Knowing that UK elections are around the corner, I have been looking out for different vote matching websites. The websites take you through a number of questions and then give you your own personalised short-list of political parties to vote for.
Votematch.co.uk
The first votematch.co.uk website I ever saw was for the London mayor elections in 2008. Apparently it was used by over 40,000 Londoners . It was a neat little website produced by Unlockdemocracy - you choose whether you agree or disagree with statements which in turn produces your shortlist plus you can sign-up to get an SMS reminder how to vote on the day. The website was easy and quick to use although the statements were bias - all the non-lefty statements were leaning towards right-wing so I would be surprised if UKIP and Conservatives made anyone's shortlist.
For this elections, Votematch.co.uk has been seriously vamped up - in addition to the website, there is also a votematch application on Facebook. 30 questions, user indicates if they agree or disagree and then at the end of the process they indicate which are the most important policy areas for them. Thirty questions did feel like too much at one point, but because statements were written in normal language and were fairly distinct, it managed to keep my attention and get me to the end of the process.
MyVoteAdvisor
Few days ago I came across this website.
It's a really nicely done website very usable in its use of design and layout. However, the mechanics of it are really complex - users are asked to chose the parties they are interested in, then chose between 11 areas of policy (from environment, health and defence to immigration and education) and then rate party responses to 5 questions within each area.
If, like me, a user chooses 3 parties - that is over 100 policy statements to read and judge. In addition, a user can rate how important each of the 5 questions within a policy area is... Phew! It gave me a headache.
Also, the party statements were probably taken out of policy documents and as such, most are impenetrable or can be understood in a number of different ways. So just skimming through won't do.
Although the website creators instruct the visitors many times that they can skip some of the 11 policy areas, I found it easier to drop out of the process altogether than rationalise and grade how much I care about different issues.
My short-list
And in case you are interested, this is what my voting shortlist looks like in the order of preference:
My voteadvisor - greens, Libdems, Conservative, Labour.
Votematch - Lib-dems, Labour, UKIP, Conservative.
Yes, there is a little Hitler in all of us ;)
Vote power
Just today my Twitter friends all told me how powerless their vote is thanks to this neat website. I was confused by their tweets "The power of my vote is 0.12" - I wasn't sure if that was good or bad. But the assumption is that democracy = 1 person, one vote. So 1 is ideal. And then there is the whole explanation on how this index was devised which was super interesting (if you like stats).
Slapometer.com
This one doesn't really help you chose who to vote for. It's more of a light relief after you've been diligently researching party manifestos, listening to leaders and others debates, etc...
Vote with the back of your hand. Surprising how much fun it is to be violent.
Election challenge/
I love this website!
Ideas are user generated - some are odd, some just plain stupid, others are very good. Every user can say if they think other people's idea are good or bad as well as add their own idea. The varied ways of describing good and bad ideas keeps user attention for a long time - this is the only of the elections websites which kept me going for some time. People's ideas are published on Twitter as hot - if they are voted for by people or New - as new ideas come up.
CountMyVote
A website that shows you what the "real" situation is in marginal seats and therefore who you should vote for if you want to vote tactically. Who are the main two parties going head to head. In my constituency the fight is between LibDems and Labour apparently. If only! Then I realise that the stats are based on the votes by website visitors.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
ecampaigning open space: MyDavidCameron
Clifford Singer
Sparkly web agency director
3 spoof websites
- bubblewrapped - spoof website around the banking crisis
- The other tax payer's alliance
Taking on the tax payer's alliance who are anti-public service. Tax payer alliance quotes generator, guide for the media.
- mydavidcameron.com - had a go with different messages and then released a template to people. Genuinely viral, peer to peer.
It started off as a single web page with few spoof posters. Other people contributed functionality. After few weeks a web developer provided a poster generator.
- it went viral witout the tools to easily share in social networks. It didn't matter initially but it was important to sustain the interest a bit later.
100,000 visitors within a week.
- spoof of Tory's RIP campaign, then "I didn't vote Tory before...."
Most of contributions were rude and not that funny. But other were brilliant.
Analysis:
- most of traffic came from Twitter. Minority of people but a small surge on Twitter causes peaks in traffic - people tell others about it through other online media.
Facebook and Twitter highest referals. 35% direct traffic - people emailing URL to people, 16% of traffic Facebook, 7% andybarefoot (poster generator)
Celebrity promotion
Bill Baily tweeted the URL - 10 times more visitors within an hour.
Other people took up the idea of poster generator - for example for calling for the referendum.
Media coverage - Daily Mail - first to cover the story. Traffic came from that too.
Sparkly web agency director
3 spoof websites
- bubblewrapped - spoof website around the banking crisis
- The other tax payer's alliance
Taking on the tax payer's alliance who are anti-public service. Tax payer alliance quotes generator, guide for the media.
- mydavidcameron.com - had a go with different messages and then released a template to people. Genuinely viral, peer to peer.
It started off as a single web page with few spoof posters. Other people contributed functionality. After few weeks a web developer provided a poster generator.
- it went viral witout the tools to easily share in social networks. It didn't matter initially but it was important to sustain the interest a bit later.
100,000 visitors within a week.
- spoof of Tory's RIP campaign, then "I didn't vote Tory before...."
Most of contributions were rude and not that funny. But other were brilliant.
Analysis:
- most of traffic came from Twitter. Minority of people but a small surge on Twitter causes peaks in traffic - people tell others about it through other online media.
Facebook and Twitter highest referals. 35% direct traffic - people emailing URL to people, 16% of traffic Facebook, 7% andybarefoot (poster generator)
Celebrity promotion
Bill Baily tweeted the URL - 10 times more visitors within an hour.
Other people took up the idea of poster generator - for example for calling for the referendum.
Media coverage - Daily Mail - first to cover the story. Traffic came from that too.
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Obama's new media team tells us how they did it
I had a pleasure to attend a meeting organised by Compass -democratic left pressure group, focussing on the Labour members, but also building a bridge to the 200,000 or so progressives who have left the Labour Party - which was a host to Joe Rospars, the Director of New Media of the Obama campaign.
Joe gave us a good overview of the principles that he thinks made the new media activity successful. Below are the bits that I found very interesting - mixed with my thoughts and interpretation of what this could mean for UK NGOs...
Overall - there was nothing surprising in what Obama campaign did - they followed all the best principles in using new media comms for campaigning. What is special is that the Obama campaign put theory into practice and gained the wealth of experience which they are now sharing with us.
New media in the centre of your campaigning strategy
Joe was part of the top team running the campaign- as Joe said it - "I was at the table with the finance guy, the campaign guy, the media guy". This means that he could bargain with them, participate in decision-making and impact on the direction of the communication strategy.
Make Poverty History new media evaluation report made this same point in 2006, making this one of the top recommendations, drawing from the conclusion that new media output of the campaign was an after-thought most of the time.
Letting go of control...
The Obama team utilised online community around My Barak Obama website and user generated content intelligently and by endorsing the rules of genuine online communities, rather than trying to twist them to reach their own ends. The team took the MY in the name of the community literally and allowed people to create their own ways of supporting Obama.
One example is the use of the phonecall system by the online community (explained in more detail further down)- anyone could join My Barack Obama community, so people were worried that Republicans will use this system to phone up people and persuade them to vote McCain. There probably were some people doing it, but the benefit of an open &easy-to-access system was that many people could use it. And majority of people were campaigning for Obama, so this didn't emerge as a problem.
Again - we knew that this is the way to manage possible rogue members in an online community. Rather than close-down the community for many in order to protect it from the difficult few. I remember Greenpeace once giving an example of a supporter who was very rude/abusive on a forum. Instead of deleting their post and closing their profile, Greenpeace left it to the community to respond. And respond they did - the abusive supporter left the forum after few exchanges with other members.
I can hear some NGO people saying that the online systems are dangerous as people would be "off message". Many people in NGOs feel that online people need to be controlled, while they are more than happy to live with the risk of volunteers promoting the organisation offline. It's a clear example of out of sight out of mind - they don't hear/see what volunteers say in a face to face contact, but can see what volunteers say online.
Also, Joe said that with 13 million emails on their list Obama has a big advocacy organisation to help him form his policies once he enters the White House. Again, this sounds like the right way of treating the community - instead of dumping them now that they helped get Obama elected, the campaign team is continuing the conversation with supporters. Obviously this is also a very clever long-term planning because there will be other elections and fights to fight when the campaign will need support of these people.
Segmentation
Joe told us a bit about the technology and systems they used in the backend.
The sophisticated segmentation and emailing was possible because of the powerful CRM. To illustrate - they could email people about events close to them with reminder to join in.
They also released what is usually used as a back-end function of a CRM to the online community - the phonecall system. As a user logged into My Barack Obama community, I could get the list of people in a specific area, click on a name, which then dials that person's number and pulls up the script.
Joe gave us a good overview of the principles that he thinks made the new media activity successful. Below are the bits that I found very interesting - mixed with my thoughts and interpretation of what this could mean for UK NGOs...
Overall - there was nothing surprising in what Obama campaign did - they followed all the best principles in using new media comms for campaigning. What is special is that the Obama campaign put theory into practice and gained the wealth of experience which they are now sharing with us.
New media in the centre of your campaigning strategy
Joe was part of the top team running the campaign- as Joe said it - "I was at the table with the finance guy, the campaign guy, the media guy". This means that he could bargain with them, participate in decision-making and impact on the direction of the communication strategy.
Make Poverty History new media evaluation report made this same point in 2006, making this one of the top recommendations, drawing from the conclusion that new media output of the campaign was an after-thought most of the time.
Letting go of control...
The Obama team utilised online community around My Barak Obama website and user generated content intelligently and by endorsing the rules of genuine online communities, rather than trying to twist them to reach their own ends. The team took the MY in the name of the community literally and allowed people to create their own ways of supporting Obama.
One example is the use of the phonecall system by the online community (explained in more detail further down)- anyone could join My Barack Obama community, so people were worried that Republicans will use this system to phone up people and persuade them to vote McCain. There probably were some people doing it, but the benefit of an open &easy-to-access system was that many people could use it. And majority of people were campaigning for Obama, so this didn't emerge as a problem.
Again - we knew that this is the way to manage possible rogue members in an online community. Rather than close-down the community for many in order to protect it from the difficult few. I remember Greenpeace once giving an example of a supporter who was very rude/abusive on a forum. Instead of deleting their post and closing their profile, Greenpeace left it to the community to respond. And respond they did - the abusive supporter left the forum after few exchanges with other members.
I can hear some NGO people saying that the online systems are dangerous as people would be "off message". Many people in NGOs feel that online people need to be controlled, while they are more than happy to live with the risk of volunteers promoting the organisation offline. It's a clear example of out of sight out of mind - they don't hear/see what volunteers say in a face to face contact, but can see what volunteers say online.
Also, Joe said that with 13 million emails on their list Obama has a big advocacy organisation to help him form his policies once he enters the White House. Again, this sounds like the right way of treating the community - instead of dumping them now that they helped get Obama elected, the campaign team is continuing the conversation with supporters. Obviously this is also a very clever long-term planning because there will be other elections and fights to fight when the campaign will need support of these people.
Segmentation
Joe told us a bit about the technology and systems they used in the backend.
The sophisticated segmentation and emailing was possible because of the powerful CRM. To illustrate - they could email people about events close to them with reminder to join in.
They also released what is usually used as a back-end function of a CRM to the online community - the phonecall system. As a user logged into My Barack Obama community, I could get the list of people in a specific area, click on a name, which then dials that person's number and pulls up the script.
This is how customer systems work in call centres when, for example, your mobile phone provider phones you up to sell you an upgrade.
For those who are familiar with UK Data Protection laws it's clear that we couldn't do this in the UK - voter register is not up for sale as it is in the US. However, the phonecall system has been used in the Ken Livingstone campaign for London mayor - where Labour members were phoning other Labour members.
Supporter journeys
The campaign was meticulous in planning user journeys. To use Joe's words - "if you have 10 people you need to put 8 of them to work".
The technology and segmentation were focussing on this result - getting people to something for the campaign.
Some stats:
- half a billion $ raised online
- 6.5 million donations of $100 or less by 3 million online donors which means that in average people were donating 2+ times.
- 13 million of email addresses
- 22,000(not sure about this figure) youtube videos totalling in 2,000 years of watching time.
Another related and important note was made - the user journey didn't finish with the victory - for example since the victory there were 4,500 meetings involving 50,000 people discussing the future.
Online to offline
Joe said that online campaign was "a window into the offline field operation".
One of the main features of My Barack Obama is the meet-up model of registering your own event and inviting people to attend.
The main focus of the online community was to do something and the strategy was formed around that.
Email segmentation was focussing on serving up information which is likely to suit a specific person. So if an event is registered which is close to where you live you receive an email.
If you are not taking up that offer than you will be asked to phone someone up from the comfort of your home. If that isn't your cup of tea you can donate, blog, create a video, etc.... There were many ways to engage..
Support and channel shift
The campaign invested in helping supporters use the online system on the phone. Joe said that they had people acquiring email addresses for the first time in their life in order to join My Barack Obama.
Also, the online phonecall system is much more convenient to use than the traditional systems. After initial training, a supporter can do it all from the comfort of their home. So once familiar with the system, supporters are more likely to use it.
Monday, 29 September 2008
elections websites
Looking for different ideas for election websites.
1) use of the Web as a resource space - downloadable resources, customizable print resources (posters, images, etc)
http://www.dopolitics.org.uk/Toolbox/index.cfm
2) vote match + reminder - quiz that matches your views with the views of candidates and reminds you of your choice on the election day - pluggs into social networks etc.
http://www.votematch.co.uk/
3) http://www.labourspace.com./
http://www.labour.org.uk/
4) write to your MP, London assembly, Councillors
http://www.writetothem.com/
5) Community action
pledgebank.com
6) Obama's action centre
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/actioncenter
7) Canadian Make Poverty History
http://www.makepovertyhistory.ca/
1) use of the Web as a resource space - downloadable resources, customizable print resources (posters, images, etc)
http://www.dopolitics.org.uk/Toolbox/index.cfm
2) vote match + reminder - quiz that matches your views with the views of candidates and reminds you of your choice on the election day - pluggs into social networks etc.
http://www.votematch.co.uk/
3) http://www.labourspace.com./
http://www.labour.org.uk/
4) write to your MP, London assembly, Councillors
http://www.writetothem.com/
5) Community action
pledgebank.com
6) Obama's action centre
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/actioncenter
7) Canadian Make Poverty History
http://www.makepovertyhistory.ca/
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