How do you put together a campaign staff and consultant team when running for office?

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Ron Faucheux is one of America's top political and public affairs analysts. Contributor-at-Large for Campaigns & Elections magazine - a nonpartisan publication he previously published and edited - he writes a column on politics and public opinion.

Currently head of government affairs for the American Institute of Architects, Dr. Faucheux is a former state legislator and cabinet secretary. He's the author of the acclaimed book for candidates, Running for Office; editor of The Debate Book, a manual of standards and guidelines for political debates; and editor of Winning Elections, a treasure chest of the best campaign advice ever published.

He's handled 116 candidate and issue campaigns as a media consultant and campaign strategist. He's worked on a wide range of issue advocacy, association, corporate and grassroots lobbying campaigns.

Since the early 1990s, he's made over 350 national television appearances and has anchored his own national cable TV news show. His network appearances have included the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Lou Dobbs Show on CNN, ABC's Nightline, NBC's The Today Show and ABC's Good Morning America.

He's trained thousands of political candidates, issue advocates, corporate executives and association leaders. The campaign "message development" process he created has been used successfully by many campaigns, large and small, around the world.

Dr. Faucheux graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, received a law degree from the LSU Law Center and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of New Orleans.

He teaches courses in Campaign Management and Running For Office at The Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute.

He was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives at 25 - at the time the legislature's youngest member. He was re-elected twice, once with 84 percent of the vote and once without opposition. He also served as state Secretary of Commerce.

Dr. Faucheux resides in the Washington, D.C. area. His office is located at 1735 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20006-5292

How do you put together a campaign staff and consultant team when running for office?

In this video, expert Ron Faucheux shares his tips and techniques on how to run for office.

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Transcripts

Host: How do you put together a campaign staff and consultant team?

Ron Faucheux: Well political candidates have to put together a good campaign staff and the campaign staff means the fulltime people and in fact who will be working in the campaign like a campaign manager or campaign political director, communications director, a campaign fundraising team, field directors, people who run the campaign, headquarters, people who do the scheduling and it's a matter of trying to get people who have prior experience in that if you can find them and who have good track records in political campaigns.

If you can't find people with prior experience, then you have to look for people with the right talents and skills and background that they may have acquired and other things and apply to a political campaign and then nurture that. Of course, putting together a political campaign consultant team means hiring a poster, hiring a media consultant, direct mail consultants, website consultants, fundraising consultants, telephone consultants, opposition research and research consultants. All of these people have developed expertise over time.

Many of them are very good; many of them are very competent; many of them are very capable and honest. Some of them may not be; so you have to be very careful and have a very thorough interview process, where you can look at these people, look at the work they have done and check their references, check their biographies, check their ethics and their standards in their work product to make sure that they are people that you can work with and feel comfortable with what they are doing.

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