IDI’s Blogger Relations Blog has a good checklist of things to consider before your organization or campaign starts a blog. Who’s going to maintain it? What topics are encouraged and what are off-limits? Will you allow comments? And, of course, how does it fit into your overall communications strategy?
– cpd
Add comment July 21st, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
As Steve Rubel noted a couple of days ago, and as I touched on at the end of the e.politics section on building and maintaining email lists, younger people are using IM, blogs and social networking sites as a replacement for email, which they generally see as a way to get an attachment or exchange messages with an “elder,” not as a way to communicate with a peer. As they move into the workforce, will it change or will they?
I’m a huge fan of email as a communications medium, since it allows for a degree of reflection that IM lacks, but I’m also 37 and set in my ways as an online writer. As a result, I may be missing out on a revolution. But email is embedded in so many office communications streams that I don’t see it disappearing any time remotely soon, though I could see it becoming more the equivalent of a certified letter — an “official” rather than a personal communication. Does this join spam-blockers, list proliferation and recipient exhaustion as another factor that dooms email-list-based advocacy and fundraising to steadily dimishing returns?
– cpd
2 comments July 21st, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Just back from a presentation by the New Politics Institute. I’ll post the video link as soon as they provide it, but in the meantime, here are a couple of quick takeaways:
2 comments July 20th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
It’s a tag-team deathmatch right here on our beloved internets: Wal-Mart hits its union detractors with a site called Paidcritics.com (with headlines just a hair short of an Onion parody), and the unions return fire with the finest URL yet seen, www.abunchofgreedyrightwingliarswhoworkforwalmart.com. Hilarity (and vicious personal attacks) ensue. Here’s Associated Press coverage, courtesy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
You gotta wonder how either side comes out of this looking particularly good, though I’m glad we get to watch.
– cpd
Add comment July 19th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
To supplement the overview of email list building and management, here’s a list of list managment and customer/constituent relations management software vendors. Most of these companies have been around for quite a while and have good track records. I’ll be adding them to the permanent links section (right-hand column of the page) shortly. (more…)
2 comments July 19th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Debbie Weil, local (DC) blogger and marketing expert extraordinaire, will be previewing her new book on corporate blogging at the 4th Estate (as Debbie has quite helpfully corrected from my original post — I wrote the wrong location) near Farragut North next Tuesday afternoon. Lots of local bloggers and blogger-relations folks will be there, and advocacy organizations and campaigns should be able to pick up some good tips for institutional blogs. Plus, of course, the 4th Estate serves beer….
– cpd
1 comment July 19th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Back in May, I went to an excellent presentation sponsored by Fleishman Hillard and the DC Communicator newsletter. Aimed mostly at corporate P.R. types, it was titled “Beyond Blogging 2006″ and focused on P.R. in a world where bloggers are increasingly influencing word-of-mouth discussions and helping people form opinions.
Besides general background about the ways blogs are changing the communications world, the presentation contained a lot of good tips about setting up an institutional blog and getting the most out of it. The video of the presentation is available online and is well worth checking out, whether or not your organization or campaign is currently blogging or planning to blog.
– cpd
1 comment July 18th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
Last week’s launch announcement for Hotsoup.com, particularly Howard Kurtz’s profile in the Post, cast my mind back to some other erstwhile political portals that have come and gone in the past 10 years.
Kurtz mentions Grassroots.com and Vote.com, each of which is still with us but as a much different (and infinitely less ambitious) proposition than it began. But remember Politics.com, whose url supposedly cost a cool $1,000,000 back around 1999? Voter.com? Votenet.com? Policy.com?
These sites, and I’m sure a lot more whose names escape me, foundered in part because they tried to be THE online destination site for politics and/or policy, following the classic dot-com-boom-era portal model.
2 comments July 17th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
So your organization has a MySpace site — great, one more chunk of text to edit constantly or let fall out of date. You could restrict your content to evergreen background about your issues, but wouldn’t it be better to have news? Displaying an RSS feed would be perfect, but MySpace blocks javascript.
Turns out some guys have come up with a solution that’s about as crafty a hack as I’ve seen in a while — a site called MySpace Feed will take the contents of your RSS feed and display the headlines as a .gif image. It updates just once per day, only contains the headlines and has limited formatting options, but it works — I’ve been using it for several weeks now on the National Environmental Trust MySpace site. The individual headlines aren’t linked to their stories, but we link the whole image (which has a fixed URL) to our news headlines page. It’s a clunky solution, but it’s probably the best we can do these days.
– cpd
2 comments July 17th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
I haven’t been to any NetSquared events before, but the topic’s certainly timely.
What: NetSquared DC- July Meeting
When:
Tuesday, July 18, 2006, 7:00 PMWhere:
Science Club
1136 19th St NW
Washington , DC 20036
202-775-0747Description:
Beyond the Logic Puzzle with Ryan Ozimek, CEO of Picnet.net
Making it easier for our supporters to communicate with Congress is key to
many of our organizations’ tatical goals. While there are many passionate
opinions on this new technological challenge posed by the Congress logic
puzzles, tonight’s discussion will focus on going beyond email. What is it
that congressional offices really want from our organizations? Why do
office’s interns hit “Select All – Delete” when we send our thousands of
emails? What can our organizations, and our fellow supporters, do via
technological means to make sure our messages are heard?
– cpd
Add comment July 17th, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
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…)
Add comment July 3rd, 2006 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
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