VIDEO: Lauren Crawford on Fox News – Uploaded Weapons
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Lauren Crawford on the factors advocacy groups must weight in light of budget constraints:
“Do you put ads (on-air) in Washington, D.C. to really elevate the issue?” asked Lauren Crawford, partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a Beltway public policy consulting firm. “Or do you utilize your ads in-district, to motivate other constituents to speak up and make this issue important? You have to really find a balance, and also understand who you’re targeting. If you’re working (to influence) a lawmaker, how does that person receive their constituent contacts? How are they weighed? Is it really important to that member of Congress? You really have to kind of play both sides, and make sure you maximize your dollars in that sense.”
A former staffer on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Crawford regards the deployment of political ads and videos as “just one component of an over-arching campaign.”
“I come from doing grassroots and advocacy-campaign experience, mostly for public affairs campaigns based out of D.C., but using the tools from political campaigns in the field,” she told Fox News. The key, she said, is “making sure that when we do advocacy campaigns, we’re able to reach out to folks outside of D.C., and bring real constituents to the table.”
That goal places immediate restrictions on what kind of advertising campaign she would recommend a particular client, or group, mount on its behalf. “Is my ad saying, ‘We have millions of employees in our industry that are going to speak out’? If that’s the case, and that’s what your ad is saying, you better have those millions of employees speaking out and doing something — otherwise your ad kind of falls on deaf ears.”