You’ve got an excellent platform, ambition, and the support of your family and friends, but how can you turn all of that into fuel for your campaign? Fundraising can be tedious, and even frustrating at times, but these four tips will send you on your way towards successful fundraising:

1. Know who you are and how to present yourself

One of the toughest questions can be where to begin. Start by knowing who you are. Be able to clearly articulate why you are running, what you believe, what makes you different than your competition, why you can win, and how potential donors can help. Having this information on hand will enable you to present a dependable image to potential donors and will be an effective way to get your story out.

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With more than 48 million users, Pinterest is the world’s third largest social networking site. As a virtual pinboard (think scrapbook), it allows users to gather and share images and videos that reflect who they are and what they want to say. As Pinterest states, the goal is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.” How can you, as a political activist or candidate, use Pinterest to develop your interests and powerfully influence your audience?

Our team has pulled together some great ideas and today we’re releasing our Get Political with Pinterest Cheat Sheet. Download it for free today!

In the meantime, here are five tips to get you started:

1. Create an account and keep up-to-date. For some good step-by-step instructions, read this from Forbes.com. Visit Mashable’s Pinterest section for the latest news and updates.

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We’d like to offer congratulations to our good friends at Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) on concluding 10 state conventions from California to North Carolina. In an off-year, they have already inspired 1,336 young student leaders to achieve “their best activism yet,” training them to build stronger state networks. We’re excited to see what these students will do with their new skills.

With more than 380 chapters and 125,000 student activists nationwide, YAL is hard at work mobilizing college students and teaching them to have an effective presence on college campuses. Training students to engage in the political process with principles of freedom, the YAL staff is doing good work with far reaching effects.

Take a look at their video released this week, highlighting the good things that are happening.

Jennifer Grant Represents Her Community on County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin

Jennifer Grant works in the Human Resources Department at a hospital four days a week. She has four kids under the age of nine. With that kind of schedule, it’s hard enough to find time for yourself, let alone to represent your community on the county board of supervisors.

That point was certainly lost on Grant, a native of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, who threw her hat in the ring and ran for county board of supervisors in 2012.

“Growing up I wasn’t all that interested in politics. I wasn’t a Young Republican or anything like that in college,” Grant says. “It was 9/11 that was the beginning of the turning point. I began following the news a lot more closely, and then from news websites to blogs. That’s when I began to realize I was more of a conservative republican.”

Grant made her first step into the political world when she attended a Tea Party rally in 2011. It was shortly after the event she realized that, because of redistricting, she was living in a district without an incumbent county supervisor. “I looked at it, and thought ‘Why not me?’” Grant says. “There’s been a decline in this country, and there aren’t enough people willing to step forward and run.” When it looked like no other principled conservatives were standing up, Grant filed papers, gathered the necessary signatures, and got her name on the ballot. A week before the deadline, another candidate filed, and the race was on.

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It’s no secret that American colleges are the strongest—and least opposed—bastions of radical liberalism in the nation. Liberal college professors outnumber their conservative counterparts by three to one on college campuses. A whopping nine out of ten university faculty members supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and 96 percent donated to the Obama campaign in 2012. In the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney had an abysmal showing among young voters and only one in three college-age students voted for him.

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Enjoy this sneak peek of our brand new Campus Majority training manual: Activate Your Campus. Find out more about our free campus trainings and request a training on your campus today!

Click to download a preview of our Campus Majority training manual.

Download your copy of our new manual today!

Young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1830, when the republic was a little over 50 years old. As he traveled the country and studied American government at both the federal and state level, he was struck by what he observed.“The form of the federal government of the United States appeared last,” he later recorded in Democracy in America. “The great political principles that govern American society today were born and developed in the state…. It is therefore the state that one must know to have the key to all the rest.”

Essentially, Tocqueville explained, America grew from the bottom up. Before the U.S. Constitution ever articulated our principles of freedom, the concepts of self-government and representative assembly were being tested, tried, and practiced in America’s pre- Revolution colonial assemblies. When the colonies declared independence from Great Britain, these colonial assemblies became sovereign governments, responsible for raising troops, printing currency, and determining rules of commerce for their states. So by the time the Constitution was finally passed several years later, these colonial assemblies turned sovereign governments turned state legislatures had generations of experience.

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Terri Proud Arizona State Legislator American Majority

As a single mom of a special needs child, Arizona State Legislator Terri Proud knew what it was like to struggle financially, to spend hours in the hospital with her child, an experience which often correlated with making the difficult decision of what bill she was to pay and which one she was going to skip.

While many would think that she had her hands full enough, Proud’s experience as a single mom only increased her concern that Arizona was not headed in a good political direction. She believed that the current trend of legislation was creating a state which infringed upon constitutional and personal rights, making it difficult for struggling families to survive. As Proud says, “The direction of the state was not one that I wanted my children to live in.”

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73 votes. That was the difference between Leah Cole, a newcomer to politics, and her Democrat opponent Beverley Griffin Dunne when the dust settled. Cole was in a three-man race in a special election for a seat in the Massachusetts State House—running against two candidates with long political histories and large bases of supporters in the Peabody area. Now she’s the first Republican since 1990 to represent her district at the State House.

With a special election, turnout is expected to be low, so an aggressive Get-Out-The-Vote effort is essential. Many of Cole’s volunteers trained with American Majority, learning how to effectively reach voters in their community. American Majority emphasizes how to make a difference, training people how to hit the streets and clearly communicate with target voters in their area. When less than 5000 voters showing up to the polls in the state representative race, an effective door-to-door campaign can be the difference between victory and defeat.

Cole says she was “overwhelmed” by the victory, and looks forward to serving her state in the coming years. Now her area will be represented by a principled conservative for the first time in 20 years. Good work, Cole!

Read more about Cole’s win here: http://peabody.patch.com/articles/in-shocking-result-republican-newcomer-cole-wins-peabody-state-rep-seat#photo-13095132

At American Majority we believe in taking strategic steps to solve the problems in our communities. Have you taken a look around you, not only at the waste and spending in our nation, but your state, county, and local community?

If you’re thinking about running for office, or helping someone else run for office, whether it’s school board or state senate, begin to prepare for the journey with the American Majority Campaign Resources. We offer dozens of free resources in our Campaign, Activist, and Social Media Resources Section of this site, but we want to give you a beginners guide on where to start. Once you’ve explored these resources, read, watch, and listen with our other fantastic guides, video clips, and podcasts to prepare yourself to run and win.

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If you could change one thing about your local government, what would it be? What’s stopping you?

People across the country are frustrated with public officials and with the government, but don’t always know where to turn. Reform at a national level is nearly impossible, and even the state government can be too difficult to change sometimes. If you try to effect change by working within the system, you’re likely to bump up against delays, unwilling legislators, bureaucracy, and a general change-averse attitude.

Luckily, there’s a tool available to millions of Americans that allows you to circumvent the legislative process and place an issue straight on your local ballot: the local ballot initiative. The initiative allows you to leverage your already-established grassroots base to effect change more quickly and more democratically, and 48 states have at least one local government that authorizes citizens to use it.

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98 percent of college students own a smartphone or other digital device and 38 percent say they can’t go for more than 10 minutes without checking it. 66 percent of online users say they use some type of social media — Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Due to this ubiquitous nature of online interaction and social media use, understanding how to reach an audience online is becoming increasingly important for any individual or group looking to make their mark.

Chelsea Rankin,    Journalism Student

This includes knowing how to effectively use social media as an outlet for political outreach among the millennial generation: an estimated 58 percent of the U.S. population get their political news from social media. College students Breanna Payton and Chelsea Rankin have seen the opportunity to reach and influence with their peers online and took steps this year to creatively increase interaction with college students through social media.

Payton is a native of California. Chelsea Rankin hails from Connecticut. This semester, they both began an internship in the Office of Communications at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia, where both are journalism majors. Both had some experience running Twitter feeds for student clubs but wanted to learn more about how to use social media to reach their audiences.

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Face it, political advertising is expensive. Whether you’re running for Congress or the local school board, you have more practical uses for the campaign donations supporters have entrusted you with—like paying your staff or the electrical bill—than splurging on a bunch of television, radio, or print ads.

That’s where free press coverage (also called “earned media”) comes in. For local races, earned media is often the only way you’ll make it onto the airways or into the paper. Getting the press to cover a local campaign is hard, especially when there are bigger, blingier, better-financed races on the ballot. But with a little ingenuity and some old-fashioned hard work, you can get positive press coverage for your campaign.

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American Majority Executive Director Matt Robbins regularly debates liberal Washington DC pundit Mark Levine on the Inside Scoop show. Here’s their latest as Matt and Mark debate CPAC and the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Watch Now

We’ve all seen a hamster on a wheel, exercising, spinning endlessly. It’s a blur of activity—and goes absolutely nowhere. Consider then a construction crew building a house: they are also active, but in the end there is a successful product—a home. The building is evidence that, with a systematic, purposeful approach and a goal in mind, there can be a meaningful end to your efforts.

Many conservative activists fall into the habit of showing up with no real purpose in mind. They get involved in tasks and groups that don’t actually bring success. Forwarding emails, attending conferences with like-minded people, or periodically rallying ad nauseam on the steps of a state capitol makes people feel like they’re accomplishing something—and it changes nothing. Like the hamster on the wheel, there is motion as conservatives churn away, but they get nowhere.

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