Lessons from the Frontlines

Lauren Brenzel on their Experience Running Florida’s Amendment 4 Campaign

When people think about ballot initiative campaigns, they often picture big teams, sprawling infrastructure, maybe something that looks like a presidential campaign in miniature. But the truth? Even the “big” ones are small and scrappy.

In Florida, I helped lead a campaign where we had 30 full-time staffers, considered very large for the ballot space. More often, there are two to five people running the entirety of a statewide campaign.

This lean setup fundamentally changes how these campaigns run. Your paid media team, for example, isn’t just a vendor you loop in for creative and ad placements. They’re at the table with you every day. They become a core part of your strategy. But that only works if you build trust early.

System Setup Is Strategy

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that you have to get your internal decision-making structure set early. While ballot initiatives tend to have small staff sizes, they also often have large boards with multiple organizations represented. When I first started working as a campaign manager, I got one piece of advice that I now often repeat to campaigns: “You need to know exactly how you and your board are going to make decisions and you need to figure out how you’re going to work through disagreements that arise.”

If you don’t figure that out in the beginning, if you don’t actively practice collective decision-making skills, it just creates problems later on. The campaign moves faster than you expect, and if you’re trying to learn how to communicate in the middle of a messaging crisis, it’s too late.

Get your systems down before it’s crunch time. Learn how to navigate tension. Learn how to listen. Learn how to move together.

Digital as a Scalable Solution

With so few people and such big goals, digital ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting. You can't knock on 20 million doors, but you can have 20 million digital conversations that meet voters where they are. You can show up in people’s feeds, on their social media, in their search results, and in the places they’re already looking for answers. When your decision-making structures are locked in and clearly communicated, you can also use digital to ensure those conversations are unique to the communities you're serving content to.

A good digital program allows you to have proactive interactions with voters. In Florida, we knew the political opposition had been building trust in places like Miami-Dade County for years, especially among Latino men. However, there was a gap in messages from our opposition on the ballot initiative campaign, meaning we had an opportunity to build narrative gains first. If we weren’t diligently reaching those voters, with a message tailored to them, we were going to lose this group of voters.

Digital means you don’t have to leave folks behind. The bulk of the Florida campaign was about persuading voters to come over to our side, but we couldn’t leave any votes on the table. We had to be intentional with our base, rather than relying on some assumed alignment. Just because someone was a Democratic voter didn’t mean they were automatically voting yes. If we hadn’t done real, values-based persuasion with Black Democratic voters, for example, those Florida voters could’ve been no votes. We had to make the case. We had to connect the dots between the policy and people’s lives.

The Power—and Responsibility—of Direct Democracy

All of the chaos and difficult work is worth it because ballot initiatives create a space that shows us how much everyday people have in common during a time that feels divisive. And unlike candidate campaigns, no candidate is standing between your vote and the real-world impact of a policy. Whether it’s raising the minimum wage or protecting reproductive freedom, ballot initiatives let voters enact change directly​ without navigating personal dynamics or personality politics. It’s just: do you want this change or not?

Ballot initiatives aren’t easy. They demand a lot from a very small number of people. But if you set up strong systems, build trust with your team, and invest in strategic, scaled communications, they can be one of the most democratic and impactful tools we have.