2020 is surely the year where everyone and everything, individuals as well as organizations, is facing challenges that none of them even thought of before. From marketing their offerings to designing election campaigns, and to getting comfortable doing everything from one place i.e. your home. It has redefined ways that we have always been doing things and that includes responsible marketing as well.

According to the forecasts, we might be getting hit by a second wave of the coronavirus anytime near November. And this forecast presents organizations and our candidates with more challenges. The candidates for elections are worried about ways they might have to change their campaigns, or maybe who knows they might just continue doing things the way they have been doing.

Questions like whether to hold public events or not or how to effectively communicate to you voters using online mediums, voters that need reassurances, voters that are going through a crisis, health, or financial. These are the factors that one needs to keep in mind and be very careful about while making decisions. According to the Director of “Ethics in Political Communication”, a project by George Washington University, Peter Loge;

“Every candidate will handle the ethics of campaigning in the coronavirus crisis differently,”

He further wrote;

“But every candidate should set ethical boundaries early and stick within those boundaries.”

Loge also hosted a webinar which was joined by many experts and surprisingly, the majority of them were against the idea of campaigns being shy about raising funds during these times. According to Dan Glickman, who once was a congressman and served as the Secretary of Agriculture during the presidency of Clinton;

“You may not be able to raise the same quantity of money, you may need to raise it differently, but our democracy depends upon competition of ideas, and that requires some degree of what I call responsible conflict, and to get that across you have to have the resources to buy the [media] time. The real issue is the times we’re in require you to use more sensitive language, more respectable language.”

Jeffrey Brand was also one of the notable people who attended this webinar. He is currently a professor of Philosophy at the GW’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy. Agreeing to the mentioned above, Brand said that if anything, organizations, and candidates should consider this as the new normal and design all their objectives, goals, and campaigns around it. In his words;

“There are really important rhetorical moves that candidates can make to remind us that we are one country and that we need some truth and reconciliation. We can’t use this as an excuse not to campaign, we can’t use this as an excuse not to engage in the discussion of major ideas that affect the country,” he said. “It’s just going to have to be a little bit different for a while.”

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