While the election may be over, your campaign work is not. Hopefully some aspects of your work will continue for some time into the new term. In order to make the most of all the hard work and energy that you put in leading up to election day, you need to continue your efforts with postelection follow-up to candidates, newly elected officials, media and the public.

Follow-Up With Elected Officials

Once the campaign has ended, be sure to review public pronouncements, candidate surveys, and other materials from the winning and losing campaigns. Understand the winning candidate’s position, and hold them to what they said. Having made public statements on the issue, the candidates will most likely be responsive.

	Lessons from Kids Deserve Better After the election, the Kids Deserve Better Campaign completed outreach to all of the candidates for office in Virginia and invited them to join Project 2010. The letters referenced the comments made by the candidates regarding afterschool in their candidate surveys and encouraged newly elected officials to make good on their commitments to afterschool. As a result of the campaign work and the follow-up letter to newly elected Governor Kaine, the Afterschool Alliance built better relationships with the administration, including a spot on Kaine’s K-12 education transition team. In addition, Governor Kaine became a member of Project 2010. To review a follow-up letter from the Kids Deserve Better campaign, please click here, or refer to the Appendix.

Follow-Up With the Field

There are a number of things you can do to follow-up with the field. Ideally the end of the campaign is just the beginning of your outreach to the database that you’ve built.

• Be sure to send acknowledgements to the field, thanking them for their effort and hard work.
• Organize a post-election meeting with your partners and the precinct captains, and share best practices: what worked, what didn’t.
• Encourage the field to “keep the pressure on.”
• Give field sample letters so they can follow up with the winning candidate once that person takes office.

	Lessons from Kids Deserve Better Throughout the Kids Deserve Better campaign, organizers worked to grow the database of afterschool supporters in the state. This database was vital to the success of the campaign, but it is equally important for longer term engagement strategies. A thank you e-mail to the database ensures that the field knows the outcome of the election and that their efforts made a difference. It can also help keep your organization engaged with the field beyond the campaign, so work next steps into the thank you e-mail or a follow-up one soon after. To review a sample email to the field after the Kids Deserve Better campaign, click here or refer to the Appendix.

Final Tips

• Walk before you run
• Don’t go it alone
• Document all outreach to candidates, and conduct outreach equitably
• Keep track of the issues – did gang violence suddenly spike – and use that to your advantage. Did a report on childhood obesity come out? Again, visit www.afterschoolalliance.org for issue briefs on a variety of topics to help you.