Aedric's Blog

Tag: marketing

  • Case Study: How to Turn an Opponent’s Attack into a Fundraising Opportunity

    In any competitive race, an opponent’s attack is inevitable. The standard playbook is to go on defense: issue a statement, correct the record, and hope to neutralize the damage. But the most sophisticated teams know that a well-handled attack isn’t just a threat to be neutralized; it’s an opportunity to be seized.

    This is a story of how one campaign used a disciplined rapid response workflow to not only defeat a negative narrative but to turn it into one of their most successful fundraising moments.

    The Situation: A Targeted Attack

    The “Sarah Jenkins for City Council” campaign was a grassroots effort focused on smart, sustainable community development. Her opponent, funded by large real estate developers, saw an opening.

    At 9:15 AM, a local news blog published an article titled, “Easton Slams Jenkins’ ‘Anti-Business’ Vote on Downtown Project.” The story framed Sarah’s pivotal vote against a controversial luxury condo development as proof that she was hostile to economic growth. The attack was designed to peel away moderate, pro-business voters.

    The Challenge: Speed and Strategy

    The campaign manager knew they had a small window to act before the “anti-business” narrative took hold. Their goal was twofold:

    1. Neutralize the Attack: Quickly reframe the vote not as anti-business, but as pro-community.
    2. Activate Their Base: Use the attack to energize their own supporters who had championed Sarah’s stance against the oversized development.

    The challenge was doing both, fast, with a small team.

    The Workflow: From Intelligence to Action with Aedric

    Instead of a chaotic flurry of emails, the campaign manager turned to their Aedric dashboard.

    • 9:16 AM: The attack article appears in their Local Feed. The manager immediately “Collects” it, saving it to their intelligence hub and categorizing it under their existing issue, “Sustainable Development.”
    • 9:17 AM: They click on the saved article and select the option to create a “Fundraising Email Draft.”
    • 9:18 AM: Aedric analyzes the article’s context and presents three potential content angles for the email:
      1. An angle focusing on the economic details of the vote.
      2. An angle highlighting the negative environmental impact of the proposed project.
      3. An angle framing the opponent’s attack as proof that he sides with powerful developers over local residents.
    • 9:19 AM: The manager selects Angle 3. It’s the most powerful narrative, turning the opponent’s attack into a clear story of “us vs. them.”
    • 9:20 AM: Aedric generates a high-quality email draft. It incorporates the campaign’s pre-set “Community Advocate” voice, reframes the vote as a courageous stand for the neighborhood, and seamlessly pivots to a powerful call to action.The draft included a key paragraph: “This attack isn’t a surprise. It’s what happens when you stand up to powerful special interests. Our opponent is funded by the very developers who wanted to change the face of our community. They’re attacking us because they know Sarah can’t be bought.”
    • 9:25 AM: After a quick polish and adding a donation link, the email is sent to their entire supporter list.

    The Result: A Record-Breaking Hour

    The response was immediate and overwhelming.

    The email not only armed their supporters with the right talking points to counter the attack online, but it also tapped into their passion. By framing the attack as a battle against powerful outside interests, the campaign gave their base a clear reason to fight back.

    In the first hour after the email was sent, the campaign had its single most successful hour of online fundraising to date. They had not only neutralized the attack but had capitalized on the energy it created, turning a potential crisis into a tangible strategic and financial victory. It was a masterclass in turning defense into offense.

  • The Aedric Workflow: From Breaking News to On-Message Tweet in 90 Seconds

    In modern communications, speed is a strategic advantage. The ability to react to a breaking news story with a sharp, on-message response before your competitors can even finish their first cup of coffee is what separates effective teams from the rest.

    But speed without discipline is just noise. The challenge is to be both fast and strategically sound.

    Traditionally, this has been a trade-off. A fast response was often sloppy, while a well-crafted one was too slow to matter. A professional rapid response platform is designed to eliminate this trade-off. Let’s walk through a real-world workflow, showing how you can go from seeing a breaking news story to publishing an on-message response in under 90 seconds.

    Seconds 0-15: The Trigger

    A new story breaks—a monthly jobs report is released, a new piece of legislation is announced, an industry trend piece is published. You don’t discover it by frantically refreshing a dozen websites. You see it instantly in your Aedric Issues Dashboard, a centralized hub monitoring the news feeds you care about.

    You immediately identify the article as relevant to one of your core campaign issues. The clock has started.

    Seconds 15-30: The Curation

    With a single click, you “Collect” the article. This action does two things simultaneously: it saves the article to your team’s permanent, searchable intelligence library, and it prepares it for action. You can instantly organize it under a specific category like ‘The Economy’ or ‘Local Infrastructure’, ensuring your intelligence remains structured and easy to find later. The context is captured.

    Seconds 30-60: The Creative Choice

    This is the most critical step, where speed meets creative direction. You click the “Create Post for X” button on the article you just saved.

    Instead of a blank text box, Aedric presents you with three distinct, AI-generated content angles based on the substance of the article. For a jobs report, you might see:

    1. Angle 1: A post focusing on how the rise in manufacturing jobs impacts our district.
    2. Angle 2: A post questioning the sustainability of the growth mentioned in the report.
    3. Angle 3: A post highlighting the report’s data on youth unemployment.

    You are not asking the AI to think for you. You are using it to instantly identify different potential narratives within the same source material. You, the human strategist, make the single most important decision: which story do we want to tell? You click on Angle 1.

    Seconds 60-90: The Final Polish

    Based on your chosen angle, Aedric instantly generates a high-quality, on-message draft. The draft is already infused with your organization’s pre-set voice and tone. It’s not a generic summary; it’s a targeted piece of communication focused on the specific narrative you selected.

    Your final job is to act as the editor-in-chief. You spend 20-30 seconds making minor edits, adding a final touch of human nuance, and ensuring it’s perfect. You copy the text and publish it.

    In the time it takes for most teams to finish their first internal email chain about the story, you have already executed a complete, strategically-sound response. This is how you win the news cycle.

  • How to Build a Daily Intelligence Briefing in Under 15 Minutes

    For any professional in politics or advocacy, the day begins with a ritual: the morning intelligence briefing. It’s a critical process of scanning dozens of news sites, blogs, and social feeds to understand the current landscape, identify emerging threats, and flag opportunities before the rest of the world wakes up.

    Traditionally, this is a manual, time-consuming chore. It involves an endless cycle of opening tabs, copying links, and pasting them into a long email that, by the time it’s sent, is already on its way to being out of date. This vital strategic task can easily consume the first 60-90 minutes of your day.

    But it doesn’t have to. By using a centralized intelligence hub, you can transform this laborious process into a sharp, 15-minute strategic exercise. Here’s how.

    Step 1: The Scan (5 Minutes)

    Instead of opening 20 different browser tabs, your morning starts in a single dashboard. Here, real-time news feeds are already organized for you, typically into categories like a National Feed for major headlines and a Local Feed for district-specific news.

    Your first five minutes are spent in a strategic scan. You are not reading every article in depth. You are quickly assessing the landscape, looking for the handful of stories that will define the day for your organization, your principal, or your opponent. The goal is rapid triage: identify what matters now.

    Step 2: The Curation (5 Minutes)

    This is where you move from passive consumption to active intelligence gathering. As you identify the 5-7 most critical articles from your scan, you “collect” them with a single click.

    This action saves the article to your team’s permanent, searchable intelligence library. But crucially, this is also your moment to add a layer of strategic value. As you collect an article, you can:

    • Organize it under a specific Campaign Issue (e.g., ‘Healthcare Costs’) to build your library of proof points.
    • If it’s from your Opposition dashboard, you can tag it with a sentiment score ([+] or [-]) to track the narrative over time.

    In these five minutes, you have not just gathered links; you have created a curated, strategically-sorted briefing that is infinitely more valuable than a simple list.

    Step 3: The Synthesis (5 Minutes)

    Now that you have your curated list of the day’s most important articles, you can create the final briefing product. For your senior leadership, a list of links is not enough; they need the “so what.”

    Select the top one or two most critical articles from your collection. With a single click, you can use an AI-powered function to generate a concise summary or a set of “Talking Points.” This instantly synthesizes the core information and provides your principal with a ready-to-use analysis of what the story means and how they should speak about it.

    You can then copy this synthesized analysis, along with the links to the other curated articles, into a clean, concise email.

    What used to be a 90-minute frantic scramble of research has been transformed. In under 15 minutes, you have scanned the entire media landscape, curated the essential intelligence, and produced a strategic summary for your leadership. You’ve saved over an hour, and more importantly, you’ve started your day with a strategic advantage.

  • Why Your Intelligence Hub is Your Strategic Moat

    For decades, the concept of a “strategic moat” has been the holy grail for businesses. Coined by Warren Buffett, it describes a durable competitive advantage that protects a company from its rivals, much like a moat protects a castle. Historically, these moats were physical assets: a sprawling factory, a patent on a breakthrough technology, or a dominant retail footprint.

    In the 21st century, the nature of these moats has changed. For professionals in the high-stakes world of politics and advocacy, the most powerful moat is no longer physical. It is informational.

    As generative AI becomes a commodity, accessible to everyone, your advantage will not come from having access to the “best” AI model. Your advantage will come from the quality, organization, and strategic value of the proprietary intelligence you feed it. In the age of AI, your intelligence hub is your strategic moat.

    The Illusion of Public Knowledge

    A generic AI model is trained on the vast, public internet. It is an incredible repository of general knowledge. But for your specific, real-time needs, that public knowledge is insufficient. It does not know the nuances of your local political landscape, the history of your opponent’s messaging, or the specific data points in the policy brief you released last week.

    Relying solely on this public knowledge base is like trying to win a war using only a generic, publicly available map. It’s useful, but it lacks the specific, proprietary intelligence—the “on-the-ground” details—that actually leads to victory.

    Building the Modern Moat: From Data Dump to Intelligence Hub

    A true intelligence hub is not just a folder of bookmarked articles or a messy shared drive. It is a living, structured system designed to turn raw information into strategic assets. Building this moat involves three disciplined steps:

    1. Systematic Collection: You must have a reliable process for monitoring and collecting every relevant piece of information—every news article, press release, and social media post—related to your core issues and your competitors.
    2. Strategic Curation: This is where you separate the signal from the noise. Every collected item is qualified. Is it positive or negative? Which of our core issues does it relate to? This act of curation transforms a raw feed into a prioritized briefing.
    3. Centralized Organization: All of this curated intelligence must live in a single, searchable, and instantly accessible hub. This is your organization’s “single source of truth,” eliminating the chaos of scattered information and ensuring your entire team is operating from the same set of facts.

    How Your Moat Defends and Empowers You

    Once built, this intelligence hub provides a powerful, durable advantage that a competitor with a generic workflow cannot replicate.

    • It Creates Speed: When a crisis hits, you don’t waste the first critical hour searching for information. Your team can instantly access the relevant intelligence, understand the context, and begin crafting a response.
    • It Enforces Discipline: With a single source of truth, message discipline becomes the default. Your team is empowered to create content that is consistently and accurately aligned with your core strategy.
    • It Generates Insight: Over time, your intelligence hub becomes more than just a library; it becomes a strategic asset. By analyzing your curated data, you can identify patterns in your opponent’s messaging, track the success of your own narrative penetration, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.

    In the coming years, every serious communications team will have access to powerful AI. The ones who win will not be those with the fanciest algorithm, but those who have done the disciplined work of building a superior private intelligence library. They will have dug a moat around their strategy that no competitor can easily cross.