Outspent 28 to 1. Won in a landslide. | No on B

The idea

A developer found a loophole and tried to buy its way past San Diego County's rules. Accretive Investments put its own project straight onto the countywide ballot, 1,746 homes on 608 acres of Valley Center land zoned for 110, with the county's planning and environmental review skipped entirely. They timed it to a housing crisis and bet that voters would rubber-stamp anything with the word "homes" on it. I took that bet personally.

The odds

When I walked in, most of San Diego County couldn't have found Valley Center on a map, and I had to make a small rural town's fight matter to people in Chula Vista, La Jolla, and El Cajon, more than 3 million of them. The other side raised about 28 times what we did, with more than $4.2 million from the developer alone. We had no brand, no website, no media presence, and six months on the clock. On paper, we were supposed to lose.

The move

So I built an army. The whole campaign ran as an education funnel, taking people from never having heard of Valley Center to understanding exactly what Measure B would do, and then turning them into the loudest voices in the county, so every voter we won went out and recruited the next. The logo and tagline came first, then a website that grew into the hub for events, endorsements, press, and volunteers. In 2016 the big campaigns were still buying TV and polling, and we couldn't afford either, so I turned Facebook and YouTube into our polling. I read the data every day and rewrote messaging and targeting within 24 hours of what it told me. Then I went after the people the county already loved. Jason Mraz, Rita Coolidge, Joel Rafael, and Cindy Lee Berryhill signed on, and I treated their followings as a media channel, back before influencer outreach was a normal play on a local ballot measure. Their posts reached people our ad budget never could, and the endorsements turned into news on their own when NBC San Diego ran a story on Jason Mraz's post. Volunteers showed up at events all over the county, and when we needed the Board of Supervisors to hear us, we put more than 2,000 letters in front of them in 48 hours.

The result

735,894 people voted no. The state certified it at 63.5% to 36.5%, a 27-point landslide against a side that outspent us 28 to 1, on a measure about a town most of those voters had never heard of six months earlier. Our ads reached 1.6 million voters five times over on Facebook and 1.5 million three times on YouTube, and the whole ad budget came in under $50,000. That is what an education funnel looks like when it works.