Glossary

Terms, defined.

The language of public affairs, campaigns, research, and cross-border work — defined plainly, the way we use it.

Audience targeting: Audience targeting is the practice of defining precisely whom a campaign must reach — using data, geography, demographics, behavior, and modeled segments — then reaching them and no one else. Done well, it concentrates budget on the people who can move a decision and spares the rest.
Ballot access: Ballot access is the process of qualifying a candidate, party, or initiative to appear on an election ballot, usually by collecting a required number of valid petition signatures within a fixed filing window, under rules that vary by state and by office. Counsel defines what the law requires; Lincoln is a foremost authority on ballot access execution, in all fifty states.
Blended finance: Blended finance is the strategic use of public, philanthropic, and development capital to mobilize private investment into projects that would otherwise be too risky for commercial investors alone. A relatively small amount of catalytic capital can mobilize several times its value in private investment. It is most common in developing and emerging markets, where it can unlock infrastructure, energy, health, and development projects the market would not finance on its own.
Campaign management: Campaign management is the daily operation that carries a strategy out — running the team, the schedule, the field program, the paid media, the data, and the budget against the plan and the deadline, and adjusting as conditions change. Strategy decides what to do; management makes it happen, on time and under pressure.
Campaign strategy: Campaign strategy is the plan for moving a defined audience to a defined outcome by a fixed date — setting the objective, identifying the audiences to persuade and to turn out, fixing the message, and allocating budget and time against them. It is the theory of how a campaign is won, settled before a dollar is spent or a door is knocked.
Canvassing: Canvassing is systematic, door-to-door voter contact in which field teams reach voters in person within assigned territory to persuade, identify support, or drive turnout. It is managed as logistics: walk lists, quotas, training, and quality control across the field program.
Catalytic capital: Catalytic capital is funding — typically public, philanthropic, or development money — that deliberately accepts greater risk or a lower return in order to attract private investment that would not otherwise come. A relatively small amount can mobilize several times its value in additional financing, which is what makes blended finance work.
Coalition building: Coalition building is the practice of uniting organizations, industries, and interests behind a shared policy position so they speak with combined weight. A coalition gives a campaign broader credibility and reach than any single member could carry alone.
Concessional finance: Concessional finance is funding offered on terms more generous than the market — below-market interest, longer repayment, or a willingness to absorb losses first. In blended finance it is the concessional layer that lowers risk enough to bring commercial investors in.
Crisis communications: Crisis communications is what an organization says during a crisis — the messages, the audiences, and the timing. It is one part of the wider discipline of crisis management, which also covers assessment, decisions, and the stakeholder and regulator engagement that contain the event.
Crisis management: Crisis management is the discipline of guiding an organization through an event that threatens its operations, standing, or people — making decisions under pressure and incomplete information to contain the damage and protect the institution. It is broader than communications, spanning assessment, the chain of command, stakeholder and regulator engagement, and the sequence of actions that contain the event. Lincoln does this work quietly, twenty-four hours a day.
Development finance institution (DFI): A development finance institution is a government-backed or multilateral body that provides loans, guarantees, and equity to projects in developing and emerging markets to advance economic growth. DFIs frequently serve as the public anchor in blended finance structures, and Lincoln works alongside them to assemble the wider partnership and capital a project needs.
Digital advertising: Digital advertising is the planning, placement, and measurement of paid messages across search, social, video, display, and streaming platforms. In advocacy and political work it does more than sell — it persuades, informs, and prompts action, from a constituent contacting an official to a voter deciding to turn out. Lincoln runs it integrated with field operations, online and on the ground, across dozens of markets.
Diplomacy: Diplomacy is the conduct of relations between states and institutions through dialogue, negotiation, and representation rather than force. Alongside official state diplomacy, Lincoln practices a commercial and private form of it — the patient work of aligning governments, institutions, and capital around a shared outcome.
Earned media: Earned media is coverage and attention an organization gains rather than pays for — news reports, interviews, commentary, and third-party mentions. It is the product of public and media relations, and it tends to carry more credibility than paid placement because the endorsement is independent.
Emerging markets: Emerging markets are economies in a rapid stage of growth and integration into global markets, where returns can be high but political, regulatory, and currency risk is greater than in developed markets. Much of Lincoln's international and partnerships work is set here, where a credible convener and the right introductions can move a project from intent to execution.
Field operations: Field operations are the on-the-ground execution of a campaign — voter contact, canvassing, community organizing, coalition building, and direct constituent-to-decision-maker contact, planned, staffed, managed, and measured. It is logistics at scale: territories, quotas, training, quality control, and data. Lincoln has fielded operations with more than twenty thousand operatives on a single program, in all fifty states and on five continents.
First-loss capital: First-loss capital is an investment that agrees to absorb a project's initial losses before its other investors are affected. By taking that risk, it protects the more cautious capital behind it and makes an otherwise unbankable project investable.
Focus group: A focus group is a qualitative research method in which a small, moderated group discusses a topic, candidate, or set of messages in depth. Where a poll measures how many hold a view, a focus group explains why they hold it, surfacing the language and reasoning behind the numbers.
Full-funnel measurement: Full-funnel measurement tracks an advertising campaign from first impression through to the action that matters — a click, a sign-up, a message to a decision-maker, a vote — and sets that result against the spend behind it. It judges a campaign by outcomes per dollar rather than reach alone, so budget can shift toward what works while the campaign is still live.
Get out the vote (GOTV): Get out the vote, or GOTV, is the final-stage effort to turn identified supporters into actual votes — reaching them in the days before and on election day to ensure they cast a ballot. It converts earlier persuasion and voter identification into turnout, run as a tightly scheduled field operation against the close of polls.
Government relations: Government relations is the direct, ongoing engagement with government and regulators — the channel to the decision-maker within public affairs. It maintains the relationships and flow of information through which an organization is understood by those who govern.
Government-to-government introductions: Government-to-government introductions are facilitated, credible connections between governments, ministries, and the institutions around them — opening the right door, at the right level, so a serious conversation can begin. It is the quiet, relationship-driven core of cross-border work, and Lincoln makes these connections across more than seventy countries.
Grassroots mobilization: Grassroots mobilization is the organizing of real people — voters, constituents, small businesses, whole industries — to be heard by decision-makers, working from the ground up rather than top-down. Lincoln organizes those constituencies and connects them directly to the officials and regulators who decide a question, for election campaigns and issue advocacy alike.
International government relations: International government relations is the practice of engaging governments, regulators, and multilateral institutions across more than one jurisdiction to shape a policy, regulatory, or commercial outcome. Lincoln applies one disciplined method with local fluency in each market, in more than seventy countries.
Issue advocacy: Issue advocacy is a campaign organized to advance a position on a policy or regulatory question rather than to elect a candidate, mobilizing affected constituencies to be heard by the decision-makers weighing the matter. Lincoln runs issue advocacy with the same strategy and field operation an election demands.
Lobbying: Lobbying is one tactic within public affairs: direct contact with officials to advocate a position. It is the act of making a case to a decision-maker, distinct from the wider strategy that frames and supports that case.
Margin of error: The margin of error is the range, expressed as a plus-or-minus figure, within which a poll's result is expected to reflect the true value for the whole population. It quantifies the uncertainty that comes from surveying a sample rather than everyone, and it narrows as the sample size grows.
Message testing: Message testing is the practice of measuring how an audience responds to language, framing, and argument before any of it goes public. It identifies which messages persuade, which fall flat, which carry risk, and which messenger and frame land hardest with each audience — so a campaign leads with what works, proven in private first.
Microtargeting: Microtargeting is the use of data and modeling to identify narrow audience segments — defined by demographics, behavior, geography, and predicted attitudes — and to address each with messaging tailored to it. It concentrates effort and budget on the people most likely to be persuaded or mobilized, rather than broadcasting one message to everyone. Lincoln handles the underlying data for privacy and compliance in every jurisdiction it touches.
Paid media: Paid media is advertising space an organization buys to carry its message, across search, social, video, display, and broadcast. It is distinguished from earned media, which is coverage gained rather than purchased, and from owned media, which an organization publishes on its own channels.
Petition circulating: Petition circulating is the act of carrying a qualifying petition to registered voters to gather their signatures, including recruiting and managing the circulators who do that work in the field. It is the front end of a signature drive, paired with validation against the voter rolls to confirm each signer is registered and eligible in the correct jurisdiction.
Poll: A poll is a survey of a sample drawn to represent a larger population, designed so its results can be generalized to that whole population within a margin of error. The distinction from a general survey is the representative sample — it is what lets a few hundred or few thousand responses stand in for millions.
Public affairs: Public affairs is the practice of shaping the policy, regulatory, and political environment around an organization and engaging the stakeholders who decide an outcome. It is broader than lobbying, combining government relations, research, communications, and coalition work. Lincoln operates this discipline across more than seventy countries and all fifty states.
Public opinion research: Public opinion research is the structured measurement of what a population thinks, feels, and is likely to do, combining quantitative methods such as polls and surveys with qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews. It reads the landscape and identifies what moves it, so strategy rests on what is measured rather than assumed. Lincoln builds that foundation under campaign, public affairs, and crisis work.
Public relations: Public relations is the practice of managing how an organization is understood by its publics — the press, customers, employees, investors, and the wider community — through earned media, direct engagement, and consistent conduct. It differs from advertising, which is paid: public relations works to earn coverage and trust rather than to buy attention.
Public-private partnership: A public-private partnership is a long-term arrangement in which a government and one or more private parties jointly finance, build, or operate a project or service, sharing its risks and returns. It is a common vehicle for infrastructure and development work, and one of the structures Lincoln helps convene across borders.
Regulatory affairs: Regulatory affairs, also called regulatory strategy, is the planned approach to engaging the agencies and rule-making processes that govern an industry or activity. It maps the bodies that set and enforce the rules, the windows for input, and the path to a workable outcome. Lincoln builds this approach for organizations across nineteen industries.
Reputation management: Reputation management is the work of shaping how an organization is understood over time — before, during, and after it is tested. It combines media relations, narrative strategy, and conduct, because credibility is protected by what an institution does as much as by what it says.
Signature collection: Signature collection is the field work of gathering valid voter signatures on a qualifying petition — including recruiting and managing the circulators who carry it to registered voters — and validating them for compliance. A drive begins from a target, the required signatures plus a margin for invalid or challenged ones, and is executed as logistics at scale against a fixed deadline.
Signature validation: Signature validation is the checking of each collected signature against the voter rolls to confirm the signer is registered and eligible in the correct jurisdiction, producing a true count of valid signatures rather than gross ones. Lincoln validates as it collects, so a drive's standing against its target is known in real time and the petition holds up when it is challenged.
Survey: A survey is any structured set of questions put to a group of people to gather information. A poll is one kind of survey — one drawn from a sample designed to represent a larger population — but not every survey is a poll.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The Sustainable Development Goals are seventeen global goals adopted by United Nations member states to end poverty, protect the planet, and improve lives. They are the common frame for development projects worldwide, and the impact that blended finance is structured to advance.
Voter registration drive: A voter registration drive is an organized effort to register eligible citizens to vote, often targeted at specific communities or geographies, and conducted under registration rules that vary by jurisdiction. It expands the universe of voters a campaign can later contact and turn out.

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