Political Gastronomica : English eCampaigning

Social networking in politics across the pond

Just surfing the blogosphere - and caught two posts: one at Simon Says discussing a new article talking about the Tories (the Conservatives) getting ready to launch a Social Networking Site to "allow users to engage with - and help develop -Tory policies on issues such as poverty, climate change and volunteering.". The second, by David Wilcox, talks about the potential for another "digital divide":

This does, of course, raise yet another form of the digital divide. If social networking is a sphere of influence those with networking skills may become disproportionately influential. Of course, it was always thus ... just the nature of the clubs is changing.

David brings up the need for the connection between offline and online - which is always the challenge about any networking or organizational development. Sticking in one medium will limit the pool of involvement - better to extend across the space and find involvement tactics that involve and incorporate in multiple ways.

Back when BBSes were the vogue thing - there was the Rising Sun where I used to socialize on a very small Apple II+ whih had an Apple Cat modem. The best thing about the community was not the 300 baud speed printing of the content on the screen, but the monthly breakfasts with other members of the BBS cemented the relationships between us. It is the reinforcement of the interactions that will help politics develop the online outreach beyond the assumed myopic view of online community members.

Funny thing, 100M+ MySpace members, close to 1M SecondLifers and the explosion of social networking sites is a ripe space to grow involvement. I think that the Tories action, while interesting, is again trying to create another space that they control. Better to go where the voters are (like, say, SoFlow or A Small World) and build from within, rather than from the outside. Use the community within and develop the community - and then grow the space for the community to be involved in. Do you need features that are not already available in the sites today? And if they are not there, could you find ways of meeting the needs without software development (like a forum or a mailing list)? Give it some thought and see what can happen.

Tags: English eCampaigning, political social networking, Tories

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 4:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Labour, Lib Dems, Tories - how do they stack up?

Last election in England, the three parties tried to use the lessons from the US in their communications. All of the parties revamped their websites, began an email communications campaign, and leveraged databases (to various effects) to get-out-the-vote. A year later, what has changed?

To be truthful, the reason for this post comes more from cleaning my Yahoo! account than a recent article in the NYTimes ("Politics Faces Sweeping Change via the Web"). As I went to clean out the thousands of emails, I took a glance at my emails from the three parties. And what I found is summed up as this: nothing has changed from a year ago. Well, almost nothing.

Labour - Learning the lesson of brevity and humour
In going through the emails, LibDems still feel that the eNews they send out is a press release channel - that every person on the list is interested in reading the nuances of the party. While this could be interesting (like an Inside Baseball list), it unfortunately reads as a news stream more fit for the AP wire than engaging individuals on a personal level. The frequency of the emails (almost once a day) have caused me to automatically filter them out (they become irrelevant after a while) and I barely read them. Additionally, they are in text format - which reduces the branding opportunities - or chances for multimedia impact that broadband profers.

The Tories have taken this lesson to heart - and have created a newsletter format - lots of information sent in three to five day intervals. They use branding and imagery, but again - the focus of the email is still a PR effort - designed not to engage me, but as a smaller, dedicated newsletter for the faithful to read. While this technique seems good (especially in the non-profit sector where you want donors to know what you are doing), the broadsheets are already discussing the topics at hand - and the newsletter format should be more "red meat" and infomation/talking points than simply regurgitating the news of the day/week. And, from a usability point of view, there are far too many links, buttons, small print and other structurally painful parts to the newsletter which looks more like a Frankenstein monster than an engaging letter.

Labour - now, they have learned some lessons well. If they are not still getting guidance from Zack, then they have learned their lessons well. They are doing a number of good things, and doing them well - the emails comes from various people (rather than an email robot), the emails are short, pithy and to the point, they are engaging in terms of humour, relevance and actionable (e.g. get involved by doing XXXX). In addition, the frequency of the emails are not particularly predictable, they tend to be relevant to the issue at hand: which makes the list fresh and engaging, not steadily becoming irrelevant as the LibDems list is becoming.

A factor to note: the growth of a list comes from issues at hand - in the primary case, when an election is coming. Secondly, it grows because of actions that people wish to align with. Lists decay from neglect or over-stimulation (think of watering plants) or even when the content is inane or irrelevant (think of watering plants with milk or hot sauce). Careful care and feeding of the list is the way to grow it for future volunteers and funds in the elections ahead.

Tags: English eCampaigning eCampaigning Labour Party LibDems Conservatives

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 3:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

eCampaign comes to a close - but will the conversation continue?

This morning, Matt Carter sent the last email from the Labour Party 2005 campaign - thanking me for my support and hard work this campaign. And, as suggested, the Labour Party sent two emails on Election Day - one from my good friend John O'Farrell and one from John Prescott. Again, it was focused on the goal - get-out-the-vote. The question is - did it work?

How do you measure the effectiveness of a campaign
Funny thing, the Internet. In the Valley, the world revolves around the perception that the Internet is a separate world (World Wide Web, blogosphere) - having its own dimensions, rules, mores and constraints.

In dotcom version 1, the understanding of the offline/online mix was torn between total takeover (read: The Internet will completely destroy the offline world with efficiencies not possible in the physical realm) to physical redemption (offline brands takeover online successes) to successful synergies (read: Dell, Walmart, online banking, etcera). But politics - this is another effort. This is an effort of brand persuasion that, based on the actions of the "company" over the past period, you have to overcome perception with messaging either positive for the company or negative for the competitor. Im political terms, this is called increasing the positives, or increasing the negatives.

And, in this world, keeping customers from buying period can be a benefit. Where does this lead? Into the discussion of how the Internet effort is NOT an individual effort within the marketing and campaign mix. From the lessons of business, the Internet campaign must be designed to integrate with the rest of the campaign message - and can leverage the concept of targeted messaging due to the synergy of lower-cost database mining, customer profiling, and email communications.

Labour won, but so did the Conservatives
Today, Michael Howard stepped down from the head of the Conservative Party - but he should take some pride in the fact that his campaign was more successful than others gave the Conservatives credit for. Using the skills developed in America and Australia, and combining the skills from effective retail direct mail marketing - the Conservatives were able to win in the constituancies that either Labour or the LibDems were focusing their efforts. Instead of treating the country as a whole and only using broadcast as a means to communicate their message - the Conservatives seem to have been especially effective in tailoring their message to the targeted communities to win over support. And, not being a resident in one of the targeted constituancies, I could not see any content being sent that was focused. The next step will more that likely be the refinement of the email campaign - where messages become tailored even more so as the databases that drove the direct mail campaign are turned onto the email lists.

It is this refinement that I wonder about - and will the Parties start to realize the conversation is just beginning? Instead of shutting down efforts in the short-term, will they continue their efforts to maintain the communication channel? Labour, Conservative and LibDems all have more information of their supporters - why not think of them as the influentials that they are - and build the relationship?

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 9:59 AM | Comments (0)

One day left - and a ramp up in email...

After watching the campaign emails all this time, I now am intrigued to post that the campaigns have steps up their efforts - at least from the Internet point-of-view.

Labour - Tony and Gordon communicate
As anticipated, the Labour Party sent out two emails - one for fundraising on Tuesday (since Monday was a Bank Holiday) and today, a communique from the two men who run 10 Downing Street. Interestingly enough, the campaign seems to be following the wisdom of the consultants - if the populace thinks that Labour will win comfortably, their supporters will not consider the vote important and ignore the polls. So, while staying clear of communicating action statements ("Labour will..."), they are using the threat of a Conservative government if people do not come out to the polls. Interestingly enough, Labour hit upon the true nature of the email campaign methodology once again - communicate to the audience (Labour supporters) a problem (potential voter apathy), outlined the potential bad outcome (Conservative government) and how the reader could help (get to the polls). All designed to play to the individuals who have been reading the emails - and to get them to act.

Conservatives - someone learned KISS
After watching the continuation of the Conservative email campaign, this afternoon (2pm GMT) the Conservatives sent one of their best emails - from Michael Howard with a more compelling subject line and using video communicating the tactics of Labour (using the fear of a Conservative government) versus the party of action which the Conservatives are positioning themselves. Attached to these video links are a eight-point plan as to what a Conservative government would do in power in the first two years. Keeping it Simple and easy to read.

While this email is very pretty and has very compelling elements, again - there are challenges that can be learned from.

1. Use text whenever possible
   The use of a graphic for the eight-point plan looks good - but due to
   spam filters and slow connections (Digital Britain is still not a
   reality), graphics are not seen unless the reader allows the graphics
   to be downloaded.
2. Summarize the point of the call to action
   The use of the video is good, but the placement (in the center top of the page) with no explanation except the link description does not incentivise a reader to click on the link aside from the most interested of folks. Why should I click on these links? And what should I do? The first half of an email (think of the above the fold concept in newspapers) are designed to capture the reader - and lead them down to the next step.
3. Be consistant with branding and personality
   Ironically, while I like the fact that the oppressive blue template was removed - the branding disappeared which was present in the other emails. And, while the email came from Michael Howard, it was not "written" by him. Just by putting his name and a catchy subject line does not build the relationship. The previous email from Liam Fox was more personal and connecting.

This email could have won points by having the chairman communicating his opening video on the email in text and leading to the graphic of his eight points. It is there that would have completed the transformation - and improved throughput.

But, a much better showing of the email than I previously commented on. One question will be - how soon does Zack and his team respond with an email to attack the Conservative plan?

LibDems - MIA?
In the closing days, the LibDems emails have almost become placid with the same rote content - and arriving much later than expected. In the final two days, no major calls to action - just a link to Mr. Kennedy's comments on the future of the party. The disappointment in this is the opportunity for the party to leverage their third-party status and draw out their supporters. From a recent Economist article, the LibDems enjoy a very strong support from the more Internet-saavy Britions - here is the channel where they can make a difference. With the final day, I look forward to a surprise in their campaign.

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 9:13 AM | Comments (0)

Comparing England's eCampaigning

Funny - after the Presidential election in the US - I was expecting a very spirited online campaign effort in the UK - especially with a six-month build-up to the anticipated May 5th election date. And, as an interested party and a spectator - I have been watching the websites and on the three major party websites for the past month - ever since PM Blair dissolved Parliament. So, have the parties and campaigns leveraged the vantage point from across the pond to communicate to the masses via the Internet?

Basic Principles
Initially, the question is what does the campaign wish to accomplish with the Internet effort? In the Dean Campaign, it was (my assumption) to build the mailing list and then drive actions by the supporters to help the campaign in various forms (volunteer, donate, gather supporters). In the Kerry campaign, we refined this act by building the list, requesting support (first in terms of fundraising and then in terms of house parties and volunteer efforts). MoveOn.org originated a lot of these concepts - derived directly from fundraising tactics - and took what many of the dotcommers said about the Internet: it is a way to get a distributed group of people to act in a unifed fashion. The best analogy I can derive is watching a swarm of bees - each individual one is moving in its own fashion, but the group looks like they are moving in a unified direction. By focusing on the desire of the group, the swarm can be generally lead in a direction that is along the gradient of their desire.

One comment made frequently in my conversations with English political players was that the "donation society" that exists in the United States would not translate to the UK's "membership society" - Britons are used to paying for memberships, but are not frequently found to donate to charities or political parties (unless it is tied to a disaster or to a cute puppy/kitten). So, would requests for donations fall on deaf ears? And if so, how could supporters of the parties demonstrate their support aside from simply voting?

In email campaigns, there were a couple of lessons that improved the performance of email campaigns. They were:

• Emails coming from "real people", not systems or websites
  Instead of johnkerry.com, emails from John Kerry or Mary-Beth Cahill were found to be much more effective in having people read them
• Email subject lines that were engaging
  Instead of "Kerry News", subject lines that were either evocative or directly relevant to the news of the moment would find readers much more inclined to open the emails and engage in action
• Emails sent midweek (Tues, Weds, Thurs) and between 9am and noon
  Interestingly enough, Monday emails were often found to be caught in the deluge of the start of the week and emails sent from Friday noon to Monday were often lost in the spam that were accumulated over the weekend. Prime days were Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays in the morning after people had already read their emails from the day before.
• Emails that focused on a problem, engaged the audience and offered an action
  In the MoveOn, Dean and improved Kerry emails, the reader was engaged in the campaign - a problem, an issue, a cause. Then the email lead to how the candidate would solve the problem or how he/she was a better alternative BUT it was the reader's support that was needed to accomplish the goal. But the action was rarely "go and vote for XXX", rather it was a smaller task - email others, sign a petition, sign up to volunteer or donate. Using the tools from the fundraiser's toolbox, it is a small action that leads a supporter to make a bigger commitment. Rather than trying to close the deal at the beginning of the sales meeting, accomplish a small victory that have the supporter show their support - which makes it easier for them to follow the path to eventual action in the long run. The old adage of being cheaper to keep an existing customer than to find new ones runs the same philosophy.
• Branding and keeping the content the focus within the email
  Once the Kerry website was revised, the emails were the next elements to be improved - to be in line with the website branding - and the other elements (address of campaign, extraneous content) were minimized. As the campaign moved forward, emails began to take a life of their own - John Kerry's emails looked like "From the Desk of" and Mary-Beth Cahill's emails were from the "Kerry/Edwards" campaign. The branding elements began to augment the look - but the focus was always the content of the message.

So - how are the English parties faring? Let's have a look:

Labour - Benefiting from MoveOn, Dean and Kerry
On January 25th, a new form of email came the the Labour Party, addressed from Frasier Kemp, MP entitled "When pigs fly...". After opening the email, I was provided a chance to vote for my favourite poster that would be used for the upcoming campaign - posters that had Michael Howard's face on a flying pig and another which had him looking like Shylock in some graveyard site. Once you chose the poster, the supporter was then sent to the Labour website - where they could enter their postcode and submit their vote. An innocuous campaign designed to update the Labour Party member database with updated emails and postcodes - but became a media bonanza when the broadsheets listened to the Conservatives crying foul for potentially anti-Semitic content.

After the initial flurry, the Labour Party used their good fortune to send another email a week later to have another campaign that was not as provocative - but just as productive to garner email/postcode pairing.

Was this a tactic put forward by Zack Exley? I highly doubt that Labour or Zack ever intended an anti-Semitic bent for any email campaign. But Zack and his eCampaign team were on the ball when I found an email in my Inbox a week later - demonstrating the benefit of leveraging timely media events. By using the earned media attention on this relatively small email campaign, they were able to generate involvement by the list members to commit to a small action that demonstrated their involvement in the party - both to the party and, to themselves.

On March 29th, I only assume that Zack's influence manifested itself further when I received an email from John O'Farrell (supposed notable British author, broadcaster and Labour supporter). Keeping with the ownership principle and engaging subject line, the email continued the template focus (clean, simple and matching the branding/message of the campaign) while introducing a human voice to the online campaign. Every Thursday, John's emails have kept me chuckling - telling me of his humourous "exploits" and engaging me in the problems/issues of the campaign - and detailing, through simple actions, how I could help.

I make note that his email comes on Thursdays - which happens to coincide with the upcoming election day. So I anticipate an email both from him and from Tony Blair on the day of the election. In the other emails from the party, I have "met" Matt Carter (Party Secretary), Alastair Campbell (Campaign Manager), Alicia Kennedy (Field Organizer) and Tony Blair. Almost all emails providing a simple content (no more than five paragraphs), a problem or issue, a call to action - and almost all emails designed to be opened around the lunch hour. Alan Connor, the BBC's Daily Politics Internet correspondent, seems to feel that these emails are "blokey and chatty" - and I am none too sure if this was not the intent...

I must note that there were two anomalous emails - the first from Matt leading me to see the Labour website at 4:30pm on a Tuesday. This email coincided with a effort to communicate that the Labour site has jumped in the online traffic stats, a reaction to the perceived second-place it had been in compared to the Conservatives. While I am not sure if this was necessary (at the Kerry campaign, we would often be misled by Alexa stats as well), it served its purpose by drawing attention to the website and the Labour performance.

The second anomalous email was authored by The Labour Party - and was a reaction to the Conservative Party's Manifesto that "threatened" NHS. By sending a rebuttal email five hours after the Conservative Party's email was sent (at 10pm) - the Labour Party email would be visible to the reporters when they opened their email Inboxes FIRST the next morning - and diminish the impact of the earlier email from the Conservatives (which would be found further down the mail queue).

Comparatively, the April 27th release of the legal documents regarding the legality of the Iraq war was barely used by the major opposition parties - opting for press release-like content. In the case of the Conservatives, a new poster appeared. In the case of the LibDems, a press release from Charles Kennedy was paraphrased before having to go the press section of the LibDems site.

For the most part, Labour has stayed within the parameters mentioned earlier - with one exception of sending emails on some Mondays and Fridays - but that could be easily explained to the shortened campaign cycle. While this week, the focus has been to "volunteer, donate or both" - I fully expect the campaign to focus their efforts on pulling out the vote and volunteering - through the "personal" relationships that have been formed with John and Matt and Tony. And what about that "membership society" problem? According to the emails - the Labour supporters have donated in small amounts - especially after a "Biddle Email" (named after Larry Biddle, fundraiser and direct mail guru for the Dean campaign) outlined how donations would be used. A day later - 50,000 Pounds has been donated. If an average donation was 25, then Labour had an outpouring of 4000 supporters in one email. Not bad for a "membership society".

Conservatives - Listening to the Republicans?
On the Conservative website and their emails, it seems as though design leverage the old broadcast model - but using the tools of HTML and branding to ensure the Conservative brand was there.

Unfortunately, most of the emails were "newsletters" - communicating events or interesting promotional links to the Conservative website. In only three emails, did the Conservatives not place too many actions on their email. In two of them, the email read like a press release - with "useful links" to the website - but barely engaging the supporter. The only email that showed promise was one from Liam Fox, Co-Chair of the party whose subject line changed from "News from conservatives.com" to "Conservative Cinema Advert". Upon opening this email, a new design was unveiled, and a call to action was presented ("Wipe that smile off Tony Blair's face"). Unfortunately, the solution - still 20+ days away from the vote - was to Vote Conservative. Little engagement, no small steps - just a chance to see a media advert.

The general tone of the emails were more of managed communication - and rarely of engagement with the party faithful. And, if not managed communication - it was seen as advertising the website features - with an after-thought of getting involved (see bottom of the most recent emails for links to volunteer and donate).

And what about that web traffic?
As mentioned earlier regarding Matt Carter's anomalous email from April 19th, why were the Conservatives generating a lot more traffic to their website? And what is the quality of that traffic? Are we measuring hits (number of server requests for pages, images and other web objects) or are unique users?

Researching this quote lead me to this FactCheck from Channel4 in the UK, quoting both Hotwise and Alexa - two traffic measurement tools we used during the campaign. One thing to note - Alexa and Hitwise are somewhat flawed in their analysis of traffic - especially since they are sample services (think Neilsen rating boxes) and are found in different places. Alexa (which you can see the comparison graphs here) is primarily leveraging installations of the Alexa toolbar on Windows PCs - and leveraging people who have had Alexa installed when Microsoft partnered with Alexa to provide browser search support (try hitting Search on your Internet Explorer to see). One other thing to note is that it is relatively easy to influence the rankings on Alexa - as commented by an Internet team who used their tactics to increase the value of their site "traffic" by increasing their Alexa ranking. (Simple trick - have all of your email images hosted on your website)

One personal fact-check on the above FactCheck - was the fact that Alexa adjusts their traffic stats as more information comes in and website traffic fluctuates over time. As the Alexa graph demonstrates, all parties have been ranked higher the others at one time or another - with the Conservatives and Labour trading off. As of this writing, the April 25th graph shows Labour on a strong rise and both Conservatives and LibDems in a falling curve. I wonder how the release of the legal documents will imapct this?

LibDems - Automated News Delivery of Press Release Paraphrases
Introduced to me by friends in England and here in the US, the LibDems are the third party in British politics - made notable by their strong stance against the Iraq War. While this stand is more aligned with my personal politics, and some of their positions on the issues are also somewhat in line (reduction of certain taxes, improved social spending), I am saddened by their squandering of their third-party status that could have elevated them to the likes of Governor Dean's outsider campaign. In the midst of the campaign, the LibDems modified their website to reflect their new branding. Unfortunately, they did not extend this branding to their automated emails - which regularly tick out of their mail server at 2pm every day - if there is a press release in their queue.

Of the three parties, the "eNews" comes to my Inbox with regularity - with the ominious "[LIBDEMS-NEWS] Latest News: XX/XX/XX" - easily allowing my spam filter to redirect the email to my Yahoo! Bulk Folder. And, while the emails are timestamped 2pm GMT - due to their email list service which is not designed for bulk delivery, I regularly receive my eNews at 4:30pm GMT. While the email is "sent out" at 2pm, the delay in getting the email out to the subscribers is costing the campaign opens - since the email arrives at the end of the day when most people will skip over the email or will wait til the morning, where it will be caught in the deluge of overnight emails that will have to be sifted through.

Interestingly, the following article mentions the LibDems collecting emails in local constituancies and emailing the people directly. While I am wholehartedly in support of this tactic, I hope that the content of the emails are more than the press release paragraphs that I have been getting almost constantly in my Inbox (a number even on Saturdays from stopnuisancecalls.com!). While I am not in the constituancies that the LibDems are focusing their efforts - one conclusion I have drawn from their unbranded, text-based, automated, press-release emails - if I am not in a targeted constituancy, I do not rate quality targeting. Sounds almost like the refrains I heard from my New York and California friends complaining that they never saw the adverts from the Bush and Kerry campaigns - since these states were already in the Blue...

Conclusions
While I may be biased on the tactical front (full disclosure - I worked with Zack at the Kerry Campaign), I believe that Labour has built a much more engaging online campaign with with their supporters - even if the content has been chatty and blokey. What the other two major parties have missed (from my vantage point) has been the opportunity that Labour has - which was to build a long-term relationship with their supporters.

Taking a page from the MoveOn.org/Friends of John Kerry operational manual, the goal of the online campaign is not just getting as many seats as possible in the upcoming election - it should be about building the communication channel between the party and the party faithful. Labour has built started building a channel - and by giving their supporters a way of being "involved" during this election, Labour has the potential to regrow their membership after the winds of political discourse have blown in another direction. Instead of simply broadcasting, Labour and the other parties can move into the concepts that are discussed in terms of eGovernment - where participatory democracy becomes closer to reality.

While people point to "The Big Discussion" as an attempt at eGovernance (which to me was more of a online news and managed communication between the policy people in 10 Downing and selected responses), the advent of blogs and other online communications efforts will eventually force all parties - and not just in England - to open up their communication channels. If done, the dialogue between the party faithful and the elected officials can build the momentum for the by-elections and the 2009 election as well - leveraging the distributed power of the internet - and using the power of the swarm to improve the chances of the party who understands it best.

Tony, Michael, Charles (as well as Pat, James and Chris) - are you listening?

Tags: eCampaigning, English eCampaigning, eCampaigning Best Practices,

Posted by Sanford Dickert at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)