Situational Marketing

Selling Capacity For The 2008 Political Campaign

The calls have started coming in about voice broadcast, e-mail marketing, and text messaging for political campaigns.  Most political consultants are focused on the cost of robocalls, but there's more to an online campaign and messaging that voice broadcast. 

The smart campaigns are taking advantage of the internet to drive political messages, organize volunteers, and in the case of the presidential campaigns, raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

Don't get left behind.  Yes, you can contact us at Voterblast to talk about  your voice broadcast needs (it's cheaper now to reserve capacity), but be thinking about how you can use text clubs, e-mails, and blogs to affect your local district and state races.

SMS For Political Donations

The next great feature of the SMS marketing world is waiting to be used.  All you need to do is convince the FEC that donations by text are a function of a free and fair election process.

The big news this year has been microdonations - donations to political campaigns that are less than $100. Barack Obama has set new records for money raised with donations from over a million donors. These donors are not tracked under $100 (which should raise eyebrows but doesn't), but what if you could drop the limit down to $10.

Imagine this.  You're at a rally with 10,000 people.  You ask them to pull out their mobile phones, and in a display of solidarity, donate $10 to the candidates by texting the name of the candidate to a number on a screen.  If half of the people comply, you're just raised $50,000. Well, actually you've raised $50,000 minus the cost of the calls, which would actually be substantial with today's carriers.

But what if you could get the carriers to go down to $1, $1.50 a call - and take the $8.50 for your candidate?  Instant fundraising, tracked through the mobile phone bill.  It's the ultimate in direct democracy, and it's going on in Korea.  Why isn't it going on in the United States?

Using Voterblast To Connect To Volunteers

The big story in this year's presidential campaign isn't just about race, gender, and national security.  the big story is how candidates are mobilizing online, using their e-mail lists to drive action, raise funds 9$85 million from Barack and Hillary in the last quarter), and connect volunteers.

When you think of political messaging, you probably think of robocalls and all the negative press they've received in the last year.  We think the attention has been unfair, and it's not just because we sell capacity to political consultants.  People don't mind robocalls - they mind bad robocalls.  They mind robocalls that are sent without thought to who you're calling, and when they haven't given you permission to call.

It's the same with direct mail, e-mail marketing, and texting. To get the most out of your effort, you have to create a planned campaign with goals.

That's whey we created voter decoder to go along with the blast product. VoterDecoder allows volunteers, supporters, staff, and constituents the ability to manage how they wish to be contacted, and it allows you to stay fully compliant by giving opt-out and opt-in power to the people you're messaging.  The goal of all of our software is to save you time and money.  If the administration of your contact list is handled by the public, you don't have to put precious campaign resources into administrative tasks.

Consumer Decoder™ is an advanced data capture application which enables campaign mangers and candidates the ability to speak to constituents on their terms. During the registration process, we gather relevant contact information and segment and profile your voters into several different groups. During this time we also ask constituents to choose a preferred communication medium for future dialog opportunities The communication mediums include voice broadcasting, email marketing, text messaging, fax and direct mail.  This provides candidates a real opportunity for increased loyalty since voters decide how they would like to receive candidate communications.

Voterblast For Your Political Campaign

Voterblast Capabilities

• Campaigns utilizing voice broadcasting, Consumer Decoder, IVR and text messaging to reach constituents and staff
• Integration of voice broadcast, Consumer Decoder, email marketing, IVR and text messaging into traditional direct mail or advertising campaigns to get your voters interacting with your campaign
• Utilize our text messaging,Consumer Decoder, voice broadcasting, or IVR technologies to ease in the collection of supporter information at event sites

• Immediately connect a voice broadcasting into a campaign call center at the end of a message
• Respond to survey and polling questions and enter data by touch tone, voice recording, or text message
• Create a video and/or audio podcasts for voters so they can download to clearly see and hear your views on important topics

Setting Standards for Political Email Lists

The rise of the Internet has led to many a late night and upset stomach for managers of political campaigns. Falling under the category of "Yet Another Thing You Have To Do", the internet has rapidly gone from quirky messaging piece to fundamental piece of your communications puzzle.

The use of e-mail, phone broadcast, and internet messaging is very simple.

Step 1: Get names, addresses, and phone numbers.
Step 2: Contact the voter and tell them to vote for your candidate.
Step 3: Repeat
Step 4:  Win Landslide election, get hired two years from now.

Unfortunately, the modern campaign suffers from the same problems as businesses that market products via the internet. Anything that is easy to do, attracts spammers.

The ease of messaging has led to the abuse of messaging, and voters quickly got fed up with inefficient contacting methods.  There's a cost in sending too many direct mail pieces to the same address.  Postage and material costs force direct mailers to be efficient.  E-mail changes so much, and is so easy to use, that many campaigns attempt a shotgun approach, creating a virtual mailing list and never bothering to make sure it was accurate.

Well, consumers are fighting back, and it has led some people to ask for email standards in campaigns.  Enter the Campaign Monitor Blog.  Mark Wyner is creating a new site that will discuss email standards and the need to use them in campaigns.  Now, Mark is talking about marketing businesses, but it's applicable to the political world as well.

There is a cost to bad email messaging in politics, but it's initially borne by the candidate and the voter, not the e-mail messaging partner.  Ultimately, that lack of standards hurts entire industry, so a lot of kudos to Mark for stepping up.

We're doing our part, but like good capitalists, we developed a software to do so.  We'll be talking more about VoterDecoder in the coming months, but the short version is we allow the voter to choose how they want to be contacted.  Self-Help E-mail List Maintenance.  Keep watching this space for more.