How to create a successful yard sign campaign: Part 1

When I moved to my small town of Walla Walla, one of the first things I envisioned was a pro-immigrant yard sign campaign with our local grassroots immigrant rights organization, the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition.

It was never exactly the right time, and we never had enough money to cover it, so it didn’t happen.

That changed this year.

With everything this administration has done to threaten, demonize, and criminalize immigrants, it became obvious that now was the time. I had developed a truly strong partnership with the new executive director Abby Muro, and we recognized that allies were hungry for ways to support immigrants, in ways beyond making a donation.

I took on the project management, pushing it forward little by little. It started as a typical immigrant justice message, featuring the monarch butterfly. We worked with a designer to create some stunning yard signs, and I was excited to finally have a product. But then another organizer pitched something that killed my idea and created one so, so much better.

The Swift.

The Vaux’s Swift was highlighted by adrienne marie brown in her book “Emergent Strategy”. Swifts do not follow a leader. Instead, each bird takes cues from only its 6–7 closest neighbors, allowing the entire group to move in harmony and shift direction instantly. This flock is called a murmuration, and it looks like a large cloud, but is actually thousands of birds.

A murmurating flock stays together because each bird manages its immediate, small-scale interactions, not the whole million-bird group. These birds are found along the West Coast, from Canada to South America. Their life is centered on their ability to migrate and move with the seasons. They spend their lives in the air.

We chose to feature the Vaux’s Swift because this bird represents the best parts of us. It represents our adaptability, our dependence on each other, and our shared purpose.

Changing the imagery of the yard sign was jarring for me, as I wanted to move fast. I wanted to get it done, check it off a list, create a deliverable. I liked the new analogy, but had invested time in the, admittedly less interesting, monarch butterfly. But I was a team player and moved forward with it.

We changed artists and asked a Chicago-based creative, Luz Ashby, to design our yard sign. I had seen her incredible work on Just Seeds, an artist collective I love. I messaged her on Instagram and she agreed to donate her time to our cause. I wrote up a design brief for her, outlining the goal of the campaign, detailing the Swift and the concept behind it, and giving parameters for what artwork we needed.

She nailed it on the first try.

I quickly realized that I had fallen into the typical trap laid by white supremacy. I was valuing progress over process, completion over intention. Thank goodness for that organizer (yes, you, Tia Kramer) who stopped us in our tracks and recentered what really mattered: meaning.

The final art was done. The signs were going to be gorgeous. We had the image. We had the narrative. We, shockingly, even had the budget.

But what comes next?

Come back for part two, where I will lay out how we created the campaign, got the artwork diversity we needed up front, set up pre-orders, organized the launch event, and distributed 350 yard signs in two months across our town of 30,000 people.

Stay tuned, folks.

See below for full images of our bilingual yard sign campaign.