– cpd

• The Accidental Rebranding of Komen for the Cure
• How Komen flushed their brand in 24 hours
• Komen Kan Kiss My Mammagram, PinActivism, and Newsjacking for a Cause
• Lessons Learned When Your Community Revolts
• Komen Website Hacked, Planned Parenthood Rakes in Donations, and News Surfaces That Komen Official Resigned Over Decision
• Planned Parenthood Saved Me (a Tumblr blog collecting stories)
• Backlash grows over Susan G. Komen-Planned Parenthood flap (enter the Senators)
• Update: Lessons from the Susan G Komen Foundation/Planned Parenthood firestorm: What other non-profits can — and can’t — take away
• Update: Susan G. Komen flap spurred on by social media

LOTS of mistakes to learn from here…so let’s not repeat ‘em.

– cpd

1) Will candidates tweet at each other?

2) How has politicians’ use of social media changed?

– cpd

• Gingrich Super PAC Spends Big Online in Florida to Hit Romney
• Union Goes After Republicans with Interactive Video
• Obama Sticks to Jobs Message in Florida Web Ads
• Florida Group Emerges With Web Centric Anti-Romney Campaign
• Obama Stressed Jobs Issue in Splashy South Carolina Ads
• Digital Marketers Head Up Ron Paul Super PAC
• Gingrich SuperPAC and Paul Go Negative in South Carolina
• Ron Paul Super PAC Spent Over $2.5 Million Online
• Political Data Firms Push Controversial IP Targeting

Good stuff! You can also follow Kate on The Twitter: @LowBrowKate.

– cpd

First, let’s think about what the movement has accomplished so far: nothing less than a reshaping of our national political discourse. Last summer, debt and deficit occupied the thoughts of the political chattering class. Would the government extend the federal borrowing limit? Would the “supercommittee” come up with enough cuts to satisfy the Tea Party wing of Congress? Would $2 trillion in cuts to basic government services somehow restore America to the greatness of our national myths?

In 2012, by comparison, the national debt is a side-issue — talk of income inequality and economic opportuity dominates our political discouse, a direct result of the Occupiers and the ruckus they were able to raise in Zucotti Square and similar encampments across the country. As Occupiers planted tents in physical spaces, their online supporters staked out social media turf and people across the country started wondering what they were actually talking about with this “99%” stuff. Google searches spiked, politicians and the media took notice of the public interest, and income inequality took over political ground ranging from President Obama’s State of the Union to the Republican presidential primary process.

So far, Mission Accomplished! But what’s next?

Plenty of plans are in motion, including a May 1st national strike, protests around upcoming G8 and NATO summits and a bunch of local actions (no doubt online-enabled — hmmmm, I wonder where we’ve heard that before?). But with the long-term occupations coming to an end, and more-traditional activism coming to the fore (protesting international summits is not exactly a new thing), is Occupy fading as a distinct movement?

If so, it might not be a bad idea. Why should Occupy become an Institution, with all of the attendant bureaucratic needs and imperatives? How about an alternate model:

My friend Nate Wilcox likes to talk about the internet giving rise to a new form of machine politics, one built on distributed armies of online activists. This model contrasts with the classic 19th century-style American political machine, which was locally based: each thrived when it could deliver government services and political patronage in exchange for votes in a given city or neighborhood.

The urban political machine largely wilted away in the 20th century, and for a variety of reasons so did much of citizens’ direct involvement in the political process. By the 1990s, they weren’t seriously expected to participate substantively in politics at all, at least in most campaign professionals’ minds. A voter’s role began and ended on election day, and he or she was otherwise mostly just a target — of direct mail, pre-recorded phone calls, and an endless array of repetitive TV commercials.

The internet, though, is a different KIND of medium — back-and-forth rather than broadcast — and the rise of such a participatory public space has completely changed the political media ecology, opening new niches to be exploited in turn by new kinds of organizing entities. Nate’s 21st-century political machines would be a nimble breed, assembling to back a candidate or cause and maintaining influence to the extent that their supporters stay engaged, involved and active. Some campaigns would be ephemeral, others would endure, but in most cases their limiting resource would be time — not necessarily their own, since staff can be bought, but that of individual people willing to donate a piece of their lives to what they see as a greater good.

My own instinctive distrust of Institutions derives in part from something my Dad, a very wise man, said to me when I was much younger: “don’t trust anything with a name, because when you give it a name, it comes to exist for itself rather than for whatever it was created to do.” Bold words from an anarchist at heart! But in the past 20+ years I’ve also worked for a lot of different kinds of Institutions, and I haven’t seen much difference among corporate, nonprofit and government entities when it comes to the question of self-preservation (hint: they’re all for it).

If Occupy joins the ranks of 501(c)3′s and (c)4′s — if it in effect becomes a self-preserving entity — in some ways that would be a betrayal of qualities that made the movement what it has been. Many of my friends in the DC communications space criticized the vague nature of the occupiers’ demands (“they need a coherent message!” was a constant refrain), but to me that was always one of the strengths of the movement — it was less an organized political operation than it was an almost primal expression of political frustration. And if its goal was to change the terms of our politics, it’s clearly succeeded, at least for now.

But what’s next? Well, thousands of activists across the country have come together to express their desire to change the political system, and many of them are still at it. Whether they call themselves “Occupy” or something else is ultimately irrelevant — now that we’re past the flashy stage and the media’s turned away, their continuing work nationally and in their own communities matters more than how it’s branded. Occupations were a tactic, Occupy was a buzzword, but the movement’s long-term success now depends on lots and lots of organizing, persuading and (ultimately) voting. Power to the people! But not necessarily to the names we give our movements.

– cpd

A live-tweeting session is a curiously unsocial social media experience – 150 people in a room, w only the speech & the sound o typing #sotu

It was an odd moment — my NWLC colleague Danielle Jackson and I had chatted with a few folks while we were waiting in line to get into the White House complex, but once we all settled in and the speech started, conversation essentially ceased. Listening to a speech takes attention, as does note-taking, and the process of trying to turn those notes into coherent Tweets becomes all-consuming really fast. Hence the silence — everyone was too busy trying to catch ideas on the wing to talk with the person sitting next to them.

Of course one factor was that each of us was live-tweeting individually. About half the crowd invited to live-cover the speech from the White House was in the nonprofit community (Danielle and I were there representing NWLC), while the other half consisted of random followers of the White House Twitter feed who’d signed up to come. So we were all in effect free agents, trying to keep up streams of content to our own individual publishing outlets. But had we been GROUP live-tweeting, with for instance a half-dozen people sitting around a table watching the speech and coming up with messages to tweet out over a single feed, it would have been a much more social experience.

BTW, the night had one very important lesson — always prepare for things to break. My colleague and I each had our own computers, and each of us had a copy of the spreadsheet we’d put together with pre-prepared Tweets on different topics that might come up (written with help from NWLC’s issue experts, and linking to resources on our website). Of course, my aging ThinkPad refused to connect to the wifi in the room…leaving me forced to try to write on the @epolitics feed via my iPhone. I got a few original messages out, but I retweeted far more than I actually wrote. Even then, my thumbs were sore for a couple of days! But fortunately, we were prepared — Danielle could take up my slack and blast NWLC’s messaging out into the aether.

Photos from the White House live-tweeting session below — enjoy.

The Obama reelection campaign is providing headquarters staff, field organizers and volunteers the ability to take campaign donations with their mobile phones.

Campaign personnel are being issued Square mobile credit card readers, allowing them to process donations with their iPhone or Android phones, a campaign official tells POLITICO. The rollout will happen nationwide, and involve staff at all levels.

The technology is a boon for canvassers and other field staff — potentially saving the campaign hundreds of hours of time processing donations, and giving field staff enormous flexibility. Moreover, it’s another good example of the power of mobile technology to streamline and automate otherwise mundane — but nevertheless important — campaign tasks.

Square has been used by a handful of local political campaigns, but the Obama campaign’s adoption is the first national political adoption of the technology.

A few points: first, congrats to Square! Talk about a bigtime endorsement…. Next, the fact that mobile fundraising will be available through volunteers is a big deal — with tens/hundreds of thousands of people canvassing their neighborhoods for the campaign in the upcoming year, the ability to take donations on the spot should expand the universe of donors significantly. Big reason: mobile donations let you catch someone at the moment they want to give, with no chance for them to put it off or forget about it altogether.

And, adding those new donors to the list is probably more important than the actual money they give in the moment, since once they’re on the list, they’re subject to all the inducements to give again that a modern campaign can offer. Plus of course, once they’ve donated, they’re invested — and they’re more likely to volunteer or otherwise work for the campaign to protect that investment. Expect to see this feature widely used at campaign rallies and other public events as well.

BTW, the Square technology looks interesting. I’ve never played with it, but judging from the photos, the actual cardreader plugs into a phone or tablet’s headphone jack! Way to take advantage of one of the few features that’s standard across essentially all portable devices.

– cpd

What Really Works for End-Of-Year Fundraising?

By PowerThru Consulting

Ah, December. In addition to all of the usual stress the average person faces — wondering how to avoid putting on those extra holiday pounds, and get just the right holiday gifts without going into a “Santa Claus is Coming to Town is making me hate Bruce Springsteen right now” rage at the mall — the online organizer has another stress to deal with. How do you put together just the right series of end-of-year fundraising emails, to raise a significant chunk of money from your supporters who are hopefully in a giving spirit – or can be enticed, worn down or guilted into being so?

There’s a ton of strategies to accomplish that. But savvy online organizers know that the only truly good strategy is one that’s been tested to prove that it works better than other strategies with your particular list of supporters. Doing something like subject line testing to see whether one subject line or another gets more people to open your emails is pretty easy, and commonly used by groups with even small lists. Unfortunately, organizations often lack a large enough list size of former donors to perform statistically-significant tests to see what will make your former donors give more or less. (According to M & R Strategies 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, the average donation rate on an email is .08%, meaning you have to email to tens of thousands of people just to get tens of donations — which is what you’ll need to see an significant difference from one approach to another).

At PowerThru though, we do have clients with large enough list sizes for us to do significantly significant tests. They were game for having us try to maximize their fundraising revenue, by testing our assumptions during the initial stage so we could use the approaches that proved to work the best for the remainder of the campaign.

What we wanted to test

1) It seemed obvious to us (and to many other organizations we think know what they are doing) that one of the best ways to get former donors to give was by including in their email a reference to the amount they had donated in the past, and to mention that they had not given this year but we were counting on them to do so. The question was — would that work, and increase both likelihood to give and amount given?

2) Everybody likes free stuff, right? The organization had previously produced a bunch of what is affectionately known as “schwag” (pens and such with their name on it). So we decided to offer those as a thank-you gift to people who donated. Would schwag make both past donors and people who had never donated more or less likely to give, and increase their donation amounts?

Skip ahead to read our conclusions, or continue to read the whole story about how we performed the tests.

How we tested it

First, we built a bunch of custom reports in Salsa that helped us pull the supporter keys and amount given by year for our past donors. That’s relatively easy to do (and if you either already know how, or aren’t a Salsa user and don’t care, click here to skip ahead) — build a custom aggregate report based on the donation table (and you might as well join it to the supporter table for a later step, although that’s not necessary), and then set up your columns so they include supporter_KEY, Transaction Date and Amount. Select the Group by Boxes first for supporter_KEY and then Transaction Date, and use the Function option to make Transaction Date be by Year and the Amount field calculate Sums. Save it, click Run and you’ll then see the total amount of donations each of your supporter has given by each year.

Click to see screenshot

Or, actually, more than that. Because you’ll be including a lot of errored or failed donations. So you need to set up your Conditions tab to exclude donations that have particular Result and/or RESPMSG values. Those can vary depending on which Merchant Gateway you use and whether you also enter in a lot of offline donations into Salsa that you want to include in the giving history. My trick? If you’re not already sure what Result and/or RESPMSG field to filter out, re-jigger your report so that it is grouped by Result, then RESPMSG, and then either counting supporter_KEYs or donation_KEY. Run it and you’ll see the total number of donors or donations you got for each Result or RESPMSG and you’ll see you need to exclude things like Result = -10 and RESPMSG = Approved Testing.

Click to see screenshot

Note – if you’re scared by the Salsa report tool you’re missing a whole lot of the usefulness of Salsa! I have some online training videos on our blog, or you can read Salsa’s documentation.

Once we got the data, we exported it into Excel and then did some manipulation using filters and sorting, and then cutting and pasting so each supporter (identified by supporter_KEY) would have a series of columns with the total amount they gave in 2009 and 2010. (Still too detailed for you? Click ahead to see what we learned). Note we treated people who gave in 2011 differently — for them we got the average amount they donated per donation in 2011 so we could ask for them to make one more donation around that size). We then used used the “AND” function in Excel to compare the two columns to see which was greater (formula of “=AND(B2>C2)” will give you a “TRUE” for all supporters where the number in column B is greater than in column C and FALSE if not) and then sorted the rows appropriately. We then created two new columns where we multiplied the greater of those numbers by 1.5 and 2, since our strategy was going to be to ask people to give 1.5 or 2 times the amount they had given in which ever year they had given more. We then created new custom fields in Salsa for 2009 donation total, 2010 donation total, and 2011 ask amount 1 & 2, and imported that data back in.

Another quick Salsa aside — we had previously tried doing something like this using the Conditional Content feature in the Salsa email tool. That nifty feature allows you to create “SalsaScript” that does exactly what we had done using reports, Excel and custom fields — merge into an email a supporter’s total amount donated in a prior year and then multiply that amount by to get a new “ask” amount. The problem? When testing we found that there were some supporters who had negative donation amounts for the year, if they had received a refund in Jan for a donation they had made in Dec. While it was an edge case, it was going to look really silly to have people receive emails that said “You gave $-10 in 2010, would you consider giving $-15 or even $-20 in 2011?” So we went the extra mile and did the work manually, where we knew we could spot any errors like that and fix them.

Okay, enough looking under the hood at how we geeked out in Salsa and Excel. Back to more of a summary:

• We had about 7500 past donors that we divided up in 3 different groups:
  1. Donated in 2010, but not 2009 or 2011
  2. Donated in 2009 and 2010, but not 2011
  3. Donated in 2011 but not in December

We then divided each of those sets into 4 different test groups of 25% in each group based on whether they were going to be receiving email with the different things we were testing:

1. Past giving history and a “schwag” offer
2. Past giving history and no “schwag” offer
3. No past giving history and a “schwag” offer
4. No past giving history and no “schwag” offer

The emails with past giving history contained “ask strings” like “You donated a total of $[[donations_2009]] in 2009, $[[donations_2010]] in 2010 but haven’t yet donated in 2011. Can we count on you to give at least $[[EOY2011_ask1]] or even $[[EOY2011_ask2]] to help us achieve our goals for next year?” The ones without history just asked for the 1.5 or 2 times level. The next paragraph either offered a gift if they donated or not (and included a call-out picture of the gift if it was offered).

Finally, we created 2 segments for the hundreds of thousands of non-donors we had on the list (since they had no giving history):

1. “Schwag” offer
2. No “schwag” offer

So, if you’re keeping track that was a total of 14 segments. But that’s what we needed to actually have this test work.

How we analyzed the results

For this experiment we were looking beyond simple things like open and click-through rate — we actually worked on minimizing those factors by making the email subject lines and content virtually identical (the only difference being the emails with “schwag” offers had a subject line and content calling that out). Instead we looked at:

• Was there any difference in the number of donations and total amount raised per send for each different segment, based on whether we showed their history and/or offered schwag?
• What % of the amount we asked for did donors tend to give? Since we knew how much we were asking for (1.5 or 2 times their past donation amount), we could compare that to what they actually gave to see if there was a lift or not.

What we determined

• For former donors, the better performing segments in terms of amount raised or number of donations per email sent tended to be the ones where we showed history and did not offer schwag, although there was some variation in the results. Former donors however did very clearly tend to give more than we asked for when we showed history and did not offer schwag:

• For non-donors, the number of donors and amount donated per email sent was clearly significantly higher when we offered schwag than when we didn’t – 160% and 205%, respectively. And % given of amount asked was also clearly higher:

Conclusion

In the end, while this was a lot of work it felt like work worth doing, because it taught us several important things:

• Your former donors are more motivated to give and to give more when you tell them what they gave in the past, remind them that they haven’t given since then, and ask them to please give again.
• Your former donors aren’t helped much in their giving likelihood or amount if you offer them a free gift. They do fairly well if you offer them a gift and DON’T show their history, but worse if you both show them their history AND offer them a gift. Therefore we thought it would be best to just continue to ask them for a donation based on past giving and not offer them any gift in return.
• Your new donors are the ones who are significantly motivated by a free gift, both to give at all and to give more than you are asking for. So start ordering little bits of schwag with your group’s name on it, but perhaps only get enough for your prospective new donors.

Subject: Mazel tov!

Colin,

Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a Democrat and one of the greatest champions of LGBT rights in Congress, has announced his plans to marry his longtime partner, Jim Ready.

Please, sign our card sending congratulations to the happy couple!

Thanks for all you do,
Chris Bowers, Daily Kos

P.S. Please chip in $5 to help support Daily Kos.

This strikes me as either, 1) a total piece of crap, or 2) really bad use of a standardized P.S. line.

First, don’t get me wrong, I send hearty congratulations to Rep. Frank and his lucky husband-to-be! What I think sucks about this message is the way it apparently ties a shameless fundraising ask to a hook completely unrelated to the institution that’s doing the begging. Assuming of course that it was MEANT as a fundraiser — the P.S. could simply be something that DKos staff routinely attach to messages (it’s shown up on at least one other email they sent this month), in which case more later.

But if this was indeed an intentional fundraiser, it’s terrible — first off, what’s the connection between Daily Kos and same-sex marriage in Massachusetts? Last time I checked, that was the result of a court decision, not political advocacy. Organizations write appeals based on particular issues all the time (I cranked one out on Thursday), but they generally talk about something the group WORKs on (i.e., “please donate $5 to help us fight global communist infiltration of our drinking water”). In this case, the DK audience is passionate about same-sex marriage, but sending $5 to support Daily Kos as a website/blogging community is not exactly the most efficient way to advance gay rights as an issue.

Second, the juxtaposition of the congratulatory message and the blunt fundraising is downright jarring. The first 90% of the message builds to such a positive. Mazel Tov! Congratulate the happy couple! Let’s celebrate a liberal champion! And implicitly, in-your-face-rightwingers, hooray for us! Then, let’s squelch the whole thing by asking for five bucks, without even throwing in an explicit link to the original subject.

Why not leave off the fundraising P.S. and just make the message celebratory? That way, after I read it I might have been left with a positive feeling that could have carried over to the next message I received. Then, what if that next message had been a gay-rights-themed fundraiser, sent a couple of days later and only to people who’d “signed the card” above? THAT might have yielded some interesting results, and could have been a step toward building a fundraising base around that particular issue. [Update: Lauren Miller suggests raising money through the thank you page, which someone would land on AFTER they "sign the card."] Unfortunately, the email they DID send makes me LESS likely to open another Daily Kos messing, because now I’ll be expecting another bait-and-switch.

Of course, this could just be a case of slapping a standard ask at the end of the email as a matter of procedure. In that case, may I recommend re-thinking the practice? Instead, the P.S. could have reinforced the primary ask, or sent people to a page that had more info about same-sex marriage and how to advocate for it, or even asked for donations to an OUTSIDE group that works on the issue. A subtle difference — by asking for help for someone else, you’re seen as acting selfLESSly rather than selfISHly.

Lots of lessons for such a short message! But these are the subtle things that you need to watch when you’re running an email list — every interaction you have with an activist affects his or her desire to act or to donate the next time you ask. Of course, the DK email crew may come back and say that this turned out to be their most successful fundraising message ever, in which case all my theorizing goes out the window. Which would be another valuable lesson in itself!

– cpd

With the introduction of the “subscribe” feature, Facebook’s news feed has begun favoring posts and activity from subscriptions over posts from fan pages. This means it has become even more difficult to get content from your fan page seen in your followers’ news feeds. So what now?

M&R’s Amy Peyro has some specific suggestions in her article for boosting the performance of your Facebook posts, but really, this entire situation is pretty damn frustrating for online communicators. Facebook is happy to take our money, but after cashing the checks they’re equally happy to change the rules to significantly cut the value of that investment: if the fans we paid to reach don’t see our content as often, each click on an ad is functionally worth less.

Yet another illustration of the danger of relying on a third-party platform for advocacy! If you don’t own the list, you don’t own the list — and the company that DOES own it can do what it wants with something you spent time and.or money building. Zuckerberg wants vendor-neutral channels like email to fade away in favor of means of communication he owns? Hey buddy, I know what’s in it for YOU, but why should WE go along?

– cpd

Big news today — my NWLC colleague Danielle Jackson and I are invited to the White House (along with digital communications folks from other advocacy organizations) to live-tweet the State of the Union. Exciting stuff! We’ve armed ourselves with a big spreadsheet of pre-prepared tweets, based on topics that could come up and including links to NWLC resources and other background materials. Should be an exciting night, and besides the @NWLC tweets I’ll also be covering the live-tweeting event itself on @epolitics. Follow it here — I’ve embedded the @epolitics Twitter feed below.

This White House invitation (sent through their Office of Public Engagement) is a classic example of blogger/online activist relations — they can’t exactly give us exclusive information or the other usual goodies we online communicators use to entice online opinion leaders, but they CAN give us a seat in a meeting room in the White House complex, which is pretty damn cool all around. Plus, we’ll have a chance to schmooze with White House digital outreach folks, which provides another benefit. Excellent work all around, and the kind of event that political campaigns can learn from.

Plus, you can get involved: after the speech, Obama’s comms folks will be taking questions online.

10:00 pm EST: Immediately following the speech, pose your questions to a live panel. Administration Officials will answer your questions about the President’s address. In addition to taking your questions, the panelists will take questions submitted via Twitter (using hashtags #WHChat & #SOTU), Google+ and Facebook. Feel free to call on your followers to add their voice to the discussion and share their questions.

Another interesting #SOTU social media angles: Yahoo wants your 140-character analysis of the speech (via Elana Levin), which sounds like political commentary as haiku! Next, Quora will be taking questions that administration officials will answer over the following few days (via A Loyal Reader — thanks, Dad!), and the President will be answering questions directly on January 30th in a Google+ “hangout” (via Lisa Byrne). Quite the social media push from the White House these days…purely a coincidence that we’re in an election year, right?

@epolitics Twitter feed below, after the break. Live coverage should being sometime after 8 pm Eastern…don’t miss it.

– cpd

On this episode of NationBuilder’s Leaders and Creators, I talk with Colin Delany…about the historical online action, former Sen. Chris Dodd’s old-school lobbying efforts to push the SOPA/PIPA bills on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America, and what this battle between traditional entertainment industry interests and the web means for the future of tech industry lobbying in DC.

Colin and I also discuss the philosophies in Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano,” and how organizations, from advocacy non-profits to citizens groups like the Tea Party, turn their online networks into offline political influence.

Listen below:

Good times all around, and keep an eye out for future installments of NationBuilder’s “Leaders and Creators Podcast” series.

– cpd

Capitalizing on yesterday’s South Carolina primary win, Newt Gingrich sent out an email last night lighting the fuse on a million-dollar “money bomb” (a concentrated online fundraising effort) to “knock out” those who stand between him and the presidency. Though the original email suggested that Romney and Republican elites were the target (it included lines like “we need a bold Reagan conservative to debate Obama” and “this campaign is going to continue to rely on millions of patriots from across the country rather than just a handful of wealthy donors and bundlers”), a subsequent message focused on the incumbent:

“I was asked at a town hall in South Carolina how I plan to “bloody Obama’s nose” and point out to the American public his many failures. My response was simple: I don’t want to bloody Barack Obama’s nose, I want to knock him out! And after last night’s resounding victory, we’re in a position to do just that.”

One million dollars? That’ll pay off his $800,000 website for sure, with a little something left over for Tiffany’s! (Sorry, couldn’t resist). Money bombs are a great way for a campaign to turn a burst of momentum and attention into the potential for further victories, though in this case even $1,000,000 is likely to be pocket change compared with what the Establishment will spend to try to stop Gingrich via SuperPACS and other channels in the next few weeks. But as with Elizabeth Warren’s recent success with the tactic, a lucrative money bomb also demonstrates grassroots support, something Gingrich will need, since he lacks a strong local organization in Florida and the Super Tuesday States.

BTW, Rick Santorum also tried to launch a money bomb recently, but he did so using a name (“Conservatives United Moneybomb”) that lends itself to an unfortunate acronym and headlines like this one. Dude, get a clue.

– cpd

A conversation at Lauren’s going-away party the other night sparked a connection — a few weeks ago Jason Rosenbaum over at the PCCC mentioned to me that he thought that a campaign’s first hire should should be a digital communications director, in part because nowadays they’re involved in EVERYTHING a campaign does. From fundraising to grassroots organizing, communications to strategy, what they build and the relationships they supervise are now fundamental, and someone who knows what they’re doing in that area should come on board as early as possible.

I mentioned that idea to Lauren, and she amended it to add a dedicated fundraiser to the first round of hires. After all, the digital director needs to be paid! And of course to buy technology and talent as needed. An excellent point, and the motion is accepted: a campaign’s first two hires should be a digital media director and a fundraising guru to shake enough money out of the trees to pay for his or her work. Okay, fine, hire an overall campaign manager before them if you have to, but you get the idea.

Why is the digital angle so important? Well, where do volunteers come from? A database — the list of people who signed up online, at events, over the phone, when canvassers knock on their doors, at church, etc., to help the campaign. Where does their motivation to help come from? Past that first connection, it’s the emails they get from the candidate, the Facebook posts they read on his or her page, and the tweets and videos they see that keep them involved.

Where does money come from? A good fundraiser should bring in big donations, of course (that’s why you hire one), but even cash generated by big-donor candidate calls is available faster if the transaction takes place online. And, just ask the Obama 2008 campaign about the value of an online small-donor base. Media attention? Traditional comms work is important — it never hurts to meet a reporter for lunch — but these days those connections frequently start on Twitter, blogs, or Facebook. Advertising? Again, Google Ads can start building a campaign’s list from the day it launches.

Think about it this way: a political operation is going to come together in stages, with a core team building the foundations months in advance of the pre-election push. When the grassroots team parachutes in a couple of months before election day, you want them to arrive to a robust supporter list and a motivated volunteer corps. When the tv folks start cranking out attack videos galore, you want to have the online channels in place to promote them and the media/blogger/online activist relationships to help amplify their punch. Across just about everything a campaign does, digital tools and digital communications are the base on which the rest of the organization sits.

So campaigns, don’t make digital an afterthought — unless you’re itchin’ to get beat by someone who thought otherwise.

– cpd

– cpd