The cheapest campaing ever

Working in the campaign of the President of the Republic was one of the biggest challenges that I had in my professional life.

We were a small team of five people, that in three months went to visit the 18 districts of the country with our candidate. It was a rewarding, challenging but a very hard time. With a restricted budget and not always planned costs, we couldn´t actually predict the amount of money to allocate in every campaign action that we planned, but we did our best.

Our budget was of 150 thousand euros and our goal was to have the cheapest campaign ever. Our fixed costs were: the rent of the car were my team was, and the wage of the taxi driver that took Professor Marcelo in the second car. As variable costs we had the hotels costs, meals and gasoline. After three months we spent more 29 thousand euros than the predicted budget, but we won the election.

It’s difficult to measure the revenues of a campaign, because there are no sales associated (like in a typical business). But if I could measure the success of it, it would be computed as a function dependent on the following Formula:

Success (Number of Votes) = Qt. of districts visited X Variable Costs + Fixed Costs

Variable Costs - €/district visited

Fixed Costs - €

The constitution doesn’t allow that campaigns can make profits but, if we could, in the end, I am almost sure, that we would have reach the breakeven point, because the 52% of votes (2.403 million votes) generate a total of 165 thousand euros of subsidy from the state, that the President received after being elected.