IBIS GROUP INSTITUTE
A center of excellence dedicated to serving candidates through strategic campaigns
What We Do
Overview
The Ibis Group Institute is a virtual think-tank formed in July, 2023 to work with Democratic candidates to win elections by providing valuable strategy-focused and data driven resources. Ibis works quietly behind the scenes in providing consultative support on an one-on-one basis with candidates and their teams.
The Institute helps expand each candidate’s campaign capacity and effectiveness by offering — at no cost to candidates or their campaigns — expert advisors with corporate, entrepreneurial, academic, and related backgrounds. The Institute is focused on assisting candidates throughout the nation, with a particular emphasis on candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives. The Institute’s goal is to work with a handful of vetted candidates.
The Institute consists of all volunteers with no staff or overhead, and services are provided at no cost to candidates or to their campaigns.
The Need
Electing smart, capable and visionary candidates to leadership roles has never been more critical. But many qualified candidates and their campaign staffs lack the funds and staff to access unbiased expertise, data and strategic support often needed to win critical elections.
Because of this, candidates often become overly dependent on local party and other organizations already stretched to support a variety of candidates and issues. And, with campaign timelines being so short, this often leaves campaign teams with no choice but to deploy the same one-size-fits-all strategies that power so many political campaigns today.
This has led to qualified candidates coming up short at the ballot box. They simply have not had the resources to develop winning strategies powered by data and evidence that could hone their campaigns and turn non-voters into voters, and voters from red to blue. Ibis wants to help so as to have greater wins at the ballot box.
What the Ibis Group Institute Provides
The Institute’s think-tank approach aims to step into this void, bringing together a highly vetted, professional base of volunteers who will serve as trusted advisors, providing candidates with expertise, planning and guidance in areas they might not otherwise be able to access. The Institute assists in sharpening and refining campaign strategies and plans, providing guidance to help candidates execute better and adapt to fast-changing events that occur throughout the course of every campaign.
The Institute does not run campaigns. Ibis does not replace campaign managers and their staff, or other support groups. Instead, the institute serves as an accelerator to stimulate excellence and innovation, providing candidates with curated wrap-around guidance to more effectively manage their efforts based on a strategic and data-driven foundation.
In addition, the Institute does not fundraise for candidates. Ibis is not a PAC, not a bundler, and not a source of donor contacts or donor funds.
The Institute collaborates with candidates who possess passion and vision, who are eager to embrace and consistently work within a strategy-based paradigm for political campaigns. The Institute enhances the candidates’ ability to envision and create strategies that are novel and cutting-edge, incorporating new ways of thinking and problem-solving.
Political campaigns are often short-lived, short-staffed, and underfunded, and operate at lightning-speed to pull together an organization, fundraise, and introduce the candidate to the market in a short period of time, with limited resources. By using the experience gained through years of work in highly-competitive and fast-paced business environments, Ibis can help as an additional arm of the campaign.
All campaigns are different. The Ibis approach is to find ways to add value based on each campaign’s challenges, resources and circumstances. Here are examples of some of the ways Ibis expert advisors can help candidates:
◊ Identifying ways to use resources more purposefully and effectively to elevate campaign strategy, messaging, and outreach efforts — helping stretch limited campaign budgets through more efficient approaches.
◊ Helping leverage data and research resources to better predict the underlying narrative, messaging, branding and issues that will drive voters to embrace a campaign, motivating voters to select a candidate, and to increase voter turnout and cast their ballots at election time.
◊ Assisting in designing strategies to identify and appeal to swing voters who are not policy-driven, with methods to connect with those voters who operate in different modes of decision-making, including issues related to emotional connections and other non-issue persuasion narratives, including branding strategies.
◊ Helping provide a foundation on how best to speak to the specific and diverse voter segments in more targeted ways, through matrix marketing and other algorithm-driven micro-marketing modeling techniques and programs.
◊ Assisting in creating superior measures for specific predictive voting behaviors across different market segments.
◊ Providing media relations training and practices to optimize positive media outreach and coverage, including help with talking points, along with interview and debate preparation.
◊ Helping use artificial intelligence technology to rapidly generate written content and messaging to reduce marketing costs.
◊ Creating prioritization models so that campaigns can focus on activities that have the highest marginal impact on voting results.
◊ Developing media mix analytics to help determine optimal media selections, buys, and messaging across a variety of media channels and formats.
◊ Helping develop state-of-the-art polling surveys utilizing innovative technologies for primary and secondary data integration, including external household and geographic data appending to survey responses.
◊ Providing specialized training in strategy and strategic management, media relations and messaging, optimal media usage and measurement, database analytics utilization, and budget development and tracking.
The Ibis Group Institute Areas of Expertise
The Institute specifically brings key areas of expertise to the candidates, including:
◊ Strategy (particularly the "Blue Ocean" * strategy paradigm) development and planning
◊ Research and polling planning
◊ Technology and tech planning
◊ Data science and analytics planning (including tracking and "war room" KPI's)
◊ Media relation planning (training, outreach planning)
◊ Marketing planning (branding, positioning, advertising, direct mail, e-marketing, field, social, messaging, generational marketing, media planning and mix planning)
◊ Fundraising strategy and positioning
(* “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne)
Structure
The Institute currently has a small and active Leadership Team of highly qualified and vetted individuals who are people with deep professional backgrounds and expertise as business and academic leaders in the nation. This team will expand over time, with similar criteria for all future Leadership Team members. The leadership Team consists solely of volunteers, and there are neither staff nor other paid positions. The leadership Team selects its members and approves additional members, based on a rigorous vetting process.
Leadership Team members, or any other volunteers, will not have financial or political conflicts of interest.
Leadership Team Members
- Rich Weissman, founder
- Philip Hodges, Ph.D., founder
- Maitri Goonewardena
- K. Francesca Nisco, Ed.D.
- Patrick Stupek
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