e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Don’t Miss a Chance to Recruit a Volunteer; Microtargeting/Voter Registration on MySpace

September 28th, 2006

New reader Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg of Future Majority writes in with a couple of good suggestions. First, campaign sites should always have some sort of action available for volunteers to take, so that you don’t miss out on a chance to catch potential activists when they stop by.

If smaller campaigns don’t have a specific action to take immediately, they could temporarily direct folks to local or civic volunteer activities, capturing names and emails in the process of course. For larger sites, I’d add that actions and fundraising appeals should be tied to particular issues and featured prominently on the pages about those issues.

He also left a comment on the Social Networking/Social Media chapter that I’ll reprint here: “One tool that campaigns should use is something that automatically requests friend additions based upon a number of categories and demographics, such as Friend Blaster Pro. I also would strongly suggest that campaigns not just focus on demos of age, sex, race, etc, but that they use lifstyle choices, such as genres of music, to add friends.”

He has more about MySpace-based microtargeting and a mention of MySpace’s voter registration campaign in this Future Majority post. Thanks for the tips!

– cpd