Start With Listening Before You Start Messaging
Most first-time candidates and nonprofit leaders make the same mistake. They jump straight to tactics. They start posting on Instagram, hire someone to write a press release, and build a website before they have answered the most important question: What do I actually stand for, and does that map to what my community needs?
This is where the work begins. Not with content. With clarity.
Find What Is Already There
The goal of this phase is not to invent a message. It is to surface the one you already carry. Adam Belmont, a communications strategist who works with candidates and organizational leaders, puts it directly: "You're not trying to put words in someone's mouth. Authenticity. It's just refining what is already there, just beneath the surface and just sharpening it a little bit. It's not changing who you are or what you want to say. It's just helping you make it more effective."
That reframe matters. A lot of first-time candidates are wary of "messaging" because it sounds like spin. It is not. It is excavation. You already have a value system, a set of problems you have lived or witnessed, and a perspective that is uniquely yours. The intake process is about getting that out of your head and onto paper in a form that is clear enough to repeat and compelling enough to land with a stranger.
A Practical Starting Exercise
Before you brief a consultant, before you post anything, before you write a bio, do this:
Write down your top five values. Not political positions. Values. The things that would still be true about you if you were not running for anything. Then write down three specific problems you are trying to solve, described in plain language that someone outside your industry or political circle would understand without explanation.
Now take those eight things and test them with five real people in your target community. Not your friends. Not your biggest supporters. People who represent the range of folks you are trying to reach. Ask them what resonates, what is confusing, and what they wish you had said. Listen more than you talk.
What you hear back is your first real data point. You are not looking for applause. You are looking for the moments when someone leans in and says, "Yes, that is exactly the problem." That reaction tells you where your message has traction and where it is still too abstract to do any work.
Do Not Wait to Start This Process
The most costly mistake is delay. Belmont is clear on this: "You can never start soon enough. You don't think that you have time — oh my gosh, we have this many months and then two months before I'll bring in some help. No, you should be thinking about it now and starting to map out your points of view, what is unique to you that you want everybody to know."
This is not a 30-day-out task. It is a foundational task. The earlier you do this work, the more time you have to pressure-test your framing, course-correct before you have a public record, and build the kind of message consistency that actually sticks with people.
And message repetition is not optional. Research on the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve shows that within one hour, people forget an average of 50 percent of new information. Within a week, that number climbs to 90 percent. Belmont confirms this from the field: "Considering that 90% of what you say will be forgotten in the one minute afterwards, you just gotta keep repeating and keep drawing on your message. Nobody's listening to you and tracking you and following you like you track, listen, and follow yourself."
You are not being repetitive. You are being strategic. Repetition across platforms, over time, is how a message moves from something people heard once to something they actually believe you stand for.
There is also a defensive reason to build your narrative early. As Mary Noone puts it: "If you don't control your public-facing narrative, they will define it for you." That is not hypothetical. It is what happens in every race and every organizational launch where the candidate or leader waits too long to go on offense with their own story. The vacuum does not stay empty. Someone else fills it.
Build a Platform-Diverse Content Ecosystem on a Small Budget
Once you have a clear, tested message, the next question is where to put it. The media landscape has shifted faster than most campaign playbooks have caught up with. In May 2025, broadcast TV fell below 20 percent of total U.S. television viewership for the first time ever, while streaming reached 44.8 percent, its largest share on record (Nielsen, The Gauge, June 2025). A Pew Research Center survey published in July 2025 found that 83 percent of U.S. adults watch streaming services, while only 36 percent still subscribe to cable or satellite.
This is not a trend you can wait out. It is the current reality of where your voters and supporters actually spend their attention. If your communications plan is built around broadcast TV as a primary channel, you are already talking to a shrinking audience.
A platform-diverse strategy does not mean being everywhere for its own sake. It means being consistent in the places your specific audience actually lives, with content that works in each format, all laddering back to the same core message.
Batch Your Content and Work Smarter, Not More
For a first-time candidate or nonprofit leader without a large staff, the biggest barrier to consistent content is time. Batching solves this. Instead of trying to produce something new every day, set aside a block of time once or twice a month to film or record a larger volume of content at once. A single 20-minute interview or long-form conversation can be broken down into eight to twelve short clips using tools like Opus Clip, which uses AI to identify the strongest moments and format them automatically for social platforms.
This approach gives you a week or two of daily content from a single session. It also creates consistency of message because all the clips come from the same source material, the same framing, the same language. You are not reinventing your message every morning. You are distributing it.
Borrow Audiences Before You Build Your Own
One of the most underused tactics for first-time candidates and nonprofit leaders is podcast guesting. You do not need a show. You need to get on other people's shows. In 2025, 55 percent of the U.S. population, approximately 158 million Americans, listens to podcasts monthly, up from 47 percent in 2024 (Edison Research Infinite Dial 2025). That audience is not watching the six o'clock news. They are listening to shows built around specific interests, communities, and local issues.
Local podcasts, neighborhood newsletters with audio components, and community-based influencer shows are all vehicles where a first-time candidate can reach a concentrated, pre-engaged audience without spending money on media buys. The data backs this up: guests with existing audiences can boost podcast downloads by 20 to 300 percent, and cross-promotion across industries increases audience acquisition by an average of 23 percent.
The pitch is simple. You are a credible local voice with a clear point of view on something their audience cares about. You are not asking for an endorsement. You are offering a conversation that delivers value to their listeners. Most hosts will say yes, especially if you have done the work of knowing what their show is actually about before you reach out.
Start Posting Before You Announce
This is the piece most candidates skip and almost all of them regret. Your content presence should exist before you formally launch. Belmont's framework is clear: map your points of view now, get them out in public early, and build a track record of showing up consistently before you ever need someone to know who you are.
This matters for two reasons. First, the algorithm rewards consistency over time, not volume in a short burst. An account that has been posting one to three times a week for six months has more organic reach than one that posted thirty times in two weeks and then went quiet. Second, voters and donors are more skeptical than they used to be. A digital footprint that predates your announcement signals that your values and perspective are real, not manufactured for a race.
You do not need production-quality video to start. You need a phone, decent light, and something clear to say. Record a two-minute take on a local issue. Share a behind-the-scenes moment from your existing community work. Post a short clip from a conversation you had at a community meeting. The bar is authenticity and consistency, not polish.
Brevity is non-negotiable across all of it. As Belmont puts it: "It's harder to say things with brevity and deliver a message with brevity and impact and meaning than it is to say something that's a whole essay's worth. And nobody, regardless of who you're trying to reach, they all have short attention spans. All of them."
That applies to your captions, your clips, your talking points, and your speeches. The discipline of saying less, more precisely, is one of the highest-leverage communication skills you can build as a first-time candidate or leader. It is also one of the hardest. Start practicing it before you are under pressure to perform it.
A Note on Digital Budget Allocation
Building a content ecosystem does not require a large budget. But when you do have money to spend on digital, how you allocate it matters more than how much you have. The 2024 election data makes this concrete. According to Tech for Campaigns' 2024 Digital Ads Report, Trump's campaign allocated 41 percent of its digital budget to mobilization, while Harris allocated only 13 percent, with just 4.6 percent of her total digital budget going to voter turnout efforts, compared to 9 percent for Trump.
Harris outspent Trump significantly in total. But spending more did not compensate for a structural gap in how that money was directed. Persuasion spending without a mobilization backbone does not close races. For down-ballot candidates working with tighter budgets, this is not just an observation about a presidential race. It is a direct warning about the tradeoff you will face when you are deciding how to allocate limited digital dollars. Content builds awareness. Mobilization wins elections. Your plan needs both, in the right proportion, at the right stage of the race.
The Difference Between PR, Comms, and Marketing and When You Need Each
One of the most common and most costly sources of confusion for first-time candidates and nonprofit leaders is not knowing what they are actually hiring when they bring on communications help. PR, comms, and marketing are not interchangeable. They do different things, they are deployed at different stages, and conflating them leads to either overspending on the wrong thing or leaving a critical function completely uncovered.
PR: Earned External Visibility
Public relations is the work of getting your story placed in media you do not own or pay for directly. That means earned press coverage, editorial placements, media relationships, and managing your reputation with journalists, community influencers, and external stakeholders who shape public perception.
PR is most valuable when you have a story to tell that is genuinely newsworthy, an announcement, a response to a controversy, a major endorsement, a policy position that ties to a live local issue. It is not a faucet you turn on whenever you want coverage. It requires relationships, timing, and something that is actually worth covering from the reporter's perspective, not just yours.
For a first-time candidate, PR is often not the first hire. It becomes more valuable once you have the message foundation built and are ready to go on offense with earned media. Trying to run a PR play before you have message clarity is a fast way to get a story written about you that you cannot control.
Comms: The Broader Stakeholder Messaging Umbrella
Communications is the larger function that encompasses everything your organization says to anyone, donors, volunteers, staff, coalition partners, voters, community members, and media. It includes your narrative architecture, your message discipline, your crisis posture, and the consistency of your voice across every channel and audience.
If PR is a specific tactic within the broader system, comms is the system itself. A communications strategy defines what you say, who you say it to, in what order, with what emphasis, and how you make sure it stays consistent even when different people on your team are speaking.
For candidates and nonprofit leaders, this is the function to build first. Before you worry about press coverage or paid advertising, you need a clear answer to: What are we saying? To whom? Why?
The Right Hire at the Right Time: A Simple Decision Guide
You do not need all three functions running simultaneously from day one. Here is how to sequence them based on where you are.
Start here: Comms strategy first. Before you spend a dollar on PR or marketing, you need message clarity, a defined audience, and a consistent voice. This is the foundation everything else builds on.
Add PR when: You have something genuinely newsworthy to say, a relationship with at least a few local reporters or community media outlets, and a message that can hold up under a follow-up question. Bringing in PR help before that point often accelerates the wrong story.
Add marketing when: You have a specific action you need people to take, donate, attend, register, vote, and a budget to push that ask through paid or owned channels. Marketing without a message foundation is expensive noise.
For most first-time candidates and down-ballot races, a single communications strategist who understands all three functions and can help you sequence them correctly is more valuable than three separate specialists who each optimize their own lane without coordinating.
Build the System Now, Win the Race Later
The candidates and nonprofit leaders who communicate well are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most polished content. They are the ones who did the foundational work early, built a system they could actually run, and stayed disciplined enough to repeat their message long after it felt repetitive to them.
Start with your values and three problems you solve. Test them with real people before you go public. Build a content presence before you announce. Show up on platforms where your audience already lives. Borrow audiences through podcast guesting and local media before you try to build your own. And when you spend money on digital, allocate it toward mobilization, not just awareness.
None of this is complicated. All of it requires discipline. The candidates who win with limited resources are the ones who pick the few moves that move votes and execute them consistently, not the ones who try to do everything and end up doing nothing well.
You already have the credibility and the conviction. The strategy is what turns that into a campaign that builds something durable. Build it now, not two months before you need it.
FAQ: Building a Communications Strategy as a First-Time Candidate or Nonprofit Leader
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You should start before you think you need to, ideally six to twelve months before any formal announcement. The earlier you build message clarity and a content presence, the more time you have to course-correct before the stakes are high.
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Communications covers everything you say to every audience, voters, donors, staff, media, and coalition partners, and sets the message architecture that holds all of it together. Marketing is the execution of specific paid or owned tactics, like digital ads or email campaigns, that drive a particular action. Comms is the system; marketing is one tool inside it.
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Batch your video content once or twice a month and clip it into short social posts using tools like Opus Clip. Guest on local podcasts to borrow existing audiences. Post consistently before your launch so the algorithm and your community both register you as a credible, ongoing presence, not just a campaign that appeared out of nowhere.
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Far more often than feels comfortable. Forgetting Curve shows people forget up to 70 percent of new information within 24 hours and up to 90 percent within a week. Your audience is not tracking you the way you track yourself. Repetition across platforms and over time is how a message becomes something voters actually associate with you.
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Not immediately. PR earns its value when you have something genuinely newsworthy and a message foundation solid enough to hold up under press scrutiny. Most first-time candidates are better served by investing first in communications strategy, message clarity, audience definition, and content consistency, before layering in PR outreach or paid marketing.
Stop Asking What's Broken. Start Asking What People Want.
Most candidates walk into a community ready to talk about what they will fix. That instinct is understandable, but it is also a trap. When you lead with problems, you get people stuck in a deficit mindset, and you sound like every other politician who shows up with a program, gets the vote, and disappears. There is a different approach, one that builds real trust, creates durable political coalitions, and actually moves communities forward: start with aspirations, not agendas.
