Florida Gubernatorial Candidate, State Senator Rod Smith (D) was faced with branding challenge. Known as staunch public defender and an effective North Florida Senator in the State Legislature, Senator Smith was not known beyond the political elite of Tallahassee. Rawlings Political was brought in to revamp the campaign web presence, develop a strong relationship-based email campaign and develop effective blog relations for the campaign.
In two months, Rawlings worked with the campaign to redesign the site, the campaign logo and online collateral to reflect the campaign message. Offline engagement rules were drafted to build relationships with supporters and event-goers to migrate them to the online channel. Additionally, bloggers were engaged to develop the word-of-mouth campaign efforts to increase the Senator's visibility.
The launch of the new campaign site and new rules of online engagement resulted in measureable successes, including:
- Increased online fundraising performance
- Increased volunteer and supporter growth
- Marked improvement on search engine placement, in the face of popular NFL player having the same name
