IBIS GROUP INSTITUTE
A center of excellence dedicated to serving LGBTQ+ 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 LGBTQ+ candidates and their teams to win elections by providing valuable strategy-focused and data driven resources.
The Institute aims to expand each candidate’s and each campaign’s 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 LGBTQ+ candidates throughout the nation, with a particular focus on candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives. The Institute is proud to be working closely with the Equality PAC, the political arm of the U.S. Congressional Equality Caucus (the LGBTQ+ Congressional caucus in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate), dedicated to the full legal societal equality for LGBTQ+ Americans. The Institute’s goal is to work with a handful of vetted candidates running for federal office in the 2024 election cycle, expanding its capacity to support more candidates over time.
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
With LGBTQ+ rights under attack, electing smart, capable and visionary candidates to leadership roles at the state and national levels has never been more critical. But many LGBTQ+ candidates and their campaign staffs lack the funds and staff to access unbiased expertise, data and strategic support often needed to win critical elections and stop the efforts of turning back the clock on LGBTQ+ rights.
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 LGBTQ+ 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 to have greater wins for LGBTQ+ candidates at the U.S. Congressional level.
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 and their teams 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, consultants, or other groups. Instead, the institute serves as an accelerator to stimulate excellence and innovation, providing candidates and their campaign teams 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, bundler, or source of donors).
The Institute collaborates with candidates and their campaign teams 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’ and the campaign staff’s 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 and campaigns include:
◊ Identifying ways your team can use your resources more purposefully and effectively to elevate your campaign strategy, messaging, and outreach efforts — helping you stretch your limited campaign budget and staffing through more efficient approaches.
◊ Helping your team leverage your data and research resources to better predict the underlying narrative, messaging, branding and issues that will drive voters to embrace your campaign, motivating voters to select your candidate, and to increase voter turnout and cast their ballots at election time.
◊ Assisting your team 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.
◊ Helping your team in providing 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 your team in creating superior measures for specific predictive voting behaviors across different market segments.
◊ Providing your team with media relations training and practices to optimize positive media outreach and coverage, including help with talking points, along with interview and debate preparation.
◊ Helping your team use artificial intelligence technology to rapidly generate written content and messaging to reduce marketing costs.
◊ Creating prioritization models for your team so that your campaign can focus on activities that have the highest marginal impact on voting results.
◊ Developing media mix analytics for your team to help determine optimal media selections, buys, and messaging across a variety of media channels and formats.
◊ Helping your team 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 for your team in strategy and strategic management, media relations and messaging, optimal media usage and measurement, database analytics utilization, and budget development and tracking.
These are a few of the ways in which Ibis can partner with the candidate and the candidate’s campaign team to help achieve a win for the election.
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 (as well as those on the Advisory team and other volunteers), based on a rigorous vetting process.
There is also the Advisory Team of volunteers who are highly experienced and politically connected on a national basis. The team is a group of top-notch professionals in the political world, and they help the Leadership Team members and act as subject-matter experts to navigate political issues, and to connect with political experts and veterans.
Leadership Team and Advisory Team members, or any other volunteers, will not have financial or political conflicts of interest.
Current Leadership Team Members
- Rich Weissman, founder
- Philip Hodges, Ph.D., founder
- Maitri Goonewardena
- K. Francesca Nisco, Ed.D.
- Patrick Stupek
- Jeff Larivee, Special Liaison to Equality PAC/LGBTQ+ U.S. Congressional Caucus
Current Advisory Team Members
- Ginny Foat
- Misha Isaak
- Representative Malcolm Kenyatta
- Jacqueline (Jackie) Lopez
- Anthony Mercurio
- Evan Wolfson
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