Set-up time

Downloading, installing and configuring CiviCRM to meet the needs of a campaign can be rather time consuming. Moreover, setting up CivirCRM the wrong way can result into restarting the installation and configuration process entirely. This is a waste of time and can be a very frustrating experience. In the middle of grueling campaign season, very few campaigns have staff and resources to afford this. On the other  hand, many of the leading providers of hosted CRMs can be setup and ready for use within 24 hours (the time it takes for your DNS to propagate). Most, if not all, the serve side configuration can occur with very little input from the campaign (they may need to provide their URL).

Just-in-time patches

Secondly, no matter how great a piece of software is, it will break. Sometimes it doesn’t behave like promised; other times it doesn’t behave expected or intended and most times unforeseen use cases come up. Companies providing hosted CRMs have systems and method of communications in place to address such situation all hours of day. Most will work with a campaign to provide a temporary solution to a problem while they work to implement a more permanent solution, which they will deploy live as soon as it’s tested. While the CiviCRM may be very active and responsive developer community, this type of attention and service cannot be counted on.

Native Integration with third party campaign software

Thirdly, leading providers for hosted CRM for campaigns have native integration with must-have campaign software like NGP and VAN. Moreover, developers and project managers at each of these firm have develop mutually beneficial and cordial relationships which allow them to work through quirks change changes in their respective software much faster than an open source developer to would.

Customer service

Lastly, very few campaigns are tech savvy enough and comfortable with technology to forgo the handholding that many of the hosted CRMs firms provide. Being able to contact an individual to ask questions or to use as sounding board or a scapegoat is simply a safety net that most campaign managers are not ready to part with. Rightly or wrongly, that is current state of affairs when it comes to technology and campaigns.

Again, Riche is right to recommend CiviCRM as an alternative for hosted CRMs. However, I believe that only organizations with the capacity, technical know how, and time to plan and implement database solutions should truly consider it an option. Campaigns, especially local ones, lack all three pre-requisites, which is why I recommend they go with hosted CRM package. If you disagree, please  share your opinion in the comments.

Full Disclosure: I’m currently employed at Blue State Digital, provider of hosted CRM solution to campaigns, non-profits and corporations.

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As the fall elections draw near, many campaigns are staffing up.  By virtue of being on many online politics-related listservs, I’ve seen a number of postings for new media directors on campaigns. However, the postings portrait the new media director position as nothing more than glorified content intern and highlight the fact campaigns are not yet aware of what they should be looking for in a new media director. This lead me to write a post on e.politics about what I think campaign managers or candidates should be looking in a new media director. I believe a successful new media director should possess the following skills:

1. Experience on the campaign trail

2. Personnel management experience

3. Technical expertise

4. Communication skills & project management experience

5. Vision

Read my entire blog post on e.politics.com.

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Bill Conner for US Congress

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Bill Conner for US Congress

Bill Conner for US Congress -  Mr. Connner’s website looks like it was built in 1998. There is not much else to say here.  Luckily for Mr. Conner, his opponents do not fair much better.

Cook County Commissioner Liz Doody Gorman – Ms. Goorman’s site is very a similar to a spam site full of scrolling Google Ads.

George Hutchins for US Congress 2010 -  Mr. Hutchins is by far the worse offender of the group. He uses multicolor fonts and is not shy about highlighting text throughout the site. The site is also full of badly photoshoped images created to imply endorsement or support from various Republican Leader (dead or alive).

Jerry Ortiz y Pino for Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico – Multi-color navigation items and scrolling text.  Enough said.

Patricia Bird for US Congress – Ms. Bird decided on a basic hosting package provided by Comcast to its users. She managed to  add a calendar widget (not linked to anything), a weather widget (Currently it is 47 degrees in Mount Prospect, IL) , and an event widgets (also not linked to anything). While her blog does not  contain any entries except for the default demo entry, the event section seems to have been updated a couple of times.

Paul Hamann for US Congress – Like Ms. Bird, Mr. Hamann did not bother with a domain name or hosting. He relies on an out-of-the box blogspot site with one of the default templates. The site has no way for supporters to get involved. In fairness to him, his website is the first result when searching for his campaign on Google.

Peter Thottam for CA Assembly – Flash, flash, and more flash. Sounds when the page first loads and when the user hovers on any of the navigation items. The background fades from blue to red and multiple links lead the user to to nowhere. According to the footer at the bottom of his site, Mr. Thottam designed and maintains his website, which explains a lot.

It’s easy to poke fun but the blame for these sites do not rest solely on the shoulders of the candidates. There may be many tools out there to help campaigns develop effective online presence, but clearly the message is not filtering down to smaller races. Our industry has placed too much focus and attention to national campaigns and high profile races and overlook the importance of clear marketing to these smaller local races.

Have you seen any bad political websites?  Send them to me and I’ll do round two.  But I don’t mean to just  mock.  I’ll gladly offer some consulting advice to candidates in local races.

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Image from Peg Corwin (@PCorwin)

As Tip O’Neill once stated, “all politics is local.” But if we’ve learned anything since the 2004 presidential election,  it is that thanks to the advent of the internet, all politics is viral.  Given these two facts, it’s understandable how blogs with a local-focus have become a major player in local politics. Increasingly candidates and campaigns have come to the realization that a successful communications plan includes comprehensive blogger outreach plan.  With that said, how should campaign go about finding blogs with  local-focus? Here are some places to start:

Local content aggregators -  Investors and media companies have realized the value of local content.  With this realization came bundles of money for sites built to aggregated and geo-tag content.  These sites include outside.in, Everyblock.com and Placeblogger.com.  Using one these sites, a user can search for content generate within his/her zip code, city or state.  Once the search results is available, the user in only a few clicks away from author’s blog (and presumably their  contact information…if available on the blog).  For example, a search for “politics” in and around Seattle,WA on outside.in yields 591 results compared to 791,000 results for a “politics AND Seattle” Google blog search. Obviously, the former set of results is much more manageable to go through then the latter.

Blogrolls – A blogroll is a list of other blogs that a blogger recommends by providing links to them.  This is usually done on the side bar of the author’s blog. Most blogger read and trust the blogs that are listed on their blogrolls.  Unless otherwise stated, one can assume that will have share similar interest and political ideologies. If part of your communication plan is to create an echo-chamber around the candidate or issue, sifting and contacting bloggers from other bloggers’ blogroll may be to your advantage.

Blogs Directories -  The most famous and most commonly blog directory is Technorati.com.  A quick search reveals that they are 23 blogs listed for Topeka,KS.  Locally, many bloggers have taken upon themselves to to organize and maintain blogger directories for their town, city or state. One of the best examples of such a directory is dcblogs.com, which list self-submitted local DC blogs as well as featuring a couple of them on its homepage daily.  Similarly, a list of left leaning blog in Kansas can be found at http://www.leftyblogs.com/kansas/

Twitter & Twitter tools – Since most bloggers have twitter accounts, Twitter has become one of the easiest way to find them.  Mashabale.com has an extensive blog post on how to find local twitterers.  It includes using Twitter’s own search as well as third party apps such as LocalTweeps, TwitterLocal and Twitterholic.

Local paper website – Despite talks of the internet destroying the newspaper industry, bloggers and journalists have grown quite fond of each other.  This is partly because many laid off journalists have become bloggers.  For their part, bloggers have proved they are not just geeks living in their parents’ basements.  The groups have learned to co-exist and will often link to each others work.  Moreover, the dwindling staff in many newsrooms have forced newspapers to rely on local bloggers for content when covering local issues and campaigns.

This list is clearly not a exhaustive list but should be enough to get any campaigns started. What did I miss? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Running on cheese pizza, RedBull, cold Dunkin Donuts coffee, cookies and the memory of the late Ted Kennedy, I spent the last few days volunteering for Martha Coakley alongside some of the best Democratic new media operatives. Some analysts are describing this as the most important election in the last 50 years — not including presidential contests. Despite our best efforts, Scott Brown won the seat that was held by someone who continues to be regarded as one of best, if not the best, senator of our time. Mr. Brown has some big shoes fill, and while I will be working hard against him in 2012, I wish him and his staff the best for the sake of the people of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Read the of the post on Colin’s blog and don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

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In his most recent blog post, Colin Delany talks about the impending explosion of state-level online politics.   He mentions the rising cost of (local) campaigns and the Obama’s success as the reasons for the surge interest at the state level.   Clearly, I agree with Colin that there is  growth to come in the online politics at the state and level, otherwise I would not have launched this blog. State and local campaigns need to be revamped to go where the voters are.  According to Pew, 55% of the adult population went online to get involved or get information about politics in 2008. However, online politics is not to replace old-school campaigning or fundraising but merely to supplement those tactics and engage a wider audience.  While I fully support and encourage this new movement to bring local politics online, there are concerns that I have about with all the new entrants in the online political world.

1. Unreal expectation on engagement, fundraising and list building – The Obama campaign set amazing records on engagement, fundraising and list building and to think that similar numbers can be duplicated (relatively speaking) is unrealistic.  They were able to do that because the campaign had a candidate and message that it could sell.  Unfortunately, state and local politics aren’t sexy and will not attract the attention or turn out that  Presidential campaign did.  We only need to look at the latest round of the special elections sicne the November election to see that trend.  Moreover, while technology and small donations did help Obama, old-school fundraising still well ahead at the local level. Just as an example, while I volunteered for a gentleman in running for a ward seat in DC, we raised money from several hundreds folks online but it was not a enough to match our opponent who raised all his money the old-fashioned way and did not have a functional website halfway through to the campaign
2. Smaller audience does not equate to diminished production cost.  A blog is a blog. In order a blog to be successful, it needs to be maintained with engaging and thoughtful contend no matter the size of the audience.  This requires staff time and thus is a cost to the campaign.  A YouTube video still has production costs and editing cost attached to it regardless of the number of views it gets.
3. Internet tools and consultant can be costly.   It has long been the myth that social media tools and other Internet tools are free and requires very little experience to mange these outpost.  While some tools may be free, some propriety tool that may be more effective and you may hours still cost money.  Additionally, good consultants that will provide an integrated strategy to using these tools effectively will cost money.  Business week help debunk this myth few months back.

Let me finish my restating that there is a lot of room for growth at the state and local level in online politics.  That being said, our expectations need to be tempered despite Obama’s success in 2008.  The 2010 cycle, we will create a much more realistic set of the expectations because more candidates at both the state and local level will use the tools with various level of success.

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Photo by semedia

When Isaac wrote up his round-up from his session at the 2009 Online politics conference, he mentioned that speakers on the panel emphasized integration.  That’s point lead one of the readers of this blog to ask the following question:

This might be an ignorant question re: point 1, but can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by “integration?” What about it is often missed or overlooked from an organizational/structural standpoint?

Our reader brings up a good question.  Integration and the level of integration means different things to different campaign managers. One thing for sure is that social media and other internet efforts on a campaign cannot stand alone in any campaign or organization.  As such, I think each campaign should seek to four levels of integration -  Team integration , Data integration, Communication/Message integration and  Off/online integration. Let’s a take a closer look at each.

• Team Integration -  The campaign team should integrated at the highest level.  This means the communication director, the field director, the fundraising director and the Internet director should be aware of each other efforts and look for ways to collaborate with each other. Structurally, there are no right or wrong way to set up your team. The Obama Campaign had the Internet director reporting directly to the campaign manager while some have suggested that Internet director should be under the communication director.  No matter how the teams are set up, it important the internet team has a [knowledgeable and influential] voice at the table in all discussions.
• Data integration - voter registration files, donation data, event attendance, phone banking data, canvassing data, email sign ups and action data should all be combined to get a good picture of who are the most fervent supporters.  The campaign should then encourage those supporters to take action on their own online and offline on the behalf the candidate/campaign.  Whether or not they are given express consent or just encouraged to act on the behalf on the campaign depends on each campaign.  Many of the Obama staffers have told me that the campaign merely encouraged people to take action and produce material on behalf of the campaign but never gave express consent.  The same data can also be used to determine which voters are on the fence, so that the campaign can better target its efforts to get those votes.  In my opinion, data integration is the most difficult and the most intensive but also carries the biggest  payoff because it will allow the campaign to better allocate its resources. There are software programs that can be purchased to help with this effort.  I hope to write a about a few of them in the future.
• Communication/Message integration – I think this the most obvious of the level of integration.  Is the campaign message  consistent across all mediums (this includes various social network websites and even online ads) on all issues?  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if one campaign ad says something different than the latest blog post, the media, opponents and detractors are going to take advantage of that.
• Offline/Online integration – Offline/Online integration should occur naturally if the campaign has good team integration. However, since most teams don’t (at the least the ones that I’ve worked on) I chose to highlight it separately. Essentially, the goal here to let the offline activities drive part of the online debate and vice versa. If the online team is aware of the offline activities, they can then tailor the content online to promote those activities as well as make arrangement to create more content that can be posted online at a later time. Conversely, if the offline team is aware of some of the efforts happening online, they can promote it through their activities.  A good level of integration will drive increase attendance and participation (given that the content is interesting and engaging) both offline and online.

Accomplishing these levels off integration is not easy by any means,  it requires man power, technology, a culture of integration that most organization lack as well as a candidate/leadership that promotes it loudly and forces it through when necessary.

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