Archive for July 3rd, 2006
Updated January, 2011
The internet really came of age as a fundraising tool in 2004 — the success of the Dean campaign and of groups like MoveOn.org startled most political professionals and observers, and other campaigns were quick to put new emphasis on the web and email lists as way to raise money from supporters. In 2007-2008 the Obama campaign raised online fundraising to a high art, and it became one of the most important contributors to his ultimate victory. The paragraphs below provide a good introduction to online fundraising, but for more details, definitely check out the fundraising chapters in Learning from Obama and Winning in 2010.
Of course, many groups and politicians do little but ask and ask and ask, and as I discussed in the section on list-building and list maintenance, that’s a quick way to burn out casual supporters and hard-core activists alike. What are some techniques to shake the most money out of those credit cards and Paypal accounts without poisoning the well for future requests? (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
Mmmmmm, mental viruses. Let’s create a video clip, an animation or even an email appeal that’s so compelling that people forward it around the world and do our promotional work for us. It’s basically traditional word-of-mouth leveraged across the internet, and who wouldn’t want to create The Thing That Everyone Is Talking About? (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
The first thing to remember about working with the news media is that reporters are bombarded with information and that the good ones consequently quickly develop a sensitive bullshit meter. When you’re working with journalists, dial back the rhetoric and focus on the facts of your issue.
The main exception is when you’re providing a statement to a reporter from which he or she will mine quotes. In that case, being over-the-top may help land you in the story. But even then, always try to back your language up with facts, usually in a “For More Information” section at the end of the statement. Everything you send to reporters should have your site’s URL! (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
A major part of online advocacy involves direct attempts to influence decision-makers such as congressmembers, governors, the President, state legislators and corporate boards and CEOs. I’m going to focus on Congress, but many of these tactics apply to other decision-maker campaigns as well. (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
Getting found on search engines is usually vital if you want to have any kind of online prominence, and search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the Holy Grails of online marketing (and marketing is what we’re doing here: we’re selling ideas, right?). So, how do we get Google, Yahoo and Bing to notice us? (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
What good is a campaign if no one knows about it? Inadequate promotion is a painfully common problem in the online world — rarely can you hide your light under a bushel and expect your site to shine. Let’s look first at the basics of getting attention, then we’ll look at how to keep those readers once you get them. (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
Cell phones, and particularly text messages, are the next political tool we’ll consider. If you’ve spent the past few years building up your thumb strength and agility while keeping up with which bars have good drink specials (as I wrote the original version of this article, I was looking at a friend’s message from the previous night that said, and I kid you not, “CcCome to bedinbl” — Jen had maybe been at a barstool a little too long…), you already know that text messages are an efficient way to get a brief burst of information in front of a lot of people at once.
Their limitation lies in the brief part — text messages are too short to include much persuasion, so they’re best used in triggering an action that you’ve preplanned. Particularly outside the U.S. (creative cell phone uses have lagged in the States), organizers have used mass text messages to alert people to the location for a rally or demonstration and give authorities little time to counter them. You might use them for similar purposes or to spark an immediate cell call to a campaign target, for instance a Congressmember or corporate CEO. You’ll need to have educated your activists beforehand through other means, probably via email, but the text message can generate an immediate action when you need it. The trick will be getting the right target phone number to the right activist, but that’s why you hired a top-notch vendor (hint). And of course, individual activists can always use texts to reach their friends and other organizing targets.
Probably the most immediate use of text messaging in the U.S. will be for election-day Get-Out-The-Vote efforts, though you can also use them as a two-way tool by soliciting information from supporters through polls and such. If you’re really ambitious, you’ll use them to announce your vice presidential pick! But the really interesting uses of mobile technologies are probably still a couple of years away (hmmm, they ALWAYS seem to be a couple of years away), and savvy campaigns are gathering supporters’ cell numbers now for applications that haven’t yet been dreamed up. Note that one good way to build a cell list is at live events, if you’ve set up the capability for people send you a short text message to sign up at that moment.
One particularly interesting use of cell phones for fundraising in the 2008 election cycle: the John Edwards campaign contacted list members via text, urged them to call a number and listen to a recorded message, then connected them to operators to take donations right away. The results were said to be good, though the campaign did not repeat the attempt that I know of. Otherwise, cell phone-based fundraising has primarily been used for disaster relief and similarly high-profile and immediate purposes.
Location-Based Services
Foursquare, Gowalla and similar cell phone-based location-dependent services were all the rage in the commercial marketing world in 2010, though they haven’t seeped over much into the political space just yet. Plenty of folks see advocacy potential in location-based tools, so we’ll keep an eye on them and see what pops up in the years to come. Also see the chapter on Political Advertising for a brief discussion of mobile ads, which tend to be location-based.
Grassroots Organizing
Perhaps the next frontier for cell phones in politics depends on the spread of “smart” phones — in 2010 we saw the first significant use of iPhone and other “apps” as well as specialized mobile-optimized websites for field organizing and block-canvassing. The best of these applications would provide canvassers with directions to the next houses to visit, offer talking points and videos for persuasion, and give the ability to sign people up for a supporter list on the spot. I suspect that the potential of tools like these is just beginning to be tapped, and that phones will play a major role in field organizing moving forward.
Next: Political Databases
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication) is an easy way to keep your readers abreast of updates to your site content. At their simplest and most common, RSS feeds send subscribers the title and a brief blurb about each new article or post on a given site or blog, along with a link to the post. Users can subscribe directly to feeds from sites they read regularly, though feed aggregators such as Google Reader and MyYahoo also collect feeds in searchable form. (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
Though online video has really broken out big in the last five years, campaigns and random citizens have been using short video clips (live-action or animated) to promote their ideas and pummel their enemies for years. But broadband’s easy availability and the explosion of video posting sites like YouTube makes it much more effective than before — users no longer hesitate to click on video links like they might have a few years ago, and you’re not going to lack for easy places to post your content as an outreach tool. Plus, tools like Twitter and Facebook now provide additional ways to spread the word about each new piece of video content.
Of course, the huge expansion of online video makes it hard to break through the clutter: the next “Yes We Can” is competing with millions of YouTube clips created by both amateurs and professionals. Besides the new generation of home video enthusiasts, music labels are promoting bands, broadcast networks are hyping their shows, and P.R. firms from all over the world are pushing “clever” promotional video clips in hopes of viral takeoff..
Why Use Video?
Campaigns have found that video can be a powerful tool in part because it helps create more of an emotional connection with a subject — having someone TELL you about a political issue is usually more compelling than reading about it. Also, good video can take complex issues and make them immediately understandable, in that picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words way. One consideration, though, is that video is often quite time-consuming. Posting an unedited clip is relatively easy, but anything that needs editing can quickly turn into a huge project. I’ve heard video producers estimate 30-40 hours of work to produce a 3-minute clip, if it needs to be scripted, shot and edited.
The Basics
So, now that we’ve decided to use video (or animation), how do we do it? First, campaigns can host clips on their own websites, blogs and MySpace sites/Facebook pages to vividly illustrate their ideas, to show their candidates in a godlike light, to highlight opponents’ misdeeds and overall perfidy, etc. This tactic is really a no-brainer, and you’re only limited by your ability to create content — plenty of people are doing amazing things with $200 video cameras, and hosting is cheap unless you’re getting gigabytes of data accessed weekly. Good video (and Flash animation) can make your case in a dramatic and immediate way and is often the centerpiece of viral campaigns. One particular advantage of using video hosting sites is that you can usually “embed” the video in your own page: paste in a snippet of code, and your readers can watch the video directly on your site without having to open the video clip as a separate document.
One note — if possible, “watermark” your pieces so that your URL displays within the picture as they play. This way, if someone copies the file and distributes it independently of your site, viewers will still have a way to find you. And if your video is specifically intended to spur action, be sure to end it with a definite call for people to take that action, usually accompanied by a link that provides an opportunity to do it. Also, besides linking to issue-specific clips in the appropriate places on your site, you’ll probably want to create a central page that collects all of your video (and/or audio) in one place. Finally, when you post a video to YouTube or a similar hosting site, pay close attention to the description and keywords you include along with the video clip itself — they’re extremely important in helping users of the site find your content as they search for information (or momentary distraction).
Reaching Out
Next, campaigns can use video as an outreach tool by posting clips on Google video, YouTube or their competitors, hoping to capture new supporters as they come across them. Most sites will allow you to create a “channel” that gathers all of your videos in one place and may allow you to link back to your main site or your action center. Again, watermarking is a good idea, as is carefully crafting the short text descriptions video-hosting sites typically allow you to add to your content — they’ll help your pieces show up when people use Google or the search engines built into the video sites themselves.
Posting videos is the beginning of the battle, but if you really want them to be seen, you’ll need to spread the word using all of your normal promotional mechanisms. Link to them from your main website and social network profiles, promote them to your email list, and make sure that it’s as easy as possible for viewers to forward your link to others (a feature generally built into video-sharing sites). Also, keep in mind that YouTube and other video-sharing sites usually display a handful of popular or noteworthy clips on their front page and on category pages, and your viewership can spike if you can build enough traffic on your own to start being featured. Pay close attention to copyright! Some sites will reserve the right to use your content for their own purposes.
What Kind of Content?
As you’re developing your online video strategy, don’t forget to think about the KIND of content you’ll be producing. Political campaigns have typically focused on slick-looking video equivalents of their television commercials — John McCain’s videos in ’08, for example, or this hi-larious example from a 2010 Alabama statewide race — but professional isn’t always perfect. Obama’s 2008 campaign not only produced close to 2000 individual YouTube clips, they produced video in many flavors and for many purposes. Some pieces were intended for a broad audience, effectively serving as online campaign commercials, but others were aimed at volunteers and campaign staff — their goal was educational and motivational, and at times their relatively primitive production standards added to their perceived authenticity.
Social Media and Online Video
Finally, as discussed in much more detail in the chapter on Social Media, campaigns use video as an organizing and motivating tool by letting their supporters create and edit video content and upload it directly to the campaign site.
Next: Advertising
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
Social media is a broader concept than social networking, though people often put them together — it refers generally to content that is created by random internet users rather than by a central person or group. YouTube and Wikipedia are great examples of sites built on social media concepts, as are blogs that allow comments. How can political campaigns use social media to tap into the internet hive-mind?
Carefully, as MoveOn.org discovered during the 2004 presidential campaign. If you’ll recall, early in 2004 the group encouraged its members to create anti-Bush ads that it would then evaluate for actual use on television. Hundreds of ads were submitted and placed online, but one used historical footage to associate the Bush administration with Hitler and the Nazi party. Oops — that one ad gave MoveOn.org’s enemies fodder for days of attacks on the organization. An ad that never ran got plenty of media coverage and took attention away from the issues on which the group wanted to focus voters (though all the attention also boosted the group’s membership, so it wasn’t exactly a total loss).
Any time you open the floodgates to user-generated content, you take the same risk, so good gatekeeping is essential. That being said, allowing your members or readers to generate content has some real strengths as a tactic. For one thing, it allows you to capture the brainpower of far more people than you could reasonably hire — you can leverage the collective intelligence of a chunk of the internet. For another, it’s potentially a terrific tool for community building, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the section on building and keeping an audience.
As an example of both aspects, in the summer of 2006 the Ned Lamont campaign in Connecticut made great use of user-created video. For instance, Lamont supporters shot clips of opponent Joe Lieberman’s campaign appearances and uploaded them to the Lamont site. Minor gaffes that would have passed unnoticed in the past could thus be preserved for all to enjoy, and those behind the cameras could feel that they were an essential part of the campaign. Lamont supporters also amused themselves and their comrades endlessly by cleverly editing Lieberman footage into their own online ads and “documentary” clips. In the 2008 and 2010 election cycles, this trend only accelerated, with some memes like 2010′s “Demon Sheep” taking on a life of their own.
Besides video, a campaign could solicit slogans from supporters, ask them to contribute their own personal stories or essays to an online presentation, provide them with photos to embellish with captions and speech bubbles, or ask them to vote or comment on ads, speeches and position papers, just to name a few uses. Any of these tactics can motivate your supporters and get them to help push your campaign over the top.
Social Media, Whether You Like It or Not
One more thing about social media that campaigns need to keep in mind: it’s out there whether you want it to be or not. For instance, look at our experience in the 2008 primaries. Barack Obama benefited from the “Yes We Can” and “Obamagirl” videos, which were created by citizens without any coordination from the campaign, but he was hurt by videos of his former pastor which were posted to YouTube. All the major campaigns had Facebook Groups for and against them; all had blogs building them up and cutting them down.
In a social world, campaigns need to pay attention to a vast new array of content producers whom they never had to worry about before, since some college kid (or some grandma) can produce a viral email or a powerful video piece that can drown out the message the campaign is actually trying to get across. Whether campaigns actively use social media tools or not, they’re being used on them. Fun times, if you ask me.
Next: Video and Animation
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
Blogs, one-time sweet darlings of the political internet world. I can still remember the first time I figured out what a blog WAS, back in the spring of 2003 (I was at South by Southwest, listening to a presentation and no doubt recovering from a hangover).
Okay, so what IS a blog? At one level, blogs are just websites that are easy to update — and simply because blogs are such convenient publishing tools, people use blogging software for all kinds of applications that don’t involve sharing body parts or secrets with strangers,. But the more common conception of a blog is a site that’s frequently updated and that is the personal product of one or more authors. It can be a diary, an op-ed column, a corporate house organ, a community center, an outlet for art, photography, fiction or investigative journalism, a place of philosophical musing or a venue for shameless self-promotion (hello, e.politics!). (more…)
July 3rd, 2006
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Updated January, 2011
If you’re an online organizer, your activist list is often your most precious possession outside of your website — its members are your supporters, your regular readers and frequently your source of precious cash. You’re likely to spend an enormous amount of effort building the list, and you SHOULD spend a lot of time thinking about how to maintain it. Traditionally, email has been the primary tool for keeping in touch with supporters, but as Facebook, Twitter et al become more prominent and email deliverability become more of a problem, email may find itself dethroned in the future. As of this writing, though, email is still by far the most widely used online supporter-contact tool — despite constant predictions of its imminent demise.
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July 3rd, 2006
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