 election, I was given a contract to be a media manager for NDP candidate Sasha Kane (Etobicoke-Lakeshore). Because of the nature of a snap election, we didn’t have a candidate announced at the start. In addition to that, the candidate did not have their own social media accounts. So, the entire online presence for Sasha had to be created from scratch. This created some issues:
- Due to the pandemic, there would need to be a strong focus on online campaigning and outreach.
- Social media platforms such as Twitter banned paid political advertisements.
- Facebook and Instagram require special authorization for any paid political advertisements. which takes months for a person to be authorized. This process would be impractical to go through in a snap election.
As media manager I was given a small budget to put together a team and create whatever buzz I could about Sasha.
We then had even more issues to deal with because of the nature of the candidate:
At age 22, Sasha was one of the youngest candidates running in the entire country. She just finished university and thus had limited real world experiences to draw from, making it an uphill battle to convince undecided voters to vote for her. In addition to that she worked full time during the campaign, limiting the amount of time she had to work on tasks surrounding the campaign. She was a good candidate that matched the demographics well and with my expertise, managed to easily be one of the most viral NDP candidates in the country. Which helped get her name out there. She didn’t win, but she grew the vote total by 3% in an election that saw a massive decline in voting. With some assistance from the work I did as media manager, Sasha looked extremely professional and gathered a lot more media presence than most candidates.
I was granted full control over the media portion of the campaign. I spent time getting to know Sasha so we could put together a solid plan. She was young which did give some advantages then a typical older candidate, and my main responsibilities were as follows:
- 5 commercials:
Sasha’s Campaign Announcement.
A more in-depth video getting to know Sasha.
An interview on why Sasha wants to run and what she wants to accomplish if elected.
A youth registration video.
A video criticizing the liberal’s environmental plan.
- Pitch to the media news stories about one of the youngest candidates running in the country. We got The Toronto Star and BlogTO to write about her campaign.
- Launch a snapchat campaign (7500 unique users of our filter reaching about 20k people)
- Run and create content for the social media accounts.
- Teaching the candidate basic PR to relate to seniors and students better.