Using CiviCRM to manage a local political party

I will be sharing my experiences on moving our County Party activists information off of Excel spreadsheets to a web based contact management system. Looking on the web, there is a ton of documentation on CiviCRM, but I have not found anything on the best practices on how to set up CiviCRM to manage a local party. This is what I want to do with these series of postings.

Also I am trolling for other people who have this experience and don't mind to share their knowledge.

Next Post, what is CiviCRM and what are some of the advantages and disadvantages on using it to manage your local party or campaign.