Do I need yard or lawn signs for my political campaign?


How do you know if you need political signs for yards and lawns in your election?

Many candidates wonder what the value or purpose is in the signs they see during a political campaign.

As I got started in politics, I made sure that my candidates had a lot of signs.  The conventional wisdom was that the more signs you see for a candidate, the better the chance they have to win.  Right?

Not really.

Before investing in signage for your campaign, there are a number of items to consider.

  • How many political signs should I get?
  • What size should they be?
  • How many colors should they have?
  • What should they say?
  • What is the purpose of the signs?
  • Who needs to see them?
  • Where should I put them?
  • Does it matter if I am running for school board or United States Senate whether I get signs?

Let me start with what I believe is the most important question: what is the purpose of political yard signs?

When I was waging a "sign war" against other candidates, I wanted to flood the neighborhoods with my candidate's signs.  I felt that by winning a sign war, I am winning the campaign.  But that is not what is really happening.

An older supporter of my candidate in an early campaign sat down with me and asked me why I care so much about signs.  After I told him my philosophy, he took a sip of his coffee and said, "signs don't vote."

Duh.  Really?  I wanted to say to him, "What is your point, old man?"  But I couldn't say that to him.  He was one of my candidate's mentors and oldest friends.  To insult him would be to drive a wedge between me and my candidate.

He didn't explain what he meant by that statement of "signs don't vote."  Looking back now, I know he wanted me to ruminate on his revelation.  I did.

He was right.  Signs don't vote.  The more time I spent on signs, the less time I was spending on actual contact with voters - people who do vote.  

I had to evaluate what the real purpose of the signs was.  And I came up with a very short list of the most important reasons signs are important:

  1. Campaign awareness - Signs may be the first and sometimes only, communication from a campaign that voters see.  Voters need to know who the candidate is and what office they seek.  Beyond that, there isn't much more "real estate" on a sign for things like message, web site, or a hashtag, although I usually squeeze one of those in.
  2. Message delivery - This is more effective with large signs that can been seen from a distance on a heavily trafficked route.  The message must be pithy (2-3 words if possible) that ties into the campaign's theme and narrative.  One of the best sign messages one of my candidate's had was a little longer, but it was poignant: "Because our taxes are too high!"
  3. Campaign branding - The yard sign helps to establish a look and feel for a candidate.  When you have direct mail delivered to a district, deploy digital ads, broadcast television and OTT commercial spots, or develop any visual asset for a campaign, it must contain the campaign's logo, which is the yard sign image.  This is the thread that connects all the elements of the campaign and penetrates the mind of the voter.

The second question I answered for myself in my soul-searching was: who needs to see the political signs?

Understanding the intended audience is as important as any message you develop.  I can place all the candidate signs I want in a neighborhood, but if my candidate is running for school board, and that neighborhood doesn't participate in school board races, then I just wasted a ton of campaign assets, time and money for no reason.

If I want broad appeal to an audience, then I want my signs on high traffic routes.  Some candidates spend thousands of dollars on billboards on the side of a highway that sees tens of thousands of travelers a day.  That's a good reach, and after a month of cars driving by the billboard, many of the commuters will begin to see the billboard and recognize the name of the candidate.  That is called penetration. 

I do not spend money on billboards.  They are very expensive at thousands of dollars for one sign on one road - sometimes $3,000 to $10,000 per sign.  But according to the PCSigns.com web site (the sign provider I have used for over 20 years for my campaigns), I can acquire 100 signs that are 3 feet by 5 feet, double sided with two colors on each side for less than $3,000.

So my opponent may have a billboard for $3,000 that 20,000 cars will see each day.  But my campaign placed five of my large road signs along the same route, on both sides of the road.  Not only am I being seen by the same traffic count as the opponent who bought the big sign, I am getting both sides of the road.  I spent less money than the billboard, and I still have 95% of my assets left to take to other roads with high traffic counts!

Now I spend most of my sign budget on a small number of large road signs rather than a large number of small yard signs.  However, the small yard signs can come in handy as well.

One thing I noticed as I have been running campaigns for over 30 years now is that most of a districts votes are condensed into a relatively small number of neighborhoods.  If 75% of the votes in a campaign are coming from only a small geographic area, why would I waste time and money on signs in all of the areas that comprise only 25% of the vote?  Unless the race is very close, I need to raise my candidate's awareness in the high-density voter areas!

I will answer the other questions about signs in my next post.

The bottom-line answer to the question of whether political signs are important is, "Yes!"  They are important.  But my old friend was right - signs don't vote.  The real effort of a campaign is to spend time connecting with voters.  Signs serve as your "foot in the door" when it comes to gaining awareness with voters.  Now that you have their attention, you need to spend the rest of your resources on message delivery and voter contact.


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