Plan a Campaign Event Freebie

Boost Support and Connect with Voters

A great campaign event can energize supporters, increase visibility, and strengthen voter connections—but where do you start?

To take the guesswork out of event planning, we’ve created two essential resources that will help you organize and execute a fantastic, fun, and engaging campaign event with confidence.

In this freebie, you’ll get:

✅ Best Practices Checklist – An overview of the do’s and don’ts of campaign event planning, including expert tips for maximizing impact.
✅ Step-by-Step Event Planning Guide – A structured checklist that outlines everything you need to plan and execute a successful campaign event.

Whether you’re organizing a meet-and-greet, town hall, fundraiser, or rally, this comprehensive toolkit will ensure that your event is well-organized, engaging, and effective in reaching voters.

This product is for you if …

• You’re running for municipal office and want to host a great campaign event.

• You need clear, actionable steps to make planning easier and stress-free.

• You want to maximize turnout and create an event that resonates with voters.

• You’re new to campaign event planning and need guidance on what works best.

• You want to avoid common mistakes and ensure your event runs smoothly.

If you like this resource, don’t forget to check out our others:

Campaign Fundamentals for Women Candidates Webinar

Learn Campaign Essentials from Our Expert-Led Webinar Series

Running for municipal office can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to figure it out alone! During the 2018 municipal election, we hosted a series of expert-led webinars to teach women the fundamentals of running a successful campaign. Now, we’re making these recordings available for free—so you can learn at your own pace!

This four-part webinar series covers the key aspects of local campaigns, from strategy to fundraising, to help women candidates and their teams run impactful, well-organized campaigns.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to build a strong campaign strategy tailored to municipal elections.

• Fundraising fundamentals from special guest experts.

• Key tools and tactics to maximize voter outreach.

• Tips for volunteers supporting a local campaign.

These one-hour sessions provide real-world insights and actionable advice for women stepping into leadership roles. Whether you're running for council, school board trustee, or supporting a candidate, this series is designed to set you up for success.

This product is for you if …

• You’re a woman running for local office and need practical campaign guidance.

• You want expert insights on fundraising, outreach, and campaign strategy.

• You’re volunteering on a campaign and want to support effectively.

• You prefer self-paced learning and on-demand access to campaign knowledge.

• You want a strong foundation to build an impactful and organized campaign.

If you like this resource, don’t forget to check out our others:

Announcing Your Candidacy

It’s time to make a great first impression

Let’s look to the future: you’ve filed your nomination papers, started to put your team together, and are ready to knock this out of the park. So what comes next?

You need to announce your run! This will come in steps, so let’s take a look.

Pre-Announcement Tips

Think through your branding. You don’t need to overthink this: just some thoughts about what colours you want to represent you on the campaign trail.

Nail down messaging. This is what you’re going to use to reach out to voters. Having a candidate Mission and Vision section to help you with this will make all the difference. Most importantly, remember to keep it simple.

Have you cleaned your social media accounts or made new ones for your campaign? There are pros and cons on each side. Suppose you use the personal social media you already have. In that case, it comes with built-in friends and followers invested in your campaign. Still, you may want to create separate accounts to keep your social media accounts for continued private use and privacy reasons. Whichever one you’d like to do is fine, but make sure that regardless, you go through your social media accounts, update your privacy settings and delete things that you no longer want out there for public consumption.

Will you have a campaign website? Again, this is a personal choice. Websites are relatively cheap to obtain, and they’re great for multi-use (even on small campaigns). They allow you to collect donations easily, get subscribers to your email list and recruit volunteers – all of which will be key for your campaign.

Do you have a headshot? Do yourself a favour and get one. If you can hire this out, it’s best – professionals are pros for a reason, and it takes another task if your list. If you don’t have the money, then do a self-photo shoot. You’ll want a good picture on hand because people will ask for this every time they write an article about you. You’ll want to use one cohesive photo all over social media.

Your Announcement Plan

What do you want to accomplish with this announcement? What kind of campaign are you running? Do you want to keep it to social media? Will you write a press release and send it to local media? Do you want to have a public announcement party? This all depends entirely on you – make sure you know your goals and keep that in mind as you work towards the event.

Start planning your content calendar. Now that you know the date of your announcement, you can use that data to work backwards and begin teasing your announcement on social media. If you plan on using social media in your campaign, here is our most important advice: pick one or two mediums you already use and do them well. It is not the time to start experimenting with TikTok if you’re not already an expert, and it is not great to find a candidate on a platform you use and then see that the account is dead. Be mindful of that, and use social media to your advantage.

• If you’re looking for a cohesive brand look, Canva is a free tool where you can make social media graphics and other things like business cards and door knockers. It will help your whole brand have consistency. There’s also a paid version (they have a free trial available if you want to check it out).

Prepare your press kit so that you have it already available if you get asked by the press for comments, interviews, biography, headshot, etc.

Inform your supporters so that they can help you spread the news. If you accessed our Personal Inventory List, you’d already have that list and can finally start using it.

And finally, the final step:

Make the announcement!

Send out your press release. Share your announcement all over social media. Get your friends and family to start spreading the news. Try to drum up as much visibility as possible so that you can take advantage of this momentous day.

Workbook Module: Prepare Your Campaign

CA$13.00

Okay, so you’ve decided to run for office — yay! But where do you even start?

This Workbook Module helps you get your campaign basics in order. With step-by-step exercises, practical tools, and clear guidance, you’ll be prepared to plan your campaign, organize your team, and take action toward running for municipal council.

• Defining your campaign timeline

• How to take care of yourself on the campaign trail

• Identifying the people you need on your team

• Preparing your personal inventory

• Spotting strengths and gaps in your campaign to find others who can complement you

Why grab just this module?

Sometimes you don’t need the full workbook—you just want to focus on preparing your campaign. This standalone chapter gives you everything from this section in one place, so you can start planning and organizing without flipping through the full workbook.

This is a complete, actionable piece from the full HOW TO RUN FOR OFFICE: EXPLORING YOUR RUN workbook.

Add to cart

And don’t forget that if you’re looking for a little extra support, we’ve created resources that can help you in your journey.

We’ve created a whole library of free resources and links so that you’ve got all of the tools that you need to run for office.

Not only that, but we wrote the book about it — literally.

We’ve got a whole series of workbooks for you, designed especially to personally help you on your journey. This digital download will give you all the resources you need to explore your run for office, including getting to know your community, getting to better know yourself and preparing the outline of your political campaign.

And make sure to keep an eye out on our newsletter, where we share monthly tips and tricks to help you get elected.

Press Release: PoliticsNOW Hosting "Running For Something"

POLITICS NOW HOSTING “RUNNING FOR SOMETHING”

MP Viviane Lapointe, Councillor Erika Lougheed and Councillor Kristin Murray coming together to tell their story about running for political office in Northern Ontario

MARCH 7th 2022 -- PoliticsNOW is bringing together local three women politicians for a roundtable discussion about what it’s really like to run for office in Northern Ontario.

The event features Viviane Lapointe (Member of Parliament for Sudbury), Kristin Murray (Municipal Councillor for Timmins) and Erika Lougheed (Municipal Councillor for East Ferris and Ontario NDP Candidate for Nipissing). Together, they will speak candidly about their experiences running for office in their communities, and what it's really like to be a woman in politics up North.⁠ PoliticsNOW hopes that this event helps show women across Northern Ontario that their experiences are valuable and that there are many pathways to running for office.

“These women bring a wealth of knowledge and unique experiences to the table. There are a million different ways that women can get involved in politics, and we’re so lucky that we’ll get to hear these three stories,” said Amanda Kingsley Malo, the founder of PoliticsNOW. “With perspectives on what it’s like to run for different parties and at all different levels of government, the conversation that we will have promises to be honest and interesting.”

This event is free, and will be held virtually. It will be a 45 minute roundtable discussion, followed by a short Q&A. The event is taking place on March 21st at 8PM. Everyone is welcome to join.

More information can be found on PoliticsNOW’s website or Facebook page. To see more event details or to RSVP, please visit the event page. 

About PoliticsNOW

PoliticsNOW is a non-partisan grassroots organization that aims to amplify women’s voices and engage in gender-inclusive political discourse, engage more women in politics at all levels of government and work together to support women candidates. In addition to their InspireNOW speaker series, they have run awareness campaigns and Running for Office Bootcamps. In the 2018 municipal election, PoliticsNOW trained over 100 women, supported 26 female-led campaigns and saw 11 women elected to municipal council.

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What We’re Doing to Get Women Elected

Election season is upon us

And we’ve been busy ... 

As the election season creeps closer and close, we’ve been taking stock of the work that we’ve done to help prepare women run for municipal council and school board trustee. We’ve also been considering what we’ll be doing to support them through the election period itself. 

Since spring of 2017, we've been busy offering programming and different resources to women in the North who want to run for council or school board trustee.

Nominations are being filed, and with an end of July deadline to file paperwork, we're gearing up to help the brave women who are running get elected.

So here’s our game plan

Campaign Fundamentals Webinar Series  

Join us as we dive into the different aspects of campaigns with our upcoming webinar series. Did we mention it's free and that you can do this from the comfort of your own home? All you need is an internet connection and an hour to give us on Thursday nights in August.

All women candidates,  female volunteers and people working on women candidate campaigns are welcome to join us. Webinars will be approximately 50 minutes in length with the option for a Q&A at the end. Please register for each webinar individually so that we can send you the proper link as the event approaches. We can't wait for you to join us!

• August 9th: Crafting Your Story

• August 16th: Canvassing

• August 23rd: Fundraising with DemocracyKit

• August 30th: Social Media & Your Campaign

#ElectNOW

We know how much difficulty women that are running have trying to get their stories told in the local media, and we want to change that. We'll be doing a weekly feature that will highlight women candidates running all over Northern Ontario on our blog. The interview will be Q&A style, and candidates can answer as little or as many questions as they would like to give their future constituents the opportunity to get to know them a little better. We'll then put that on our blog and share it on our Facebook page, Twitter page and our Instagram account. Candidates will have the chance to share it as they please. We'll also include a graphic that they can share. This blog post will be available on our website (http://www.polinow.org), where we will also have a designated candidate page that will include the candidate's picture and a link to the blog post. We're hoping to get as many women candidates in the North involved as possible.

Since June, we have been reaching out to the women filing their nominations in Northern Ontario’s 9 cities and sending out the survey to those who reach out to us. One of our goals here at PoliticsNOW is to amplify the voices of women, we think that a blog series featuring the women running in the North this is a perfect fit. We can’t do this alone, though - we need your help reaching out to women candidates. Not all cities have candidate information readily available online for us to reach out to the women running, and not all smaller communities have the internet capabilities to post it at all. This makes it hard to ensure we reach out to every single woman that is running. Know, though, that we are committed to amplifying and supporting all women candidates, and would appreciate being pointed in the right direction to find them. If you are a woman that is running in the upcoming election that hasn’t received an email from us but wants  to be included in this endeavour, reach out to us.

Please note that these blog posts are not an endorsement. We want to give equal support, equal opportunities and equal voices to all women who are running. As a non-partisan organization, we have chosen to remain neutral in the election itself. We trust that voters will decide which candidate best fits with their vision for their school board, ward or town/city. Our goal is to use our platform to help women reach more constituents, as well as give citizens the opportunity to find which women are running for office in their region.

If this is something that interests you (or you know someone who would be a great feature), please don't hesitate to fill out this form to get in touch with us  

Campaign Resources

We’ve been building our campaign resource page since our inception. Make sure that you check it out and take a look at all of the resources that we have created and curated from around the Internet. Feel like you need a little additional help? Email info@polinow.org to get connected with someone from our org who can offer a little extra one-on-one help. 

Open to Suggestions

We're planning other activities and programs to help women in the North be able to run campaigns more effectively. If you'd like to have your say on what we do, or you have some great ideas, don't hesitate to let us know through this survey.

Thank you so much for helping us elect women in the North!

Don't forget to follow us on social media to get the latest from us and learn more about how you can help #ElectNOW.

Press Release: PoliticsNOW To Host New Speaker Series

SUDBURY, JULY 31ST 2017 -- PoliticsNOW will be hosting a new speaker series that will feature women community leaders and change-makers called InspireNOW. The inaugural event will take place at Kuppajo Espresso Bar on Tuesday August 22nd from 6:30-8:00PM. The featured speaker at the August 22nd event will be MPP France Gélinas, member of parliament for Nickel Belt. 

The speaker series is a new venture for PoliticsNOW, a new grassroots organization in northern Ontario that is dedicated to engaging women in politics. “Our communities have so many inspiring women within them,” said Amanda Kingsley Malo, the founder of the organization. “This is a unique opportunity for us to come together and listen to them tell their stories and be inspired by their courage, their successes and their tenacity.” The organization hopes to make this a bi-monthly event, with each event featuring a new guest speaker with a new story. The event is free. All are welcome. Drinks and food will be available for purchase from Kuppajo Espresso Bar during the event.

More information can be found on PoliticsNOW’s website or Facebook page. To see more event details or to RSVP, please visit the event page on Facebook. 

About PoliticsNOW

PoliticsNOW is a non-partisan grassroots organisation that aims to amplify women’s voices and engage in gender-inclusive political discourse, engage more women in politics at all levels of government and work together to support women candidates. In addition to their InspireNOW speaker series, they have run awareness campaigns and are planning to launch a campaign bootcamp aimed at getting women prepared to run  for the 2018 municipal election.