Posts Tagged ‘online campaigning’

A number of my colleagues and I went to an lecture from Thomas Gensemer, part of the online team behind Barack Obama’s grassroots and fundraising success. Arguably, Obama’s online campaign will become the ultimate case study of the benefits of online campaigning and Gensemer was a significant contributor to this success.

What was personally interesting was that the basis of the Obama strategy lay in the importance of constant personal contact and simplicity. Gensemer made the very valid point that regular email newsletters, no matter the quality, are rarely consistently read by the majority of recipients. There were 7000+ messages sent out to Obama supporters over the course of the campaign and all averaged less than 300 words, all with the aim of getting “feet on the ground”.

The ultimate objective of the online campaigning was to create local, on-the-ground activism, so each request was aimed at getting the recipients to do something, whether that is volunteering at the local campaign office, knock on doors, leaflet or donate money. Hence, the huge amounts of funds raised and the huge number of volunteers and local organisers.

The individual touch was also vitally important and this was achieved through personalised replies. If a volunteer replied to one of the mail-outs, Gensemer said that their aim was to get a personalised reply back within 3-4 days.

It was a fascinating insight into online political campaigning, but the beauty of its simplicity means that aspects of the strategy could potentially be transferable to a good deal of what we do as public affairs and public relations professionals.

Much of our work is issue related, or can at least be linked or incorporated into issues. Therefore aspects of the Obama online campaigning strategy could be transferred across the areas of politics, global advocacy, patient group outreach, product promotion and the list goes on.

Therefore online campaigning and interaction is a fantastic tool and if done properly, can be extraordinarily powerful and transferable to a number of sectors. It is certainly something we, as communications specialists should all be getting a handle on.

It would seem that the Brown Government has taken up President Obama’s online campaigning baton. Numerous Labour and Labour surrogate sites seem to have been popping up out of nowhere.

Labour List is apparently a place “where Labour minded people come together”. It has been around for a few weeks and is currently a beta, although it is updated at an extremely high-frequency. It’s due to be formally launched on the 12^th of February.

It was founded, according to the About Us section, by New Labour identity, Derek Draper and numerous Labour characters such as Liam Byrne, Andy Reed, Hazel Blears, Keith Vaz, Ken Livingston, Ed Miliband to name but a fwe. The actual list of contributors is huge and even Ken Clarke makes an appearance as a blogger, albeit Ken Clarke the Regional Director for the London Labour Party, not the other one.

GoFourth is John Prescott’s site which aims to propel Labour to a fourth term, hence GoFourth. The site’s USP include blogs and vlogs from the former Deputy PM himself.  It was initially dreamt up in 2008 (although Prescott didn’t start posting until late January 2009) by some well-known Labour names; John Prescott, Glenys Kinnock, Richard Caborn and Alastair Campbell and aims to “create a broad grassroots movement to secure a progressive Fourth Labour Term.” Prescott also explains he once bought Tony Blair a singing fish to cheer him up.

Alistair Campbell has also launched his own site suitably called, Alistair Campbell.org. Alistair is in the unique position of not being in the Government, but is still as feared by most Tories as much as any other Labour head kicker, so his vlogs will be interesting to watch. After posting his first blog only four days ago, he intends to;

…use this site to bring together the various things I do - writing, speaking, strategising, campaigning, whether for Labour or charitable causes close to my heart. I will blog when I feel like it, vlog at least once a week, give Dave Cameron the odd whack, and hopefully engage in a bit of lively debate. Tories welcome. Some of them anyway, if only to be told where they’re going wrong.

I’m looking forward to it.

On Alistair’s links page, there is yet another Labour site, CampaignTV, which claims to be the home of progressive politics on the web. This site is video after video of pro-Labour and anti-Tory imagery. It even rekindles footage of John Major from old Spitting Image episodes.

All this of course comes after the Number 10 website upgrade midway last year to include a number of social media additions including twitter feeds, flickr and facebook posts and so on.

We already knew that Labour has a crack team already in place to win over the voters occupying the digital space, but they are certainly trying to get their message out to as many people as possible by as many people as possible. But could all these voices effectively be drowning each other out?

If anyone can think of any huge leaps the Conservatives have made into the digital world, apart from the odd tweets from the Conservative Party, please let me know, but otherwise I think they are being left seriously behind by Labour in this department.