3 Ways to Increase Audience Trust

As a campaign manager, candidate, or communications director, you are likely looking for ways to increase voter trust in your campaign. A 2018 study showed that constituents are much more likely to trust a candidate when they see video from other voters and constituents. This means that voters want to hear from people like them, so that they can understand that someone else believes in the candidate’s message. So how can you get a mass of people talking about a candidate?

So how can we gather this content? The answer is to use video. However, the “how” of video matters. For example, you can wait for it to happen organically on social media, or you can use a platform that allows people to respond to email or text with video. Using the latter, you can begin to collect videos and leverage them as assets to deploy within your outbound outreach. If you’re using video today and you’re just doing social media, you’re missing an opportunity to collect video that you can then redeploy as an asset to support your message.

Here are 3 Recommendations for Using Video to Increase Audience Trust:

• Allow video to easily be sent to you via mobile devices. This means having things like:

  • QR codes on your mailers and yard signs

  • Outbound email and text campaigns that allow for video responses

  • Internal, volunteer focused polling using video as a response mechanism. Your current volunteers are your strongest proponents

• Put YOUR video out.

  • Asking for video from constituents and/or volunteers - but not putting your face out there - won’t work.

  • Start using video as a major communication mechanism. Here are some tips:

    • Embed video on your website (but don’t let Youtube take your audience away)

    • Combine your video with simple survey questions so that you can engage immediately

• Be consistent

  • You may not get a ton of video back on your first attempt. People need to know that this is a communication approach - not a one time event

  • Use technology to make it easy to get your ideas and thoughts out. Things like recurring video prompts or loops allow you to stay in front of your constituents more easily

By using video, you can increase trust in your community. You can collect videos from constituents and leverage them as assets to deploy within your campaigns. This will help to show voters that other people believe in your message, and will help to increase trust.