CandidateSigns.com Blog

Google Maps for tracking your political campaign yard signs
By Phil Van Treuran

Phil Van Treuren publishes daily political campaign tips at Killer Campaigning.

Individual yard signs might not cost much, but add them all up and you’re looking at a pretty hefty political campaign expense. In smaller local campaigns, yard sign costs frequently eat up most of a candidate’s budget, making them all the more important to keep track of (especially if you plan to use them again in future efforts).

The options for tracking the locations of hundreds of yard signs used to be pretty sparse: Excel spreadsheets were as high-tech as it got, and many campaigns didn’t even go that far. While writing down your yard sign locations is still a great backup, I’m going to let you in on a cool secret that helped me track every sign in my successful city council race: Google Maps.

If you’ve ever used Google to search for a local business or location, you’re probably familiar with Google Maps. Google has mapped the entire United States (and the entire world, for that matter) from a bird’s-eye perspective, and lets anyone with an Internet connection see an overhead view of just about any spot on the globe.

But here’s a little-known bonus that political candidates can find in Google Maps: it also lets you create and save your own overhead maps complete with virtual thumbtacks marking hundreds of separate locations.

You can see the potential for yard sign management already, I’m sure. The process is really simple: just sign up for a free Google account, go to the Google Maps application, and click on the link that says “my maps.” Another click on “create a new map” will allow you to do just that; simply type your city into the search box to find local neighborhoods, and start laying down the placemarks where your yard signs are located.

I’m going to assume that you can figure out the rest and won’t get too technical. For an example, here is the map that I created to track my yard signs in Amherst, Ohio.

Google Maps has a lot of potential for other political campaign uses too, including supporter tracking, donor tracking, houses to avoid . . . you name it!

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