HOW TO PREPARE- MATERIALS
Physical materials: I made flyers in Adobe Illustrator! I designed them on my own, but since I arranged them to print out four smaller flyers on a single sheet of paper( so that I could fit more flyers into my budget), I asked people from my state to help with cutting them out. I also made two trifolds for Meet the Candidates, so that I could have one be centered around my spirit-related ideas, and another around my service-centered ones. Digital materials: I made an Instagram page and a website. I used Adobe Illustrator to format the Instagram posts, and I made sure to use similar colors, fonts, and layouts as I used on my flyers, poster boards, and website. I used the same exact information I put on my trifolds onto my website, so that anyone who only read through one of them would still learn the same things about my campaign! I also linked the scripts of my NomCom and General Assembly speeches on my trifolds, Instagram, and website, so that people could read back through them if they wanted to jog their memories of my platform. The speech: Since I had already written out all of my platform ideas before I started working on my speeches, they were actually surprisingly quick to write! I wrote my General Assembly speech first, and structured it by starting off with my personal experience with the JCL, then went through my campaign ideas, and closed it by listing off a few of my qualifications. I trimmed down my G. A. speech to use for NomCom.
CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS
Campaigning at Nationals: I’ m quite introverted, and I was quite nervous about coming up to people and speaking off-the-dome about my campaign. While I didn’ t memorize a full elevator speech to give to people when they asked me to tell me a little bit about my platform( expect to hear that question a lot!), knowing a couple short phrases I could include verbatim whenever I spoke to people gave me some points to anchor myself on, so I wasn’ t afraid of completely going blank out of nerves. Plus, I made sure to have flyers( and candy) on hand at all times, so people had access to a more concise version of my platform to look through later! Also, I’ ve noticed that whenever a bunch of people from different states clump up, conversation often eventually shifts to people’ s thoughts on the elections, so I made sure to ask people if they had any questions about my platform whenever I found myself in that position! My state definitely helped a lot with the person-to-person conversation aspect of campaigning; especially with passing out flyers during Agora! Favorite part of campaigning: My favorite part of campaigning was chatting with non-candidates about how ideas they had for the NJCL connected with aspects of my campaign; it was just really wonderful to see how people from across the nation cared so much about our organization! What you did well: I was quite happy with how prepared I felt when I got to Convention; I was worried that, when I started campaigning, I would discover some egregious mistake in my materials, or wind up floundering when I tried to actually talk about my platform, but everything went surprisingly smoothly! What you could have improved: I think the biggest error I discovered was that I made a single typo in one of my Instagram posts, but somebody from my state caught it almost immediately, and I was able to quickly fix it.