Unstructured Political Campaigns: Podcasts and Town Hall Meeting Strategy

The word unstructured political campaign may not look like an ideal thing to pursue at first sight of the name for politicians.

However, modern days' demands are encouraging more political campaigns to adopt these sorts of unconventional strategies.

Unstructured campaigns are political campaigns in which politicians rely on various unconventional tactics while at the same time measuring the efficacy of each method.

Contrary to the structured campaigns, this methodology is not dependent rigidly on some predefined campaigning strategy.

For instance, during pre-COVID times, every politician had a predefined set of methods, including door-to-door canvassing, rallying, corner meetings, and pumping up their camps to bring change.

In short, the campaign was too structured or rigid in nature. Two of the famous unstructured campaigning methods include podcasts and town hall meetings.

In podcasts, politicians can promote their political campaigns as it is one of the emerging forms of digital audio and video.

Arranging Podcasts: Campaigning Out of the Box

The idea of unstructured campaigns has catalyzed the penetration of digital campaigns altogether. Even those political campaigns that were once reluctant to pursue a digital path are now making a paradigm shift.

Campaigning through podcasts is one of the ways through which politicians are starting to engage audiences during election season.

This is surely a top-of-the-list unstructured campaigning method through which the campaigners are trying to reach undecided voters.

Advertisers are seeing this as an opportunity to promote their products due to the level of engagement the podcasts bring.

With the emergence of YouTube campaigning, the podcasts are now even more important, where politicians do not have to borrow media channels during prime times to reach their voters. 

Podcasts indeed overlap with digital audio and digital video marketing, and its emergence in the global political landscape has eased the sufferings of politicians.

Town Hall meetings are the unstructured form of campaigning in which politicians can answer different unplanned questions. This is one of the ways to convince swing voters.

Town Hall Meetings: An Emerging Unstructured Political Campaigning Method

One of the primary methods of unstructured political canvassing is attending town halls meetings and making yourself available to voters' questions.

When you offer yourself to public scrutiny and decide to take non-pre-planned questions, there are ample chances that your voters will end up being impressed with you.

As these sorts of events are open-ended and everyone is invited, you will need to face voters of different types.

Most of the time, even swing voters attend town hall meetings because they find it an opportunity to interact with political candidates and clear their doubts.

It is pertinent to note that whenever you are promoting your campaign through an unstructured campaigning method of town hall appearance, make sure to invite local and nationwide media based on your campaign size.

Similarly, one of the ways to engage more people in today's world of the pandemic is to take questions online during the meeting so that you can also build a reasonable crowd online to reach maximum people with minimal resources.

Many politicians conduct pre-planned town hall meetings to promote their bids. While it is one of the ways of election campaigning, it must not defy the very purpose of town hall meetings, i.e., transparency.

The inorganic flow of questions in an already planned out meeting can backfire on you, which can reduce your chances of winning.

Every politician must know the difference between a rally and a town hall meeting. While you just have to deliver a speech in a rally, it often comes in a structured campaigning method.

However, the town hall is an interactive event in which you must involve your audience as well, as it makes the event unstructured and unplanned.

Final Thoughts

Using unstructured campaigning is one of the unique ways to reach and impress your voters through your creativity.

As there is no fixed format for unstructured campaigning methods, you can always add as much creativity as you want in these methods.

For instance, you can add local influencers in your podcasts to talk with them on the emerging issues of the community that is likely to affect voters.

Similarly, you can also use different marketing tactics, including YouTube shorts, to make your podcasts clips viral.