AI for Campaigns \u2014 self-paced
Everything the live session covered, written out in full.
Read it straight through in about fifteen minutes, or jump to the segment you need. Same material, same order, no slides required.
The one skill everything else depends on
Prompting comes before any tool. Everything else in this session builds on it.
The formula: Role + Task + Context + Format + Constraints.
"You are a volunteer coordinator for a city council campaign. Draft a reminder text for Saturday's canvass launch. Audience: volunteers in their 20s and 30s. Max two sentences, warm tone, include the 9am start time and the address."
Don't settle for the first draft. Treat it as a rough cut, then say "make it shorter," "make it warmer," or "add a call to action." The back-and-forth is where the good stuff shows up.
Feed it your real material. Paste in the actual flyer copy, the actual talking points. Garbage in, garbage out still applies here.
Match the prompt to the role. A campaign manager hands it a strategy memo to summarize. A canvasser hands it a door script and asks it to argue back.
Meeting and call notes
This is the single biggest time-saver in the whole session. Staffers sit in meeting after meeting, then forget half of what got said by the next morning. Tools like Otter, Fathom, Fireflies, and Granola sit in on the call, transcribe it, and pull out action items with names attached.
Fathom's free plan is not the unlimited deal it used to be marketed as. Free still gives unlimited recording and transcription, but AI-generated summaries are capped at 5 calls a month. After that, you get the raw transcript only. Still a fine starting point for a budget-strapped campaign \u2014 just don't promise the team something it won't deliver by month's end.
Use these tools for internal staff meetings and volunteer trainings. Not for voter conversations or donor calls.
Recording consent laws vary, and a recorded donor call gone sideways is a trust problem you don't want.
Email and communication drafting
Let AI take the first pass on donor thank-yous, volunteer follow-ups, and internal updates built from a few bullet points.
AI drafts. A human sends.
Never let AI auto-send anything with a campaign's name on it. One wrong tone in a donor email is a bigger problem than the hours it saved you.
For scale: paste in a donor or volunteer's note history and ask for a two-sentence personal opener. Takes thirty seconds instead of five minutes an email, and it still reads like someone actually remembers them.
Research and digestion
Use it to turn long council agendas, bills, opposition press releases, and policy PDFs into a one-page brief. Try: "Explain this bill like I just joined the campaign. Give me three talking points and three vulnerabilities."
AI invents plausible-sounding facts with total confidence. A made-up quote or a wrong vote count in something that goes public is a real crisis, not a minor error.
Use a source-grounded tool (one that cites where it got something) for facts. Treat a general chatbot as a drafting tool, not a fact-checker. Verify every name, date, and quote yourself before anything leaves the building.
Role-specific breakouts
The highest-value segment of the day. Here's what it looked like for each role in the room.
Campaign managers
- Turn strategy docs into briefing memos
- Draft agendas and post-meeting follow-up lists
- Scenario planning: five likely attacks, five responses
Volunteer recruiters
- Signup confirmations tailored per platform
- FAQ docs pulled from real volunteer questions
- Several tailored text variants, fast, not one generic blast
Canvassers & voter-facing staff
- Practice objection handling: "push back on me"
- Adapt one message for seniors vs. students
- Quick post-canvass debrief summaries
Keep saying this out loud: AI is a rehearsal partner. The human standing at the door is the actual message.
Translation and accessibility
Instant Spanish, Chinese, or Vietnamese translation of flyers and scripts opens doors that would otherwise stay closed.
Someone who speaks that language fluently, every time. A stiff or wrong translation reads as disrespect, and community trust is not something you get back easily once it slips.
Guardrails \u2014 don't skip this one
Data: Never put voter file data, donor data, or anyone's personal information into a consumer AI tool. Stick to what your campaign's data platform and compliance rules allow, full stop.
Fact-check everything before it goes public. One invented statistic in a mailer, one wrong quote in a script, is the kind of mistake that follows a campaign around. Non-negotiable, not a nice-to-have.
More than 30 states now regulate AI-generated content in political ads. Pennsylvania hasn't enacted a final law yet, but it's close: House Bill 95 (the AI Transparency in Advertising Act) passed the House in June 2026 and would require clear disclosure whenever AI creates or substantially changes an ad. A separate bill on AI-generated deepfakes of a candidate's face or voice is also pending in the Senate.
If your content uses AI-generated images, audio, or video of a real person, check with counsel before it runs. This is one of the fastest-moving rules in this whole session, so confirm current status rather than trusting this page alone.
Now pick one thing to try this week.
A training only sticks if you leave with one concrete thing you're actually going to do, not just a page you read once. Reply to your coordinator with the one thing you're trying, so someone can follow up.