Advocacy Avenue

POLC: How We Did It - the role of money in the Obama and McCain campaigns

The theme of this keynote conversation, the last session I was able to attend, wasn't particularly supposed to be money.   Joe Rospars (Former Director of New Media, Obama) and Michael Palmer (eCampaign Director, McCain) talked about what they did, their results, and lessons for future campaigns, but from early on the focus was definitely resources.

Why resources?  Well, aside from being able to buy more TV ads, the Obama campaign had more staff.  Probably a lot more staff.  One New York Times story about August campaign spending, for instance, said "Mr. Obama, the Democratic candidate from Illinois, spent $2.7 million on salaries in August, compared with $1.1 million for Mr. McCain, the Republican of Arizona."

So what can you do with extra staff time?

• Be in more places - Obama had profiles and updates on Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn but also Eons, BlackPlanet, MiGente....
• Build tools - Online phonebanking. iPhone app (built by supporters, not the campaign itself). Election day turnout system. Polling place finder. Investing in technology to make the campaign more efficient.
• Send many targeted messages - Segment, use the ladder of engagement to get people more involved over time, identify your best advocates - all of those strategies take time.
• Create your own news - From the NYTimes Bits blog: “The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours,” Mr. Trippi said. “To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million.”

With less money/time, you should probably focus on the sites with greater returns and find existing tools.  It's still worth targeting your messages and creating your own news, even if you can't follow those strategies to the same extent.

As Palmer said, McCain's campaign tried to keep up with Obama's, but I'd say one place they might have done better is the last point: they started out offering reporters and bloggers lots of access, but that tightened as they did more poorly.  If you don't have a national campaign's ability to get messages out with TV ads, etc., you can't afford to follow their example.  In the age of Google, more content about you means finding more supporters.  More supporters gets you more donations gets you more staff time gets you more supporters - you can win an election that way.

POLC: Reaching Congress, according to Congress and according to advocates

My two morning panels were an interesting contrast: both talked about social media and influencing Congress, but from very different perspectives.  First we heard  from four members of Congress who are active on Twitter. Then we heard from advocates (from Fleishman-Hillard mainly) about how to reach Congress.

First the major similarity: both panels know communication is changing, that it's becoming more decentralized and more personal.  Congressman Tim Ryan (D, OH-17) said social media "accelerated the decentralization of messaging."  Bill Black of Fleishman commented that most lobbyists look with horror at the idea information is being dispersed - but now organizations realize they can't afford not to be doing blogging, Twitter, etc.

But unlike the advocates' view of the future,  the elected officials seem to be coping with the stream of messages, so far.  Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) reads all her @replies each evening.  Congressman Steve Israel (D, NY-2) said he'd tweeted about Jay Bybee and gotten responses from "sophisticated" people knowledgeable about the issues, and that was valuable and had more impact on his office than messages through other channels.  Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R, WA-5) commented that she has email screened so only messages from Washington State residents reach her, and so far it's OK that that doesn't work on Twitter right now (McCaskill has started asking her constituents to use #mo, but they aren't tracking that yet).  They'd like more staff/funding to push these ideas further - Ryan would like to organize discussions between his office and individual classrooms, for instance - but so far the mix of professional and more personal (McCaskill about a cellphone dropped in the toilet, Ryan being told he bought the wrong food during the Food Stamp Challenge) is working.

The advocates are focused on cutting through noise - and making their advocacy look authentic.  They know the politicians talk about things like Ryan's stack of letters six inches tall in his district office, or Israel getting "astroturf phone calls is what we call them."  John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation has heard staffers talk about hitting Reply All and getting huge numbers of bounces.  Black mentioned a member of Congress getting a postcard purportedly from himself, supporting the opposite of his position.

So the advocates recommended associations reaching out beyond their members to find more supporters, though sometimes the biggest audience for your messaging campaign might be your own members ("look, we're doing something about the issue you care about!").  They suggested making things tangible - once 100 people in a district signed in support of more funding for locally grown food, Michael Bassik of Air America said MSHC Partners (his old employer) would go buy locally grown food from that district and deliver a basket along with the signatures.  Pat Cleary of Fleishman talked about the Fix Housing First campaign, and how useful Twitter was for putting out a constantly updated feed of information - Black went to a fundraiser for his old boss Steny Hoyer and learned the bill would be delayed for Sherrod Brown's return, and the only people who knew were those in the Fix Housing First network.  And as Bassik said, "there's still no substitute for an in-person meeting with a member of Congress."

None of that sounds much like "I sent an @reply and the senator read it."  Advocates are still focused on mobilizing lots of people and on having in-person relationships with officials.  Officials seem more likely to value individual, personalized messages.  One questioner stood up in the elected officials session and talked about new tools being able to generate phone calls at a rate he thought Congressional offices just couldn't handle, and the same is certainly true of social media.  I'm expecting a collision in the near future, and I expect the advocates' aggregate view to mostly win.  My hope is that the listening tools now being developed for corporations, with evaluation of each mention's tone, will be adapted to Congressional listening.  That's the only way the offices are going to be able to scale.

(Added) More on Congress and Twitter and advocacy and astroturf:

• Congress panel liveblog from Jill Miller Zimon at Writes Like She Talks
• Congress panel recap from National Journal
• Matt Bai in the New York Times on "the promise of false intimacy between politicians and voters"
• Claire McCaskill on why she tweets
• Eagle-Tribune on fake letters to their editor

One last note on the power of Twitter: Israel was delayed in getting to the panel (and John Culberson unfortunately couldn't make it because of flu).  Israel tweeted "Traffic! They can figure out how I can instantly communicate with you, but not how to move a disabled car from the left lane of I-95 in DC!"  A minute later, @nerdette, otherwise known as Tanya Tarr, retweeted his message and I saw it.  About ten minutes later, the moderator read it to the session.  Once Israel arrived, I saw Tanya taking a picture of the panel.  A couple minutes later, she posted a link to the picture on Twitter. New communications in action.

The Congressional panel also marks the debut of my username on television: my question was read (though not answered) and the panel was broadcast on C-SPAN. I'm unduly amused by this. You can watch the archived session to catch all the funny bits I've left out.

Launched: Second Life component of the ACLU's Close Guantanamo Campaign

With IDI's assistance, the American Civil Liberties Union held the first in a series of live events in its new space on Second Life's Progressive Island on January 11, 2008, in conjunction with the Close Guantanamo Day of Action.

The new space includes "Gone GITMO" (PowerPoint), a program produced by Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil and built by Second Life architect Buhbuhcuh Fairchild. The space allows Second Life residents to take a virtual tour of Camp X-Ray. Residents can also sign a petition and wear virtual orange clothing as a way to express opposition to torture and indefinite detention at the U.S.-run prison.

The event included introductory remarks by Constance DeChurney, a Q&A session by ACLU expert Ben Wizner and a statement and Q&A session with Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil, as well as a live virtual performance by Juel Resistance, an acoustical blues band.

We had excellent attendance, thanks to the ACLU group in Second Life, other Second Life groups and mentions in blogs including ACLU Blog, Massively, Your 2nd Place and Business Communicators of Second Life.  Keep an eye out for future events in the series.

- Kevin

Pulling activists up the ladder of engagement

Anyone who deals with grassroots activists needs to read Seth Godin's "I gave at the office." That means nonprofits, of course, the focus of his post, but it also means associations, corporations, unions, Chambers of Commerce, political campaigns, veterans' groups, multiple sclerosis patients, bicycle commuters.... Attention is scarce, and existing ways to reach people who care about your issues are failing under the strain.

But you can use the internet to create new ways to engage. Change.org, the Facebook Causes application, and individual efforts such as LitLiberation and the Frozen Pea Fund are changing nonprofit fundraising.  Political activists can put together single-issue lobbying coalitions in days, not months of overtures and negotiations.

For any site or technology, you can just as well ask "What's the activism model?" as you can "What's the business model?" Shawn Zehnder Lea has an excellent post on the activism model for Twitter, a microblogging service. With Twitter, people sign up to receive your alerts and then you can direct them to make a phone call, visit a website, talk to each other, interact at an event, etc. It's lightweight and immediate (you can interact via text message). Lea's post is specifically about associations, but everything in it applies more broadly. And as Godin suggested, Twitter can pull people into actually doing something for/with your organization.

That's the kind of interaction the internet makes possible, and that's what activists will demand. Make it personal, make it brief, make it easy to act once, make it easy to do more. Your development director, public relations staff, and lobbying team will thank you - and so will the stakeholders who have adopted your organization's mission as part of their own.

Facebook: Not Just a Pretty Face

I am a big fan of Facebook and tend to tell whoever will listen that I think (unlike some other social networks) that it may have a lengthy shelf life. Honestly, the strictly-business network LinkedIn would be greatly improved if it mimicked some of Facebook's features more closely such as the newsfeed, status updates and convenient mobile access. About 80% of college students today have profiles in Facebook -- they will enter the workforce with a built-in network that many folks more seasoned and worldly than them would envy. Facebook has 24 million members and is growing quickly. Many younger people have stopped using email altogether, preferring the (so far) spam-free direct and multilayered messaging environment offered by social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Facebook recently took a few more strides forward with their launch of numerous innovative applications that you can choose to adopt for your profile. Among my Facebook friends who include mostly professional colleagues, the most popular apps have been Causes and Video. I've heard raves about the iLike app and some concerns about some of the apps' stability.

Fortune ran a great article on this recently with a quote from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Here's a slice:

"We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications," Zuckerberg told me, saying it would be analogous to the platform that Microsoft Windows provides for developers. Outsiders can now develop Internet services on Facebook's infrastructure, he explains, that will have full access to all its members. Just as it is when someone writes a program for Windows, programmers won't need any permission from Facebook or any special business relationship with the company.

This is likely to result in an explosion of creativity. In addition to its basic features of a profile, a friends list and tools to communicate, Facebook today gives all members access to six mostly modest applications on the left side of its home page - Photos, Notes, Groups, Events, Posted Items and the classifieds service it launched last week called Marketplace. It also launched a very cool video application Thursday. But also today 65 partner companies unveiled more than 85 additional applications that members can install immediately.

[...]

From here on it will be wide open. Anyone will have access to Facebook's so-called "markup language," which is intended to be usable even by those with rudimentary programming skills. So kids in dorm rooms will be able to create simple applications to coordinate TV-watching or trips to the cafeteria with their friends. And some creative amateur coders are likely to come up with amazing new things to do inside Facebook. Companies, too, will find many ways that Facebook applications can improve productivity and collaboration.

The company will impose no limitations on what kinds of applications others can create, except that they be legal. Says Zuckerberg: "They can sell sponsorships, they can have ads, they can sell things, they can link off to another site - we are just agnostic." He promises that Facebook will not give its own applications any special privileges or exclusive access to its members.

The company will continue to primarily obtain its revenue from advertising, at least at first. It is betting that the increased usage resulting from the platform strategy will dramatically increase its ad inventory as well as help it grow membership even faster. Revenues this year are already estimated by outsiders to be around $150 million. (The company will not confirm the figure.)

Facebook is the company to watch, IMHO in terms of the potential impact on our personal and professional communications going forward. If you aren't already looking to understand the Facebook environment, it's not too late to jump in and watch the future unfold. Watch out Google and Yahoo!

 

Using Premiums as Incentives: Think from a Customer's Perspective

During breakfast this morning, I caught a Mother’s Day-themed television ad from a local car dealership. They were telling folks that even if they would stop by the store, they would receive a bouquet of flowers that they could give their mothers for Sunday.

Initially, the ad just didn’t make any sense. Why would people be motivated to come to a car dealership for free flowers (unless they’re very strapped for cash – in which case they should save the car ride given the gas prices in the DC area these days)? Why would potential car shoppers want a bouquet of flowers as a freebie?

I assume that the dealership’s marketing intention was to drive traffic (no pun intended) to their store and use their manpower to convert those individuals into buying customers. It would be surprising if the campaign draws enough traffic to their shops as they would have expected unless they know their customers far better than me. After all, there is still a disconnect if a free bouquet of flowers for Mom on Mother’s Day is a true incentive to be subjected to a dog-and-pony show at the car dealership.

This type of marketing is far more common, especially in nonprofits. Many organizations are quick to jump to premium campaigns without really thinking about their target audience.

For instance, there was an organization who gave away free bracelets as an incentive for people to opt into their mailing list. Of course, with such a low ask for a freebie, people were inclined to sign up, but their advocacy and fundraising conversions were also very low. After some data mining, the organization found that their new subscribers were too disaffected or young to be advocates and donors. They could have at least gotten more bang/buck for their bracelets if they had asked folks to donate. Lesson learned.

Web 2.0 and the Virginia Tech Tragedy

I just came back from the Social Media Summit in Chicago where I was invited to give a workshop on Web 2.0 and how to measure the impact of your communications in a rapidly changing environment. Lee Aase who leads both "old" media and new media for Mayo Clinic has done a great job blogging about the conference. Here's Day 2.
 

One of the points I often make when speaking on the subject, especially to C-level executives who tend to be a little older, is that Web 2.0 is a generational phenomenon. The demographics tend to skew towards Generations X and Y which makes sense given that, unlike boomers, folks between the ages of 16-24 and 25-34 and 35-44 have grown up with computer technology and have become comfortable using the internet to both gather and share information.

Here at IDI, we were shocked and saddened by what happened yesterday at Virginia Tech, which is considered by many in the Washington DC area as a local school (given its popularity with regional VA students).  I think it is instructive to look at how the students were able to organize and communicate both among themselves and with friends, family and the media, to a certain extent outstripping the university's ability to communicate with its student and faculty. Had the university employed its strong Facebook network which links in with many students' mobile phones along with sending a campuswide  email after the first shooting, I think it's fair to ask how many lives might have been saved.

The Washington Post remarked on the phenomenon: how a young student originally from the war zone of Palestine was bravely able to capture the first sights and sounds from the scene on his cell phone and immediately sent the file to CNN.com.

Albarghouti, a graduate student at Virginia Tech, is "the cellphone guy" -- a 24-year-old who used the camera in his sleek, silver Nokia N70 smartphone to capture video of police rushing toward Norris Hall, the building where the shots rang out.

This is what this YouTube-Facebook-instant messaging generation does. Witness. Record. Share.
[...]

And many Hokies, past and present, are on Facebook, the popular online directory for college and high school students. Nearly 39,000 are listed on Virginia Tech's network, putting it among the top 25 college networks on Facebook, a a spokesman for the directory said.

When Albarghouti got back to his apartment, he had about 279 new messages on his Facebook account.

Adam Connor also does a solid analysis over at Personal Democracy Forum titled "Virginia Tech, Facebook, and Online Grieving". It's important to understand that 80% of college students are in Facebook. The alumni network it may have taken Baby Boomers or even Generation X years to build is alreadly in place for Facebook users. They use Facebook not just as a LinkedIn style rolodex and resume but also as a way to share location, news, information and to organize groups and social events. There is a constant RSS stream of information about your friends and contacts in Facebook that people use as an alternative to email. Facebook, particularly among people aged 25 and under, is a verb, not just a noun. Here's an excerpt from Adam's post:

 

Within hours of the tragedy that occurred today at Virginia Tech, ABC News had published a story entitled "If You're OK, Please Update Your Profile " which quoted someone named Carlos 'Mohawk Monday' Fernandez asking, "Many of us are all worried about our friends, so lets do this. If you are okay! Please update your status in facebook to say something like 'I'm okay'."

 

With cell phones spotty because of the massive volume of calls, and concrete information even more scarce, Facebook became a vital way of letting family, friends, and even strangers know that you were OK.

 

[...]

 

Within minutes of the tragedy breaking into the news, Facebook groups began to sprout up.  Try typing "Virginia Tech" or " Hokies" into Facebook's group search feature. You'll find dozens of groups like, "Our hearts are with you, VA Tech," 3 different " Always Remember Virginia Tech" groups, and  " A Tribute to those who passed at the Virginia Tech Shooting" group which now has 42,326 members (42,327 now that I've joined). [...]
 

 

Tomorrow, we'll see an online outpouring of grief for those 33 students lost. And their Facebook profiles will become memorials, tributes to their lives that were cut short as friends from far and near remember them.

 

In the coming days, we may even find out that the killer had a Facebook profile. We'll pour over his profile and try to understand the incomprehensible, never succeeding.

 

But people from across the world will come together to remember people they may have never have know, or have known all their lives. And they'll all do it on a virtual place that is as far, or as close, as you can get to Virginia Tech.

 

Today, when I say that social networking, that Facebook, is changing social interaction as we know it, I only wish I didn't have to illustrate it with examples like this.

 

 

Finding local political bloggers

Micah Sifry over at Personal Democracy Forum has a great article on how to sniff out the local political bloggers in your area. He recommends Placeblogger.com for example. Why is that important? Here at IDI, we've been advising clients since 2004 to keep an eye on the exploding local blog scenes. Local blogs have local power. And people in power like Members of Congress for instance or state politicians are very interested in keeping their ears to the ground in their districts.

National political blogs have key insight, analysis and large, influential audiences. Yet, if you want to hear what voters are saying in your district, you're heading for local blogs. Local political blog networks have greatly expanded since the 2004 election and played a stronger role in 2006. This is real grassroots in turbo mode, speeding up communications among local organizers and citizens with larger audiences and narrowing the distance between bloggers and policymakers. There's a lot of emphasis in the blogosphere on strengthening these networks so look for local netroots blogs to flex their muscle in news, analysis, outreach, organizing and fundraising as we head into a new Congress and onward to the 2008 election cycle.

RootsCamp Review

IDI was pleased to be one of the sponsors of last weekend's RootsCamp. Shana Glickfield and Kevin Reid from IDI joined me at the well-attended Saturday night party downtown. I also attended both days this weekend and co-led a session on Race, Religion and Outreach 2008 with Tanya Tarr - IT Director from Working America/AFL-CIO, Amy Ard - National Field Organizer for Sojourners and James Rucker - Co-Founder of Color of Change. James comes from MoveOn.org and is using many of the successful online-to-offline grassroots organizing techniques to create a community targeted at African-Americans and those interested in Katrina recovery. In only a year, Color of Change has built a list of 60,000 people almost exclusively through word of mouth (and keyboard).

It was a great and standing-room only session. Tanya and Amy had great information and insights to share from the 2006 election. Zack Exley told us about his experience as a progressive Christian living in the South and Sheri Divers, Communications Director for Democracy For America shared with us her astonishment that conservatives have succeeded in accusing those with progressive values "Godless" despite the moral and religious underpinnings of progressive initiatives such as the Civil Rights Movement. The notes from this session and other sessions are now available on the RootsCampDC wiki.

It's clear that there is a lot of energy being driven from the netroots and that the Democratic Party -- at both the local and national level -- and major organizations are taking note. RootCampers were diverse and were seasoned in the art of politics. It will be interesting to see how this dynamic expands as the new Congress comes into session and as the 2008 election season launches into full swing. We'll also have to wait and see how the conservative blogosphere will respond.

Jerome Armstrong of MyDD has a summary of his impressions from RootsCamp that is worth a look.

I would recommend that you consider attending one of the RootsCamps in your area or join one of the upcoming weekly sessions in SecondLife. Thanks to everyone who participated in RootsCampDC 2006, especially clients, partners and friends of IDI.

IDI is Proud to Sponsor RootsCamp DC and the PAC Grassroots Conference

IDI is excited to sponsor two upcoming important events for those interested in grassroots communications -- both online and offline.

RootsCamp DC this weekend Dec 2-3 is a gathering of people from progressive organizations who "played a role in the 2006 elections and are prepared to share with others innovations, failures, old wisdom and new discoveries." The attendees include some of IDI's strategic partners, stakeholders and clients. A number of star bloggers are also attending such as Jerome Armstrong, Matt Stoller and Arianna Huffington. You can see a list of attendees here at the RootsCamp wiki. IDI is one of the co-sponsors of the Saturday evening Happy Hour at MCCXXIII in Dupont Circle. We look forward to seeing invited attendees there.

IDI has been a sponsor of the annual Public Affairs Council's Grassroots Conference for several years. In the past, we helped to bring technological innovations to PAC participants such as sponsoring WiFi access. This year, we've created a conference wiki for participants to share information on grassroots best practices before, during and after this seminal meeting of grassroots professionals from major organizations and companies. Take a look -- you can view but must be a registered conference attendee to edit.

What is a Wiki, you may ask? It's a growing social networking tool for collaborative content authoring online. Here's one definition:

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly. (Source: Wiki.Org)

The largest wiki in the world is the Wikipedia which is now among the top ten websites in the world. Wikipedia is "a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". It has become the largest encyclopedia ever created. At over 5 million entries in 250 languages, it stands as a unique human achievement. Take a look at the PAC conference wiki and the Wikipedia for examples of wikis in action.

We look forward to seeing you January 23-26, 2007 in St. Petersburg FL for the 30th Annual Grassroots Conference and to seeing those participating in RootsCamp DC this weekend.