Call it innovation, call it self-preservation, call it a traffic scheme, but the Baltimore Sun, one of the leading papers covering Maryland politics, has made the decision to offer a blog to every legally registered candidate running for office in the state of Maryland. The offer is bi-partisan and covers both Federal and state candidates. The paper’s site states the following:

The Baltimore Sun is offering free blogs to political candidates in key races this year. It is up to the candidate to decide whether to accept the blog invitation and to decide how often to post on the blog. The Baltimore Sun does not edit any candidate’s blog, and it is not responsible for any content posted by the candidate or the candidate’s representatives here.

Technology is the enabler

What makes this experiment by The Sun plausible is the advance in technology in recent years. During the last election cycle, the same experiment would have been nearly impossible. The staff and time required to implement such an idea would have far exceeded any benefits the paper would have derived from the endeavor – both in terms of money and readership. The advent of WordPress Mu changed that equation for The Sun and similar organizations. Used by the likes of Harvard Law School and Le Monde, WordPress Mu is an open platform powered by WordPress that allows site administrators to maintain multiple blogs (even with separate domains) from the same installation. This solution has drastically cut the cost and time required in creating and hosting multiple blogs.

Opportunity for candidates

The Sun’s experiment is not only beneficial to the paper, but also to the candidates –many of whom are running for obscure seats in the state legislature. For these candidates, having a blog on The Sun‘s website is an enormous platform to get their ideas and thoughts in front of a wide audience. Individuals who would not normally venture to a candidate’s site can now see excerpts on the homepage of The Sun and in other prominent areas throughout The Sun‘s website. Moreover, this experiment gives candidates a way to establish a more credible web presence. Many candidates have awful websites that get in the way of presenting themselves, their ideas and policies in a clear, concise and thoughtful manner. This opportunity allows candidates to be judged for the quality and depth of their ideas, and not their web-building acumen. Lastly, it allows the media more accessibility to challengers thus somewhat leveling the playing field with their incumbent counterparts, who stand in the media spotlight brighter.

It’s not all gravy

While this effort by The Sun is a promising one in theory; in practice, it leaves many questions unanswered. For instance, will Sun columnists feel the pressure to link to blog posts on their site instead of other articles on the web? Will the coverage of candidates who do not sign up for a blog be affected? How will the paper handle criticism from politicians on its on pages? Will blogging on the site give the impression that candidates received endorsements from the paper? In addition, the fact that The Sun stands to make money from ads on blog posts written by politicians, will not sit well with many readers and voters. These questions will not be answered by executives at the paper in a breakfast meeting while enjoying sandwiches and lattes. Instead, we will have to work through them together. Bloggers, the paper’s Ombudsman, competing media outlets and the voters—those who stand to benefit or lose the most from this –- will have to work together to develop a system of checks and balances to keep the paper accountable.

Moving in the right direction

Despite the many unanswered questions this experiment by the Sun should be encouraged — even celebrated. For the last couple of years, many have been predicting the slow and certain death of newspapers. Well, it appears that they will not quietly into the night. And for that I, for one, am glad. Our democracy stands to benefits if we can find more ways for old media and new media cohabitate, especially at the local level.

You can view the candidates’ blog at here.

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One of this year’s nominee is Colin Delany, Editor of epolitics.com (where I’ve guest blogged several time).

Colin Delany is the self-described "host" of epolitics.com, a website devoted to documenting best practices, tools, techniques, and learning experiences from his time working on the web since the mid-1990s. Delaney’s debrief on the Obama’s use of online organizing, "Learning from Obama" is a widely distributed account of the wildly successful strategy and methods used during Barack Obama’s 2008 bid for the presidency. Delany is also the author of several other white papers on internet politics.

In an industry full of self promoters with little to show, Colin is one of the few that has consistently  put out good work for a long time.  Moreover, he does so in a way that benefits not just his clients but the entire community.  And while there is a number of impressive individuals on the list, I think Colin is deserving of your vote. So as they say, vote early and often.

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Set-up time

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

Just-in-time patches

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

Native Integration with third party campaign software

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

Customer service

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

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

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

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Topics of the guide are as follow:

• The Money Bomb: Smart Online Fundraising
• Online Ad FAQs: How to Use Online Ads to Win Political Elections(includes Bonus Tips on Creating Killer Ads and Landing Pages)
• Build Your List and Put It to Work List Building, E-mail and Voter Mobilization
• Social Media Ain’t Rocket Science: Demystifying the Role of Social Media in Political Campaigns (includes The 10 Commandments of Campaign Social Media and Twelve Steps to Social Media Campaigns That Don’t Suck)
• Beyond the Talking Head: How to Make a Great YouTube Video
• Transforming Online Engagement into Real World Activism: A Q&A with Rob Willington
• Your Online Hub: Keys to a Successful Campaign Website
• Getting Buy-in: Tips for Scoring Budget for Digital Initiatives

Whatever your role on  a campaign, head to click’z website, download the guide (PDF) and find ways to incorporate the advice of these experts in your campaign. If you need some extra help, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

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Google products and YouTube allow you to deliver your message directly to voters, and can keep your staff and volunteers connected throughout the campaign.

In the 2008 presidential election, 68% of registered U.S. voters turned to the Internet regularly to receive political information. For the first time, the Internet surpassed newspapers and magazines in terms of reach and influence. Google can help you grow and engage your supporters in a targeted, cost-effective way.

Learn more at http://www.google.com/events/campaigntools/

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Earlier this month, I had a chance to attend a screening of the “The Youngest Candidate” at the the 2010 Politics on Film Festival, directed by Jason Pollock and produced by David Letterman’s company, Worldwide Pants.

The documentary tells the story of four teens, Ytit Chauhan, Raul De Jesus, George Monger, and Tiffany Turpper, who are running for various local public offices in 2007. Their story is one of young and passionate idealists with the courage and conviction to confront a less than stellar political system in each of their localities. It is a story full of great challenges and small victories.

Pollock did a great job documenting each aspect of the candidates’ journey to election day from fundraising to canvassing. The film provided real insight into the candidates’ state of mind through late-night video diaries. One Wikipedia editor summarized their story best writing: “through their journey, these young candidates learn about fair play, leadership development, racism in politics, the importance of family, and other lessons that they will carry with them throughout their lives.”

While the film covers the candidates integration with local media via talk radio and print interviews, it’s interesting that he omits the newest forms of media exposure. Pollock does not address whether the candidates or their opponents had any presence online.

The neglect of new media is especially curious in the case of George Monger, who in his spare time is an aspiring music producer. As one who has succesfully used online outlets like MySpace to promote his artists, he, more than the other candidates, would have been more keenly aware of the power of the internet in spreading the word of his campaign. Pollock goes as far as including a clip where Turpper denies an opportunity to create a Facebook group, claiming that she wants to be taken seriously as a candidate.

Moreover, the film does not contain any cuts of candidates trying to mobilize their friends and supporters through text messaging. It is true that Facebook and MySpace may have been in their infancy in 2007, but text messaging was certainly very popular among teens at that time.

After the screening, I talked to Pollock about the lack of new media. Pollock, who has since turned into a new media consultant for the likes of Ashton Kutcher, admitted that it was missing from the film. He went on to say that if he were to reshoot the film today, it would certainly play a much larger role.

New media aside, this documentary is worth watching. In American Politics, teens and young voters are often labeled as apathetic. A label that I’ve always thought does a disservice to the young people working for advocacy organizations and elected officials. Pollock’s film serves as a reminder that young people do care and are engaged in our democracy.

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Following up on

In my last post I wrote up a introduction post about CiviCRM, presenting as a alternative to proprietary hosted CRM solution. I did not want to end the conversation that.  The truth is over the course of my career working with the system, I have found many reasons why an organization or campaign should and shouldn’t use it:

Why You Should Choose CiviCRM:

In the crowded CRM market, there are some notable features that I feel make CiviCRM stick out from the pack:

Activities – CiviCRM offers a standard way of tracking all interactions with constituents, called activities. You can have an activity record for every communication you send to a constituent (phone call, email blast, text message) and one for every interaction they have with you (donation, event registration, website registration). You can customize create custom activity types with custom data fields so you can collect information relevant to each type of action. As an example, you may set up a custom activity for “signed petition” and add custom source and sub-source code fields to track how that person found your petition.

Custom profiles – Administrators can configure custom sets of fields to collect specific data about constituents on CiviCRM forms. This gives an organization extreme flexibility in what information they gather from constituents and can be used to build registration forms and program applications for your CMS system. As an example, you may configure a custom profile to collect a person’s food preferences on an event registration page.

CRM integration – Out of the box CiviCRM comes with integration with Drupal and Joomla. This can save organizations a lot on development costs from custom integration CRM systems.

Geocoding/Mapping – CiviCRM has native integration with the Google or Yahoo! Maps API to geocode all contacts as they are created. You can then map any custom search within the system. This is also very useful when building geographic search tools or mapping applications that plot CiviCRM data.

Task Management – CiviCRM uses activities as a tool for task management. You can assign an activity to any team member and track the status of that activity. Each user has a custom dashboard, which lists out all activities that have been assigned to them. This can be a powerful feature for managing organizing teams or staff spread out geographically.

Customizable Dashboards – Each user is given a custom dashboard similar to an iGoogle page. That person can embed widgets, which are CiviCRM reports, on that dashboard so they get a snapshot view of what is going on within the organization. You can get the information you need quickly without having to rerun reports each time.

Fundraising – CiviContribute is one of the most well developed components of the system. It offers very customizable donation forms, personal fundraising pages, embeddable widgets, and premiums. The one caveat is that CiviContribute does not allow you to source code contributions from specific pages, but that can be overcome if you have a developer who can customize the system to do so.

Why you shouldn’t use CiviCRM:

Capacity: The number one determinant, in my opinion, for any organization that wants to use CiviCRM is capacity. Although CiviCRM is free to download, it is not free to maintain. You need a level of technical expertise to apply upgrades and customize the system. You also need to host the system yourself, which will require some level of system administration work. If you do not have the technical expertise in house or the funds to pay a developer to support the system for you, then weight the cost/benefit of going with a hosted solution.

No Advocacy Tools – CiviCRM offers no tools for online advocacy. To launch petitions, letter to the editor or congress campaigns, etc., you need to roll your own tools. There are a few good modules for Drupal that allow for petitions, but are lacking when trying to target elected officials or some entity (newspaper, business, etc) with personal letters from constituents. There are some tools under development for running canvassing and phone banking reports, but there is still the gap in there not being a robust online advocacy solution.

No Asset Management – There is still no mechanism in CiviCRM for managing photos and other web assets associated with online forms. It is not uncommon for organizations to embed images in emails and on contribution pages. This is a huge annoyance to have to upload the image somewhere within the CMS them go back into Civi to include it within your content.

Underdeveloped Email Tool – The one area of CiviCRM I feel is the most neglected is the CiviMail. Don’t believe the hype when people say it can’t scale, it can. But, from a features perspective, most organizations running sophisticated email marketing programs would be disappointed with it. Templates are not very easy to set up, you cannot use conditional content or place in tokens donation amounts, there is no split testing mechanism, and there are repeated complaints about the accuracy of its reporting (which may or may not be true). You can customize it to your desire, but this brings us right back to whether your organization has the capacity.

Developer Focused – There have been great inroads in improving the usability of CiviCRM over the past year. It is still somewhat of a developer-focused system. To create custom reports, new case types, tokens for the email blast tool, etc.; you need to be a developer. Most organizations don’t have developers on staff and are left without the ability to implement some basic things, like custom reports, that other systems offer GUI tools to do.

Conclusion

Choosing a CRM system in general is a roll of the dice. You are presented with facts regarding features and functionality, but your success with any platform ultimately comes down to your strategy for utilizing it.

Do not be caught in a position where you choose to use CiviCRM for the wrong reasons, and don’t let a hack tell you why it is the best solution since sliced bread. CiviCRM is not free, there are cost to implement and maintain it which scale depending on your degree of use and customization. Using CiviCRM will not make you the next Barack Obama nor raise you hundreds of millions of dollars online. Get through the fog of misconceptions to get down to the real nitty-gritty so you can make an informed decision.

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Today’s guest post is written by

In recent years, many organizations and campaigns have sought to consolidate their constituent relationship management (CRM) to one place and by all accounts the trend is a good one.  Many of these organization and campaigns choose to use proprietary hosted solution such as one provided by Wired For Change, Blue State Digital, Convio and Salesforce. The perception exist that if an organization is looking to use a CRM, they must choose from one of company listed above. That is simply not true. An alternative to these proprietary CRMs  is CiviCRM, an open-source than can be used a stand-alone software or integrated with Joomla! and Drupal.

There doesn’t seem to be much gray area around CiviCRM – either you love it or you hate it. ‘Tis one of the risk we face when we choose a CRM platform to use. Either we make informed decisions and select a system based on why it is (and isn’t) a good choice for our organization, or we choose solutions haphazardly and end up kicking ourselves when we realize it doesn’t do what we want the way we want it to.

For those not familiar with CiviCRM, it is an open source CRM system targeted at the “civic” sector. It offers common features that most nonprofit CRM systems offer now-a-days: data management and reporting; online contribution functionality and donation management; event management and online registration functionality; and email blast tool with open and click through tracking. Civi offers other components that make it a pretty robust all-in-one solution, such as membership management, grant management, and case management, that get less recognition but should also be noted.

People are also attracted to CiviCRM because it is open source. This means you have full access to your data and the source code of the system at any time. You can customize CiviCRM to meet your needs. Your team can run queries directly on the database. You don’t have to deal with restrictive licenses and high vendor fees. You are in the drivers seat.

There are many reasons to use CiviCRM for your campaign, probably as many reasons not to use it. As with any system, it has its strengths and weaknesses, all which are relative depending on your organization’s needs. The fact that it doesn’t offer a petition tool probably doesn’t matter to a foundation, but will to an advocacy organization. You have to take into consideration the features and functions which pertain to your specific use cases in order to make an informed decision on using CiviCRM or not.

In a follow up post, I will a deeper look at some of the feature that CiviCRM has to offer.  Stay tuned.

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

1. Experience on the campaign trail

2. Personnel management experience

3. Technical expertise

4. Communication skills & project management experience

5. Vision

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

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