Why Mycorrhiza?
ABOUT MYCORRHIZA
Mycorrhiza Digital was born from the grassroots. Our goal is to help fledgling campaigns grow and thrive, building a healthy relationship with small donors in their community and beyond to win hearts and minds for bold, progressive policies. After a set of 2020 campaigns where our candidates raised over $30,000 from direct-donate ads—on just $6,000 of ad spend—and both of our congressional candidates far outperformed expectations, we decided to solidify this vision into an organization that could take on more candidates and a broader scope, forming Mycorrhiza Digital.
Mycorrhiza is the name for a symbiotic relationship between a plant and a fungi, most often seen when fungal mycelium helps plant roots absorb moisture and nutrients from the soil. This is the goal of Mycorrhiza Digital: to help grassroots campaigns expand their reach, facilitating relationships with the "soil" (the people) through social media that connects, engages, and spurs to action through donations or voting. Our team is small, but we're scrappy, driven storytellers who believe in the power of narrative to change the world—and have the data to prove it.
OUR APPROACH
Most advertising agencies, and especially those in the political world, emphasize targeting as the place to optimize for an effective campaign. After years of experience in creative strategy for ecommerce, we know that creative is king. Good content can perform magnitudes more effectively than mediocre ads, as we saw in our first attempt at translating our ecommerce know-how into political campaign fundraising. In the candidate's original $200 fundraising test, they saw just one $10 donation. In the first $200 tested on Mycorrhiza videos, over an even broader audience, the same candidate raised over $4,400.
Compare the two ads below.
First is this general campaign video. Its narrative is driven by audio, supported by small subtitles. It's a compelling story, and it's often what candidates try running on social media.
Unfortunately, when a video like this is placed on Facebook or Instagram it loses that effectiveness. Only 20-25% of users on social media have their sound on, so most of the information conveyed here is lost with such small, unassuming subtitles. It takes far too long to get to the point for an impatient scroller.
Taking a TV or Youtube-style ad and putting it on Facebook is like putting a radio show on TV. It's a different medium, and needs different focus and standards practices to succeed on a social media platform.
This is a video formatted for social media. It's taller than it is wide, taking up more space on a phone screen, with big, clear graphics that convey the story through text. Almost nobody scrolls through Facebook or Instagram with their sound on, so anything in audio is mostly lost.
The video opens on action, with an "interesting" shot that grabs attention by more than 3x that of the above video (more than 3x as many people keep watching after the first few seconds, rather than scrolling past).
No wonder this ad brought in more money than the campaign in total over the prior six months.
The digital landscape is constantly changing, and no situation is identical across candidates. But what we learn from our experience with one candidate can inform how we make ads for another; what we learned from ecommerce can inform the world of politics; and the information we include in our ads can simply inform the public.
The healthiest democracy is an informed democracy, and at its core advertising is a way of disseminating information. Eye-catching and emotive narratives are a necessity of the digital world—the more entertaining videos are watched the most—and Mycorrhiza Digital has the skill and experience to get these important messages seen.
Please contact info@mycorrhiza.digital to inquire about making ads for your campaign. No race is too small—we do local elections too!