Matthew Leyba-Gonzalez
Case Study
Role: Social Media Strategist and Community Builder
Deliverables: Organic Strategy to Build Community Support
The Outcome: Matthew Leyba-Gonzales was elected to the Imperial Beach City Council
The Challenge
Our client Matthew Leyba-Gonzales was not from the political establishment in Imperial Beach and needed a strategy to build personal connections with voters in Imperial Beach during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Our Approach
We built an online engagement program based on the principles that underlie a more traditional grassroots/field/relational organizing model. This was critical to Matthew’s victory as the campaign was prevented from doing any person to person contact during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our program utilized a core Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter to push our narrative about Matthew while the candidate and the campaign team engaged in several community based Facebook groups and hashtags to engage the community. We also created a text message strategy to support the digital campaign and enable Matthew to have one-on-one conversations with the constituents replicating our field canvassing model. Our text message engagement rate was significantly higher (32.8%) than the industry average engagement rates.
Reached over +15K Facebook group members
32.8% text message engagement rate. higher than the industry average.
Won the City Council race with over 63% of the votes
The Impact
Matthew was elected to the Imperial Beach City Council with over 65% of the votes in his race. Through the power of social media, we organized and built a strong coalition of community leaders and members that did online canvassing using Imperial Beach-focused Facebook groups with over 15,000 members. The coalition was then able to promote Matthew’s campaign by introducing new people organically to Matthew as they shared both self-generated and campaign produced content on social media. Additionally, the text messaging program left Matthew with a base of voters in his district ready to be engaged in his policy efforts moving forward.
