Information about Building a Grass Roots Effort and why we need one

A New Strategy for Internet Lobbying & Campaign Tools
from http://eCampaignHQ.com

As political efforts (both lobbying and campaigns for office) move into the 21^st Century, utilization of internet facilities continues to increase. With a majority of the general public now connected to the internet and the percentage growing every year, effective planning and use of internet tools will soon become an absolute requirement for obtaining an electoral majority in many elections, and spell success or failure for many lobbying efforts.

The use of some of the simpler internet tools has become quite wide spread in both lobbying and campaign efforts. But in many cases these produce minimal results. Larger budget efforts are expending large sums of money for more sophisticated internet tools and are gaining an edge on lower budget campaigns and lobbying efforts.

This series of articles provides information and examples of lower budget campaigns and lobbying efforts incorporating similar internet tools into their efforts in novel ways. The series is based upon implementations of the eCampaignHQ.com internet tools. Each article also contains general purpose Practical Internet Tips – which we hope will benefit your effort.

An Opportunity

Utilizing additional internet tools has an obvious benefit for existing campaign and lobbying activities. Any new strategy should do more than just enhance existing features. It should provide expansion into possible new areas of opportunity. The eCampaignHQ suite of internet tools provide several such opportunities.

With actual age eligible population participation on a multi-decade decline, in most elections the majority of potential voters do not vote. This creates an election opportunity in almost every election. From a lobbying perspective it is a vast unused pool of support.

There is a wide body of studies available providing background on the statistics of voter participation. As a summary, since the 1960’s the percentage of age eligible participation in elections has been on a downward trend, despite many changes to make registration easier. Today in most elections less than half of those who could participate take the time to go to the polls.

Any campaign that can bring a portion of these infrequent, inactive or non voters to the polls has a decided edge. From a campaign perspective, there are three obstacles to overcome to accomplish this goal:

• Identifying the citizens in this group
• Identifying your issues and positions that will motivate these citizens
• Communicating, re-enforcing and encouraging these citizens to vote

These are, of course, the same requirements to increase support among frequent voters.  Another goal of using internet tools should be to expand your appeal to some portion of infrequent voters at the same time. If you are able to manage these three obstacles, you have a win-win situation. By increasing citizens participation you are fostering better government and at the same time improving the chances of being part of that government.

Pursuing this group of potential voters runs against typical campaign strategies, which focus on “frequent” voters. “Frequent” voters should be the main target of your internet efforts, but the point this article is stressing is that your internet tools can also provide a way to expand into this untapped pool of support. Any successful expansion provides a better return or cost per vote for the internet portion of your budget and can become a potential campaign edge against opponents. In very close elections (or votes when lobbying), the additional support can be the margin of victory.

Now comes the difficult part. Every campaign or lobbying effort has more desirable things to do than time or funding allow. So every hour and every dollar is important. This is a very critical decision for all but the very high dollar campaigns who have hired staffs to take care of these issues. For smaller campaigns where the candidate is faced with managing most aspects directly, this is a major task.

Your campaign can have a positive effect and generate a better cost per vote by having an internet presence – even with a limited budget.

This article describes an initial approach that could be viewed as an entry level at very low cost. Additional articles will describe more comprehensive approaches.

Your Internet Presence

The first step to implementing your internet presence is to establish a budget. The budget has to be reasonable (i.e., inexpensive) and piggyback on other campaign activities such as literature, canvassing, advertising, etc.

The second step is to develop an internet presence that is within your time restraints. This includes your time and any volunteer help that you may have on your internet presence. This places requirements for it to be highly automated and capable of utilizing volunteers with minimal supervision.

The key component of an internet presence is of course your campaign or issue website. This site should use a simple design with easy navigation. On the front page and every page you should have easy and direct access to: 1) Platform, 2) Biographical information, 3) Contributions, 4) Contact and Volunteer information and 5) Signup for Updates. These should be fairly static and once done should need little change. Press releases, events and items of interest will be dynamic and should be listed with the most recent first. Older items should be available in an archive.

There are many packages, companies and volunteers that can provide the basic website. When making your selection, be sure that you maintain the ability to implement timely and periodic updates, either by yourself, paid service or a volunteer. Some practical tips on improving your basic website effectiveness are at the end of this article.

Maximum Return from Internet Presence

Now that you have a website, how do you use it to enhance your campaign, whether it be for elective office or a lobbying effort?

To be an asset to your effort your website needs to be effective for your visitors. It needs to:

• Garner their interest
• Encourage their involvement
• Maintain communication with them
• Attract a steadily growing base

This requires a much higher level of expertise to be successful.

Offering items of interest on your website attracts the maximum traffic to your site, and retains the interests and involvement of these visitors. Typical campaign and lobbying websites have limited success as they are passive. While it may contain a wealth of information that would be of great interest to many, very few know about it. Many who find the website interesting will forget about it in today’s overload of information and options.

Large scale campaigns and lobbying efforts solve these problems by utilizing several tools to reach a much larger audience. These include extensive use of internet newsletters, advertising, mailing lists and phone banks. Most of these tools have been beyond the means of lower budget efforts, for example State Legislature, county and municipal campaigns and many issue related lobbying efforts.

The eCampaignHQ.com suite of internet tools has been designed to make these internet tools available to these lower budget efforts by maximizing an existing website, internet technology and current day home computers. Most do not realize that a current PC integrated with a website have more computing power than large scale multi-million dollar computer facilities of just 10-15 years ago.

Putting Your Available Computing Power to Work

Moving your internet presence beyond the typical passive nature can be accomplished by converting your website into an action center for your key issues, in addition to providing typical information. This will motivate frequent voters. In addition, some percentage of the less frequent voters that have a strong interest in specific issues will be encouraged to resume participation. While many frequent voters are driven by partisan interests, less frequent voters are driven, if at all, by the specific issues that are “dear to them.” When these issues match your platform, you need to continue communication with that potential voter.

This requires considerable web related resources and is beyond the capabilities of most campaigns and lobbying efforts. At least it used to be. Solutions are becoming available that make this capability available to virtually any political campaign or lobbying effort.

eLobby and eLetter are just such internet tools. Both are designed to allow a political website to become a source of information and one that encourages the public to stay informed and get involved on issues of interest. Additionally these tools provide the capability to become an action center where the citizen can voice their opinion with minimal effort.

Let’s look at an example of how these two features enhance your website for a particular issue. You obviously have a position on this issue and want to locate citizens who care about the issue. Both eLobby and eLetter allow you to define any number of issues and periodically distribute updates and action items about each issue.

eLobby is based upon a user of your website recording their basic election districts so that they can receive issues that affect them in their voting district(s) only. In a lobbying mode, this is an excellent method to build an increasing capability of applying targeted citizen action to selected officials.

When a user first selects this link on your website, they are asked to establish a typical user name and password login. Then they are asked for general address and district information.

On repeat visits they only have to enter their username and password.

Your Updates are checked against their district information, and only those that apply to their specific districts are offered to the user.

These updates can include a Letter Wizard to help the user write to their elected official. It makes the creation of a letter or email to their elected officials a very easy process.

They have the option to signup to automatically receive email notices when you post new Updates.

eLetter is a simpler tool that requires less information from the user, and the Letter Wizard offers all elected officials for selected elected offices, not just the officials for the user’s actual districts. On initial use, there is a higher usage by the public for this tool compared to eLobby. As your website builds credibility with users, they tend to use the eLobby features in increasing numbers. Subsequent articles will demonstrate how to put this general public behavior to use. 

With either or both of these tools, you have added two new dimensions to your website; targeted issue updates providing timely information on the issue(s) and an action center for expressing an opinion on the issue(s). Many citizens will now consider your website their primary source of information and action on the issue(s) of interest. Many will sign up for the optional notification service thus providing you with an ongoing means of communication and encouragement. These citizens can be incorporated into your already existing campaign or lobbying efforts.

Actual test results have shown that these “issue oriented” citizens return to the website, and they will inform others of like mind about the website. websites using these tools show a steady traffic increase and over time move ahead of competitive websites.

Let’s check how this method compares with the three key items identified earlier to attract an expanded potential voter base:

1. Identifying the citizens in this group

For those who provide full contact information you can use your normal methods of determining their voter history. For the portion that do not provide complete contact information, you maintain the capability to communicate with them.

2. Identifying your issues and positions that will motivate these citizens

The level of response between various issues gives you an indication of the level of interest among the public. Note, your main concern is the size of the potential net gain of support.

3. Communicating, re-enforcing and encouraging these citizens to vote

By providing the update and becoming an action center, you are conveying not only your position, but building credibility in your knowledge and expertise. Periodic updates are a time tested method on maintaining communication and keeping the issue on the mind of the citizen, two key components in their decision to vote.

As we all know, many large budget political campaign and lobbying efforts use these methods with great effect. Many typical campaigns and lobbying efforts just assume that such capabilities are beyond their means - which has been true, until now.  

That was the purpose of the eCampaignHQ.com suite of internet tools. By providing the internet hosting, software, bandwidth and an ever increasing database of available political information, the technology is packaged and available as a cost effective service to you. This service is reasonably priced (starting at $50.00 per year) and is non-partisan and non-issue. Your effort supplies the partisanship, the issues and the position knowledge.

Sound interesting? It should - this is a new concept in merging citizen interests with lobbying and campaign efforts without requiring an IT staff. Look for the second article in this series providing a more detailed implementation, using the two tools referenced above and ePetition. For those who would like to test drive themselves, a full featured, no obligation, 30 day free trial is available at http://www.eCampaignHQ.com.

Practical Internet Tips

Some internet tips to improve the effectiveness of your campaign or lobbying website:

Search Engines – Search engines are a major source of traffic to any website. Is your website setup and reasonably prepared to be spidered by search engines? The following will greatly improve your search engine results:

• Page Title – each page on your website has a page title in the header section (also called meta tags). You should carefully name and ensure that each page has a proper title.  When feasible, the page title should contain the keywords associated with the material on the page; and when feasible, the physical page name should also contain these keywords.
   

• Page Keywords – Another item in the header section are the keywords. These are not as important as they were a few years ago, but should be page specific. The keywords should match the material on the page.
   

• Page Description – The Description in the header should be a one or two sentence briefly describing the purpose of the page or the material on the page.

These are just a few tips we hope you find useful and interesting. You would be surprised at how many expensive, professionally paid campaign websites have very low traffic levels. These efforts are getting a very low return on their investment. 

In closing, a few words about the website of a major party candidate for a State – Secretary of State, in fact the consensus leading candidate. Campaign contributions were over the $500,000 level in the year before the election. The candidate's name was misspelled on the title pages and meta tags, and there was no Description or Keywords. This very expensive website had the lowest traffic ranking (http://Alexa.com) of all the announced candidates for the office. By following the TIPs above, your campaign website can probably out perform this example.

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http://eCampaignHQ.com