engage communications for a new era

Folks are abuzz about how the candidates are rollin’ and Tumbloggin’ around the Internet, trying to become more Pinteresting. Most of the discussion this year seems to center around what folks in the Web world call the front-end — turning GIFs, (now old-fashioned) web videos, and CSS and HTML5 effects into weapons of mass political destruction. Beyond its head-turning message, an underappreciated fact about the Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” is that it was the first parallax slider-based campaign attack in American history.

But while the media and the pundits focus on how visual media is reshaping the debate, something else is going on. The Guardian reports this week that the Obama campaign’s long-awaited grassroots toolkit, with the minimalist name of “Dashboard,” is almost ready for public release:

The Dashboard project is being led by Michael Slaby, one of Obama’s digital gurus, along with Joe Rospars and Teddy Goff and Obama’s director of field organizing Jeremy Bird. Collectively, they have been quietly reinventing traditional presidential races for the wired age.

They have put together a team of more than 100 statisticians, predictive modellers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software engineers, bloggers, internet advertising experts and online organisers at the Obama For America headquarters in downtown Chicago, which has been labouring since its start to craft a new generation of digital campaign tools.

They are keeping specific details about Dashboard heavily under wraps for fear that they might lose the substantial advantage they now enjoy over their rivals in the Romney campaign.

They have also been keen not to reveal the tool until it has undergone substantial testing by staff. All that the Obama team will say is that it represents a major step forward that could “make a huge difference in how we organise for 2012″.

Dashboard, they add, will allow any volunteer for the first time “to join, connect with and build your neighbourhood team online”.

One intriguing fact about Dashboard is how late its’ introduction comes compared to 2008. That year, My.BarackObama.com was launched on the first day of the campaign, in February 2007. By this measure, Dashboard is 15 months late. But there’s good reason for it: Unlike the out-of-the-box Blue State Digital tools that formed the core of MyBO in 2008, Dashboard was rebuilt from the ground-up, using in-house developers, some of them recruited from Facebook and Google. (The person overseeing it all, Obama campaign CTO Harper Reed, is himself a startup veteran recruited from Threadless.)

We’ll have to wait for the formal launch — it’s apparently been in use by field staff for months, and I’m not on the early invite list for these things — but from all appearances, Dashboard represents an admirable commitment by the Obama campaign to rethinking older (and successful) ways of doing things. And doing so in a way that elevates raw engineering talent in a way they didn’t in 2008.

Dashboard should also spark a renewed debate about what’s important in digital campaigns.

At the end of the day, anyone can build a Facebook page with millions of likes. Anyone can set up a Tumblr in 5 minutes and anyone with a decent sense of humor can spin up GIFs and QuickMemes, and push them to Reddit, Buzzfeed, and Upworthy. The hard stuff — the interesting stuff — is marshaling an army of engineers and data geeks to translate online energy into better and more effective offline voter contact. The meme war might be more interesting, but it’s playing out almost exclusively among political operatives and the media elite. In a close race, ground game matters, and candidates who don’t prioritize putting their ground game online will find themselves playing catchup. We learned this in 2010, when even with the political winds at their back, Republicans faced an organizational deficit and fell short in a number of key Senate races.

Winning online takes more than a Twitter account and a WordPress plugin. It takes serious engineering resources to build sophisticated grassroots and microtargeting tools like the Obama campaign is doing, and data scientists to optimize the vote. In recent years, “custom” has become a four letter word in the world of web development, but the proliferation of programming frameworks from Ruby on Rails to CakePHP to CodeIgniter mean that developers no longer have to spend time reinventing the wheel. Basic functional components you would see on most websites (like user registration modules, or formulas to calculate distances and directions) come pre-built, so that engineers can spend time on the things that add value. Coding itself is becoming more like building a site in WordPress or Drupal.

Communicators and social media experts are a dime-a-dozen. They’re important, but it takes a lot to stand out from the pack. Good engineers are harder to come by, and the Obama campaign has invested in them in spades. As I argued at a recent panel at the CampaignTech conference, this starts with campaigns and political groups working with and valuing engineers and data scientists in the same way that they currently work with and value video producers, print designers, and press people.

With the general election in full swing, it will be interesting to see the level of game the GOP brings to the battle of the engineers.

At Engage, we pride ourselves on raising the bar. And this is what we mean by that: CrossroadsGeneration.com.

Crossroads Generation, a new GOP Super PAC, is a joint venture of the College Republican National Committee, Young Republican National Federation, Republican State Leadership Committee and American Crossroads to win back young voters.

Engage’s design studio created the beautiful branding and voice behind this new group. We even developed a custom media upload solution for the site.

Check out the new CrossroadsGeneration.com and tell us what you think! And be sure to follow XG on Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve dabbled with the Facebook PHP SDK plenty of times before, and Facebook does a really awesome job of making it simple to use their SDK and their Graph API. The development and creative team at Engage know how much I love the Open-Source PHP Framework CodeIgniter by EllisLab . It’s a high-performing and extremely light-weight MVC (Model-View-Controller) Framework that has a very small foot-print when compared to the other frameworks out there. Best of all, it requires nearly zero-configuration to get setup on a web server.

I’ve been doing some research on how other developers integrate Facebook’s SDK into Codeigniter, and I haven’t seen any real solid working examples of a best practice. So I decided to throw my two-cents at it, and am releasing my findings publicly for everyone to use!

To get it setup, all you have to do is follow the very short README file instructions, and you’ll have a working example in no time. Here’s an overview of the important files to look at:

• application/conifg/Facebook.php
• application/config/Stellar.php
• application/libraries
• Controllers and Models
• application/config/autoload.php

Below you’ll find links to a working demo, the source on my GitHub Repository, and a support forum. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to email me at nick@engagedc.com. Thanks, and I hope this at least helps one person out there!

• http://codeigniter.com/forums/viewthread/216438/
• http://www.stellarfrequency.com/
• https://github.com/ncerminara/Facebook-Starter-Kit-for-Codeigniter

On this week’s show, we have a great conversation with Micah Sifry, co-founder and editorial director of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website and annual conference that covers the ways technology is changing politics. Check out Micah on Twitter @mlsif.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode of the Engage Show. We’re @EngageDC on Twitter and we’d appreciate it if you like us on Facebook.

Engage Show 65: Micah Sifry [ 43:10 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We shared this must read post from HubSpot’s Blog about essentials for effective emails with our clients this morning, but there are a few key aspects that I wanted to highlight and provide some political context for.

To summarize, their “9 Must-Have Components of Compelling Email Copy” are

• Use Actionable Language
• Personalize when possible
• Subject Lines Must be Clear, and Might be Catchy
• Align Your Subject Line Copy and Email Copy
• Establish Relevancy
• Write in the Second Person
• Talk About Benefits, Not Features
• Be Brief
• Use Actionable Language in Your CTA

Subject Lines

With each of my clients, I stress the importance of email subject line. It’s often the part we least pay attention to in an email even though there’s always lots of back-and-forth about punctuation, messaging, and wording in the body of your email. The subject line is the most important part of your email.

It’s the only part that most people will ever see. Think about it: If your open rate is 30% for a given email, 70% of people only saw your subject line. Any time I start to draft an email for a client, I make sure the I include “Subject:_______” and then as I’m writing the body of the email, I’ll usually come back and fill in the blank when I think of a catchy line.

HubSpot’s post emphasizes that subject lines need to be clear first and catchy if possible. I’d also add, based on our experience here at Engage, that the shorter a subject line is, the better it performs. Focusing on brevity also helps you achieve clarity.

For example, a subject line that says “The Democrats are attacking us and need your support to fight back” isn’t as clear as it could be and it’s way too long. “We’re under attack, help us” is both clear, brief, and, most importantly, actionable.

Relevancy

The other mistake campaigns and elected officials make is the failure to establish relevancy with their emails. Every week, I receive dozens of “e-newsletters” that tally up all of the week’s news.

These are typically long emails that are too long and have too much content. By not making the decision of what’s important, you’re leaving it to the reader. You can’t expect your supporters to complete every action or read every item in an “e-newsletter.”

At Engage, we help our clients craft concise, focused emails that have a clear call-to-action or desired outcome. If you can’t answer the question, “Why am I sending this email?” in a compelling way, you probably shouldn’t be sending it.

If you’re looking to improve your emails to supporters (and the answer should always be “yes”) then consider focusing on these nine fundamentals before you hit send on your next email.