First, a confession.  I prepared content for this blog series months ago based on the primary efforts and have been simply making tweaks as new strategies emerge.  However, for this entry I'm going to scrap the initial idea for this post and focus on a brilliant new idea the Obama campaign has implemented.

Mobile messaging is hot, there's no doubt about it.  However, many nonprofits are still grappling with the right strategies to use this channel, not to mention the technical hurdles (psst... check out Mobile Commons technology).

I must admit, I've been impressed so far with the marketing strategies of the Obama team but their recent plans to use mobile messaging to announce his VP choice is brilliant.

This strategy is something nonprofits should consider replicating.  Here are some ideas that could be announced via text messaging:

• Announce the results of a legislative vote
• Announce a fundraising milestone
• Announce a key-note speaker for your conference
• Announce an urgent advocacy request to key super-activists

The key ingredient here is announcing something people who are already invested in your organization would want to know.  Therefore it's important to take into consideration their involvement.  For instance, only offer to announce the results of the above legislative vote to constituents who took action on the advocacy campaign and similarly with supporters who made a donation to help you hit that milestone.

Why do this?

Several reasons.  The Obama campaign will likely add thousands of new supporters via this strategy, but that is not always the case.  More importantly it provides valuable information to your key supporters, which strengthens your relationship and increases their investment in your cause.  Additionally, by providing you with their cell digits you've just learned how invested they really are with your org.  I mean, we don't just give out our cell numbers to anyone! So if an individual has yet to donate but provides their digits, there's a good chance they would be willing to donate or take further action in the future, and this is highly valuable information for your organization.

Resources:

• MobileActive.org- excellent source for activism strategies and news
• Mobile Commons- Convio technology partner with a super-cool integration using our APIs. 

Nonprofit Examples:

• NARAL Pro-Choice America - Txt4Choice
• Sierra Club - Campaign Messaging

My Get Involved component becomes focused – instead of a cluster of ideas, I get a prioritized top-to-bottom list of what I should do, from least to greatest commitment, with (brief) annotations for each item so I know exactly what’s being asked of me. (Still, "A Cause Greater"? I must ask: "why so cryptic?") Best of all is the information design of this component, which becomes a stand-in for my detailed Action Center dashboard. The horizontal white squares track my progress in each of these areas, allowing me at a glance to gauge my level of impact across many of my efforts. Is anyone actually using this Action Center to this degree? I wonder. We’ll see how this plays out as the campaign unfolds, as people get engaged, and as these engagement tools are evolved based on what’s working and what’s not. For now, JohnMcCain.com wins a point for strong engagement pathways.

Turning to My.BarackObama.com: Though this site is definitely a leader on many interactive fronts (beautiful design, clear areas of focus, strong nav), I was disappointed overall at the devices for getting engaged.

Obama.com does employ the interactive utility box (actually a couple of them) – to some degree the whole long right column is one big action-focused device – this is one area where more is less. To get to either this,

or to this:

you have to scroll way past this:

...which asks for participation in high-commitment activities like attending an event or donating, but doesn’t give you a sense of the breadth of ways to join or get involved. (Sign Up Now is happily included, but by this point you have already bypassed – or completed – signing up in order to enter the site in the first place).

After deciding to sign up for the rather unfortunately abbreviated my.BO.com, in which I must give my first and last name in addition to email and zip, I’m excited to see exactly one personalized item – a state-specific event finder – and some sort of small utility drop-down menu that’s hidden at the upper right. Otherwise, however, there’s nothing on most of the page that indicates that BarackObama.com actually knows that I’ve already signed up. My interactive options are the same (still presented way down on the page), and I’m still encouraged to sign up everywhere I look. Is that all there is: the chance to sign up?

Of course the site offers more, and if you can find your way to My Dashboard, an eight-item interactive box along with a complex "Activity Index" scoring system tells a different story of sophisticated online engagement opportunities. Still, what am I being asked to do with my Friends, Events, Messages, Groups, and Fundraising? My.BO.com is navigable, absolutely, and by doing some things like clicking on "Details" to learn about the scoring system or scrolling way down on the dash and clicking around to learn more about each opportunity, I’ll get there. But for such sophisticated pathways, this site is riddled with unnecessary barriers to entry that don’t give visitors a streamlined, personalized experience to grow their relationship with the campaign over time. So, alas…we’re giving this one to McCain for clear interactive engagement pathways. Which makes it:

Obama 1 / McCain 1.

Let us know what you’d like us to evaluate next – quality of email? Blog strategy? Navigation? Overall visual design? You name it, we’ll do our best to tackle it.

In light of Misty McLaughlin's post Presidential Hopefuls Scorecard, and with AIR Austin creeping up on the horizon, I thought I would take a few minutes to briefly review the accessibility of the sites of Barack Obama and John McCain. (This will be based as much as it can be unbiasedly on accessibility - wish me luck!)

Barack Obama

Pros

• Graceful resizing for anyone who needs larger fonts.
• Commendable job separating content from design. Turn off the style sheets on this site and you end up with a decent job of pure content, and *gasp* skip links to jump over the navigation.
• Tabbing is fairly intuitive (for all of our mouse-free users out there) and seems to allow you to navigate through the site almost as if you were using a mouse.
• Closed captioned multimedia options - which means everyone has access to the content in the speeches.

Cons

• The contrast of the links to the background in some places is no where near distinct enough and could cause problems for people with visual impairments or old monitors.
• There are quite a few images with no alt tags (not even blank ones), and that can mean big trouble if you're a screen reader user.
• A couple of bad moves when it comes to the use of headers, using them for style instead of substance

John McCain

Pros

• Graceful resizing for anyone who needs larger fonts.
• Again, tabbing is fairly intuitive making it at least mostly able to be navigated by keyboard-only users.

Cons

• No closed captioning or alternative accessible features for multimedia. (The only option is a PDF brief of the speech.)
• Mediocre separation of content and design - in most parts tables are used to control positioning, which means trouble for a lot of people.
• Some links open in new windows with no indication - which completely disables the back button and hindering backwards navigation to the rest of the site.
• Absolutely no headers used on the site as far as I can tell - which means no indication of information heirarchy and challenging navigation for screenreader users

The Results

I wanted to give you an even list of pros and cons on both sites, but the drama wasn't there, gang. Kudos to Barack Obama's team for taking them time to include accessibility (and web) best practices into the website. McCain clearly has a lot to learn about the web as a medium and about the millions of people in America and around the world who have disabilities that impair the way that they use the access information on the internet.

This is a big pass to Barack Obama with flying colors, making the score 1-0.

PS - Side note - Convio is proud to announce that we will have TWO teams competing in the AIR Austin competition in October. Good luck teams - we'll be sure to post the results as they come in! Learn more about AIR Austin by checking out the Knowbility website

Not only do brief subject lines tease your reader, they help to avoid the pitfalls of spam filters and the growing challenge of various email application readers. Here are a few fictitious examples to consider, you be the judge which subject would illicit a higher open rate.

The right subject line for your message will depend on the timing, the issue and your desired outcomes, but the next time you’re struggling to pick the best phrase, consider an A/B test with one version no more than four words and analyze the results.

We've written about the candidates websites as hotbeds of innovation, and about Lessons Learned (so far) from the '08 Campaign. Now I'm proposing...a little thing I call the Hopefuls Online Scorecard.

I’ll start by posting scores (forthcoming) on a few best practices in website usability and engaging constituents online - stuff like overall experience, navigation, pathways to action, and quality of content. I'll ask you to post comments on the success criteria that matter to you - let's keep the tally rising.

Game on. McCain 0 / Obama 0. Watch this space.

With a little spare time over the holiday weekend I enjoyed reading the expansive essays in Rebooting Democracy, a recent collection of essays from Personal Democracy Forum. As we celebrate the anniversary of our Independence ("booting" the British?), re-engaging with the ideals of our Republic seems appropriate.

The essays are quick reads and provide an array of sometimes contradictory opinions about the future of democracy in the Internet Age.  For example, while some like Pablo de Real or Craig Newmark propose technology as a way to reinvigorate our democracy, danah boyd asks why we lack the motivation to engage as citizens, online or off.

On a related note, most of the sessions from the PdF 2008 (Rebooting the System) conference in June, are now posted on blip.tv and worth watching.  The PdF website features post-conference feedback, a nice feature for those of us sifting through the posted materials.

(This post is part of an eight part series focused on lessons learned from the 08 Campaign. Read the parent article published in Convio Connections

Idea #2 Provide clear and obvious calls to action throughout your Web site

• Provide some easy options.  Not everyone is able to come to a house party or give money, so offer a low-effort option or two (e.g. tell one friend this week, place a widget on your MySpace page, or send an eCard to 5 friends).
• In subsequent interactions, be sure to acknowledge the actions they have taken or have committed to take.
• Customize the calls to action based on prior actions and what you know about the visitor. This tactic requires some sophisticated tools (Er, got Convio?) but is a very powerful approach. 
• Segment your visitors into 3 or 4 groups and design your action calls based on a quick persona of these groups.

(This post is part of an eight part series focused on lessons learned from the 08 Campaign. Read the parent article published in Convio Connections) 

Idea#1 Get the email address!

Wait a second, didn’t we already learn that in 2003? 

During the Converging Campaigns event at the National Press Club in DC, Patrick Ruffini made the comment that "one of the big challenges is to find a killer app that is not fundraising." While fundraising is important what is the app that is going to help you capture and engage constituent interest, support and engagment for the long haul? 

Most of the media I have talked with since the event have talked about that comment. Today, one of the editors asked me to ask you. "Aside from fundraising, what is the killer app you would like to see?"  She asks that you get creative - so lets have some fun...

Personally, my son is calling and wanting an App that gets Dad home in the next five minutes...have a fun and safe holiday weekend and let us know what is your killer app!