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.

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.