Cal Cunningham for U.S. Senate

Launching an Inviting and Engaging Senate Campaign Website

Cal Cunningham has a distinguished history of serving the state of North Carolina and his country.  He came to NMC to launch his statewide US Senate campaign, introducing him to people across the state and around the country. 

The goal for the site was to have it immediately feel innovative, modern, and fresh, representing the ideals of Cal's campaign.  It also needed to highlight the state of North Carolina, where Cal was born and raised, attended college, established his career, and is choosing to raise his family.   Finally, as is essential with any campaign site, it needed to engage visitors and push them to action, whether that be sharing content, signing up for Cal's email list, or making a donation to the campaign.

A Modern & Engaging Campaign Website

It was important that Cal's site standout to represent him as a next-generational candidate.  The site embraced many of the best practices and popular campaign website trends from this upcoming election cycle.  The feature area of the site is an ambient video taken directly from his campaign introduction video.  The ad immediately gives motion to the page and draws a visitor in, while also highlighting scenes of Cal and North Carolina.  There's a quick option to play the full ad in a popup video, too.

Throughout the site, quality images are used to personalize the campaign and help visitors get to know Cal.  The modern design allows for the images and content to stand out while using accents to highlight specific calls to action and engage visitors.

Growing the Site & Gathering Data

The site is built on WordPress, which makes it easy to continue growing and scaling the site over time.  The campaign can post timely updates and releases, and the WordPress setup is in a way that allows them to easily build out custom layouts with blocks that they can customize, order, and edit.

An essential role of any campaign website design is gathering data from visitors and progressing them up the ladder of engagement from a casual visitor to an ardent supporter.  The site has prominent options on each page to enter data and go to the donation page.  Additionally, the call to action is setup as a "sticky CTA," which means it attaches to the side of the page as a visitor scroll and is always visible.  This element allows visitors to easily take their next step with the campaign from anywhere on the page. All of the data is seamlessly collected into the campaign's voter database and email marketing tool, NGP.

Moving at Campaign-Speed

Campaigns are unique beasts in that they scale up incredibly fast with a clear end in sight, and a very tangible result.  For those reasons, speed is essential with any campaign website, and it's essential to strip out friction and make it easy for the campaign to react, scale, and succeed.  The WordPress setup allows the campaign to quickly publish content, build new templates, and feature announcements. 

Additionally, NMC has continued to partner closely with the campaign to help them with new initiatives around designing new features, augmenting sections of the site, improving data collection efforts, and more.  Campaigns require quick actions and a streamlined rapport between multiple parties, and we're proud to have achieved that with the campaign and continue closely partnering with them toward election day.