In Australia, most elections take place during the normal, general election period. The accepted wisdom is that local campaigns make up, at most, 3 percent of a candidate’s primary vote. The rest comes from the central campaign from party head office: television ads, the leader’s personal appeal, the party’s policies and so on. There are [...]
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Use your union’s Facebook page to build your email list
Facebook is a tremendous communications tool for unions – especially white-collar unions – and with only a small amount of technical know-how, it can also be super-charged for organising and campaigning. If you haven’t already, check my earlier articles about unions using Facebook: Best practice use of Facebook for unions and Using Facebook as an [...]
Why I'm not blacking out on Australia Day
The legion of No Clean Feed activists have developed several campaign sites, one of which is The Great Australian Internet Blackout. Their call to action (in addition to writing to the Government and adding a twibbon to your Twitter profile picture) is to blackout (darken) your website on Australia Day. Their reasons for doing this [...]
Email is the “killer app” for online campaigning
The Massachusetts election has blown open the mainstream media’s infatuation with social networking tools, with headlines like “the iphone app that killed Coakley“. On the techblogs, there is also detailed examination of new tools that aided the winning Mass. Senate candidate Scott Brown. I am hardly immune to the temptation of writing about the exiting [...]
Collaborative online tools for political campaigning
You don’t need to be a big national campaign to use the myriad suite of free online tools. With the analysis of the Brown victory in Massachusetts continuing, it is emerging that this state-level campaign made extensive use of Google Apps: But something else has Google reps particularly chuffed: how much the Brown campaign, they [...]
Massachusetts election outcome shows dangers of incumbency
On Tuesday, I wrote that the Democrats would be the victims of incumbency. In Massachusetts, a strongly Democratic state, the Dems control the state Legislature, most or all of the Congressional seats, and now all but one of the Senate seats. With Obama in the White House, and the Democrats controlling the US Congress and [...]
Key messaging advice for unions
Every union communication challenge is unique – the circumstances, membership, employer, and so on are different every time. Having a framework to assist in messaging for diverse campaigns can make each campaign easier, and can help union communications anticipate what the employer (or opponent) may say. (George Lakoff called this “framing”.) The messaging quadrant The [...]
Using Google Docs in your union campaign
Google Documents is a free online service that provides word processing and spreadsheets that are stored online (in the “cloud”). Google Docs basically allows you to mimic Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The main feature (in my view) is that it is online, so it can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet, [...]
The problem of crowd-sourcing campaigns
I’ve written previously about a very successful grassroots campaign – Save VCA – and how it brought together a diverse group of people. A key element to the success of this campaign has been its coordination at an early stage. There is a very interesting discussion about the No Clean Feed movement by Mark over [...]
Innovating from Opposition
The British Conservatives are widely viewed as being on the cutting edge of online campaigning and “digital democracy”. It’s one of the benefits of being in opposition – you don’t have the infrastructure, institutions and culture that Governments have. Oppositions can think big, experiment and (this far out from an election) can afford minor failures. [...]
No Clean Feed campaign needs to drop their "censorship" obsession
There is a fair bit of soul searching that seems to be going on in the “No Clean Feed” movement of late, especially following the lack of mass-rallies in support of the campaign following the release of the Federal Government’s report into the Internet filter. UPDATE: Read the key messaging ideas for the No Clean [...]
Going local – social networking for politicians
While there’s a million and one articles on the internet about how Obama built his success on social networks. There are fewer articles about how local candidates’ campaigns used social networking to promote their candidacy. I’ve previously written about one instance of a local campaign – the governor race in Virginia – using text message [...]
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Lessons from the (Modern) Prince, Part 4: Understanding the Greens in Tasmania
- No Clean Feed campaign needs to drop their "censorship" obsession
- Alan Kohler shows he doesn't know about politics
- The Robin Hood Tax
- Seven ways for unions to use Twitter
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