CASE STUDY

The blueprint for winning school board races

Challenge

Getting hyperlocal on the issues while staying under budget

Going into the 2022 midterm elections, three local candidates for Walled Lake Consolidated Schools, one of the largest school districts in Michigan, ran as a slate to win the school board in one of Michigan’s largest districts.

The candidates, Julie Fernandez, Shayna Levin, and Christy Tice, knew that running a grassroots-driven effort and being able to talk to voters about the local issues that mattered to them would be key to winning against formidable incumbent candidates.

Solution

Empowering the grassroots with the i360 platform

The slate worked with i360 from the beginning to develop a campaign plan that would empower the grassroots activists that were eager to knock on doors and talk to voters about the issues facing the district. The team leveraged i360’s proprietary Parental Involvement in Education model to refine their target audiences and reached them using i360 Walk, i360 Call, and i360 Text.

Volunteers in the field were eager to use the i360 Walk app, finding it to be populated with far more accurate voter data than other tools they had been supplied with on past campaigns, especially with regards to a voter’s modeled party affiliation, which was critical to the campaign’s targeting as Michigan lacks party registration.

Back at the campaign headquarters, the candidates and their teams could easily visualize the results from the field using i360 Portal’s integrated dashboards. The candidates were also able to facilitate direct follow-up calls, texts, and emails to voters tagged as needing a personal reach-out using the portal’s built-in CRM, which allowed the user to see the full picture of that voter’s political history, past field contacts, and notes left by volunteers.

During the absentee voting phase of the campaign, the slate used i360 Text to quickly engage with voters who had requested and received ballots, ensuring voters had unprecedented access to the candidates and could ask questions about policy positions or the deadline to return their ballot. As voters returned their ballots, they were automatically removed from the voter contact universes, saving the campaigns time and money. On Election Day, the team was able to easily execute texting campaigns to targeted precincts based on reports from the field about turnout.

Result

Winning all three spots

On Election Night, all three candidates won in a decisive victory for the slate, despite a blue wave across the rest of Michigan.

Image Credit: ClickOnDetroit.com

i360 was the difference maker for our campaign in 2022. Their superior data, combined with user-friendly apps and quick support, was a winning solution for our grassroots volunteers and for us as individual candidates.

Shayna LevinCandidate for Walled Lake Consolidated School District
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