Connection Café: Presidential Hopefuls Do Engagement Pathways

	Presidential Hopefuls Do Engagement Pathways
	Posted by Misty McLaughlin at Aug 20, 2008 12:18 PM CDT Categories: Constituent Empowerment , Usability

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Current tally on our Presidential Hopefuls Online Scorecard: Obama 1 / McCain 0.

Thanks to Brandy Reppy for her expert rundown on each candidate's site's accessibility for visitors with disabilities.

Today, I’m going to rate JohnMcCain.com and BarackObama.com on their interactive pathways for engagement – in other words, what can I do to get engaged online, both before and after I become a supporter.

By now, we’re all used to seeing the “Get Involved” or “Take Action” utility boxes, usually at the right of the homepage, that tell us 5 ways we can support an org, 4 ways to act now, or one really important and three kind-of-but-not-quite-so important ways to get engaged. True to the genre of advocacy sites like the International Rescue Committee and FairTax, both Obama and McCain have chosen to present our interactive options clustered neatly in groups of 4 to 8 actions at the right of their design.

First, McCain’s Online Action Center. McCain opts for 8 routes to action, prioritizing donations and email signup – yes, an eCRM best practice – above six more involved paths to involvement. While he loses some points on the inclarity of a few options ("McCainSpace?" "Cause Greater Than Self?" what the - ?), the Action Center component gets a thumbs-up because it:

prioritizes a low-cost way to get involved (email- and zip-only sign up)
advertises the breadth of interactive opportunities on the site, without overwhelming, and
persists throughout the site in the same location, providing reliable, handy routes to action.

Even better, when I take that first step, something noticeable and relevant to me happens.

McCain Volunterr Dashboard 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:

Barack Make a Difference

you have to scroll way past this:

Barack Get Involved

...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.

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Posted by Iain McLaren at Oct 28, 2008 07:11 PM CDT
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Thanks for this. I'm very interested in the use of these action boxes as they outline clearly ways you can help. I think charities should look more at using this kind of feature - do you know of any that do?

Posted by Sally Heaven at Oct 28, 2008 07:10 PM CDT
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Definitely the blog strategy!

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Presidential Hopefuls Do Engagement Pathways

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