Key takeaways from a SoSha-exclusive webinar with former members of the Harris and DNC teams.
Image Credit: FMT
Vice President Kamala Harris out-raised her competitor President Donald Trump by more than 2:1. She also outspent her opponent on Google and Meta by over $250 million, and built a robust campaign infrastructure of 2,505 staff and 358 offices across the core battleground states.
Despite this strong logistical and financial structure, the Harris campaign was defeated both in the Electoral College and the popular vote.
To get a sense of what campaign strategies proved more or less effective, SoSha hosted an election debrief exclusively for SoSha partners with former staffers from the Harris campaign and Democratic National Committee, Natasha Smith, Shani DeWindt, and Brynna Quillin.
Amid heavy ad spending this campaign season, a core reflection emerged: With enough time and resources, focused user-generated content (UGC) campaigns get messaging to hard-to-reach audiences and drive online engagement.
Based on our debrief session, here are the top five 2024 post-election takeaways for campaigns and issue advocacy organizations looking to fully utilize UGC to reach audiences and spur engagement in 2025 and beyond:
Promote ease of access to your content
Lowering barriers to engagement require two key elements: intentional messaging that captures target audiences’ attention, and streamlined distribution techniques that make it easy for people to build and share campaign content.
To build a campaign online with lasting momentum, audiences need to feel that they are a part of the campaign. Messaging should be crafted to translate broader issues into individual or community-based contexts (See point 2).
For distribution, two things are critical:
Viewing the entire user journey from awareness to sharing, and removing potential barriers to sharing, such as sign-up pages, excessive downloads, and number of clicks-to-share for content; and,
Broadening opportunities to share, from crafting pre-drafted shareable content to exploring interaction with new-media varied platforms like TikTok, Discord, and Bluesky.
Leverage trusted volunteers to develop community-specific messaging
Sometimes it’s not enough to have the right message; you need the right messenger. People trust their relationships online more than big networks or the media.
Ultimately, audiences respond best to authentic voices that speak to the specific issues affecting their communities, making relational organizing all the more important.
Empower trusted messengers, from local community members to online group moderators, that believe in your organization and can translate broader issues into tangible messages for smaller communities.
Find pathways to reach closed groups online
Social media platforms with instant messaging functionalities like Discord, WhatsApp, and Instagram provide opportunities for users to form closed communities that digital advertising cannot easily reach.
However -- highlighting the importance of trusted messengers -- user-generated content that reaches closed communities like family group chats can have a distinctly high impact in affecting engagement.
A combination of organizational visibility and ease of content sharing across these platforms, along with a routine of messaging iteration (See point 4), provide a greater likelihood of messaging reach to these closed communities.
Utilize real-time data for rapid iteration
A core feature of the Harris and DNC organic sharing strategy was daily, if not hourly, content iteration. This involved monitoring what copy, multimedia, or combination of the two resonated well with audiences and replicating it for future messaging.
While the pace of iteration can vary outside of the busy election season, the principle remains important. Monitoring real-time performance data and optimizing content is the only way to ensure your messaging is reaching audiences and generating impact.
Since this can be time-consuming, find and prioritize the use of social sharing tools that enable faster and seamless performance analysis, content drafting, and/or content sharing with online audiences.
Invest in long-term community outreach
In terms of campaign length, Vice President Harris’ 107 day run seems hurried compared to Trump’s 720 day marathon. While the appropriate length of campaigns are open to debate, when it comes to facilitating a UGC-focused messaging strategy, time is critical.
An intense time crunch, as experienced by the Harris campaign, can be a significant barrier to conducting more research on the best messaging combinations and reaching more communities online.
Ultimately, an organic social strategy built around UGC is about relation-building between your organization and your target audience. And like all quality relationships, it takes time.
For organizations in 2025 looking to engage potentially fatigued, disaffected communities and audiences online, it’s essential to lay the foundation of engagement and build upon it so that your community relationships bear results come election or fundraising season.