The Democrats are Doomed.
Sep. 21st, 2005 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsLast night I spent a brief while composing all of the things that a political website would need in order to be effective. Let's go through some of them. I've been asked to assemble this as an analysis for a local Democratic Pol in the hopes of making a cookie-cutter, drop-it-and-go website for Democratic politicians. Here's what I learned.
1. An effective domain name.
"JoePolitician2006" is good, as is "JoePoliticianForStateSenate," although the first one is more commonplace. It should be short. It should be the name the candidate uses all of the time. And it should end in ".com" or ".us". The last is harder to find, but looks better for a pol, no?
2. The homepage should be fast.
Images should be minimal, markup should be very light and CSS-based. To be ADA compliant (this is for Democrats, remember), it should use modern layout techniques that degrade to older browsers and readers for the blind easily. Colors should be style-sheet oriented. Fonts should be commonplace.
3. The homepage should not overwhelm, but should inform.
The candidate's message (perhaps a rotating collection of messages, but no more than four), a small picture, campaign news, and upcoming events are all that should go on the front page. If the candidate is willing to hand-maintain a blog, the top entry might fit here, but it must be small and the backend must gracefully hide it if it gets out of date. And there should be TWO menus: a big one for supporters, a smaller one for others.
4. There should be a campaign newsletter. It must be kept up-to-date.
Whether or not the candidate wants to combine "news," (with links to the local media-- and the local media love that), his blog, and the newsletter is up to him, but I think it's a tactical mistake. Still, there should be someone who'll take care of each. The Newsletter should be targetted at building a donation pool and a volunteer base.
5. The Volunteer Form.
"I want to volunteer!" with contact information. Very important. It's easy to fill one out over the Internet, and people often feel guilty about breaking commitments once they've made them.
6. The Candidate Biography.
Should be written by a hack. Should rarely, if ever, go back more than eight years but, for local elections, the candidate should make it clear that he or she was born and raised in the area if at all possible.
7. Campaign Event Calendar.
Should look like a Calendar, and should be printable. Public events and events where the reader should do something (like election day) should be highlighted.
8. Campaign Statement.
What the candidate stands for. Why she's running.
9. Online donations. MUST be secure.
10. A campaign photo gallery. Fun, and shows that the candidate is actually running.
11. Media Center.
I can't emphasize how important this one is. This should be a password-protected area, mostly just to preserve bandwidth, to which only members of the media have access. It should contain several high-resolutionMP3 speeches, picked by the candidate's electoral team, that local stations can use in their reporting, as well as high-resolution TIFF photos of the candidate for television stills.
By giving out the password to members of the media, the candidate can both build trust and a sense of "being in this together" with the reporter. The reporter also gets a sense of immediacy, as the material is available all the time and not just when a member of the campaign staff deigns to make it available. If it goes in a media kit, it belongs in here. It if could go in a media kit but its portability doesn't make that convenient, it goes in here. If it would go into the media kit but the media kit has already been printed, it belongs in here.
You want to make it easy for the media to report on the campaign, with as much color as the candidate needs to seem "real" to the electorate. Obviously, the contents of the media center must be absolutely on-topic, and summaries should available of all long pieces, and transcriptions of all audio pieces would go a long way.
Why do I say, then, that the Democrats are doomed? Because all of this advice came from publicly available Republican resources. The GOP has put together an extensive and effective network of toolkits, consultants, advisors, and tutorials on how to create a useful campaign or advocacy website. I was able to find nearly twenty in a few minutes.
Nothing like that exists for the Democrats. The frakking Greens have it more together than the Dems! Howard Dean's team put together "I support Howard Dean" templates, all of which have simply disappeared off the Internet. There has been no effort to take that material and turn it into something useful for the next wave of elections.
You know what really bothers me? This isn't hard! It can be done by almost anyone with a few days of practice with a common web development environment. If you want it active, you'll need a PHP or Rails hack-- and yeah, those are expensive. But someone should have put together a kit in some flavor of LAMP[?] two years ago with a tutorial on how to buy your own site ($250 per year; cheaper than printing the media kit!) and installing it.
1. An effective domain name.
"JoePolitician2006" is good, as is "JoePoliticianForStateSenate," although the first one is more commonplace. It should be short. It should be the name the candidate uses all of the time. And it should end in ".com" or ".us". The last is harder to find, but looks better for a pol, no?
2. The homepage should be fast.
Images should be minimal, markup should be very light and CSS-based. To be ADA compliant (this is for Democrats, remember), it should use modern layout techniques that degrade to older browsers and readers for the blind easily. Colors should be style-sheet oriented. Fonts should be commonplace.
3. The homepage should not overwhelm, but should inform.
The candidate's message (perhaps a rotating collection of messages, but no more than four), a small picture, campaign news, and upcoming events are all that should go on the front page. If the candidate is willing to hand-maintain a blog, the top entry might fit here, but it must be small and the backend must gracefully hide it if it gets out of date. And there should be TWO menus: a big one for supporters, a smaller one for others.
4. There should be a campaign newsletter. It must be kept up-to-date.
Whether or not the candidate wants to combine "news," (with links to the local media-- and the local media love that), his blog, and the newsletter is up to him, but I think it's a tactical mistake. Still, there should be someone who'll take care of each. The Newsletter should be targetted at building a donation pool and a volunteer base.
5. The Volunteer Form.
"I want to volunteer!" with contact information. Very important. It's easy to fill one out over the Internet, and people often feel guilty about breaking commitments once they've made them.
6. The Candidate Biography.
Should be written by a hack. Should rarely, if ever, go back more than eight years but, for local elections, the candidate should make it clear that he or she was born and raised in the area if at all possible.
7. Campaign Event Calendar.
Should look like a Calendar, and should be printable. Public events and events where the reader should do something (like election day) should be highlighted.
8. Campaign Statement.
What the candidate stands for. Why she's running.
9. Online donations. MUST be secure.
10. A campaign photo gallery. Fun, and shows that the candidate is actually running.
11. Media Center.
I can't emphasize how important this one is. This should be a password-protected area, mostly just to preserve bandwidth, to which only members of the media have access. It should contain several high-resolutionMP3 speeches, picked by the candidate's electoral team, that local stations can use in their reporting, as well as high-resolution TIFF photos of the candidate for television stills.
By giving out the password to members of the media, the candidate can both build trust and a sense of "being in this together" with the reporter. The reporter also gets a sense of immediacy, as the material is available all the time and not just when a member of the campaign staff deigns to make it available. If it goes in a media kit, it belongs in here. It if could go in a media kit but its portability doesn't make that convenient, it goes in here. If it would go into the media kit but the media kit has already been printed, it belongs in here.
You want to make it easy for the media to report on the campaign, with as much color as the candidate needs to seem "real" to the electorate. Obviously, the contents of the media center must be absolutely on-topic, and summaries should available of all long pieces, and transcriptions of all audio pieces would go a long way.
Why do I say, then, that the Democrats are doomed? Because all of this advice came from publicly available Republican resources. The GOP has put together an extensive and effective network of toolkits, consultants, advisors, and tutorials on how to create a useful campaign or advocacy website. I was able to find nearly twenty in a few minutes.
Nothing like that exists for the Democrats. The frakking Greens have it more together than the Dems! Howard Dean's team put together "I support Howard Dean" templates, all of which have simply disappeared off the Internet. There has been no effort to take that material and turn it into something useful for the next wave of elections.
You know what really bothers me? This isn't hard! It can be done by almost anyone with a few days of practice with a common web development environment. If you want it active, you'll need a PHP or Rails hack-- and yeah, those are expensive. But someone should have put together a kit in some flavor of LAMP[?] two years ago with a tutorial on how to buy your own site ($250 per year; cheaper than printing the media kit!) and installing it.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-23 06:45 pm (UTC)The sad truth is that the Republicans had a more advanced IT system in 2004, because they were able to develop it starting in 2001. The Dems started developing theirs after the primary. One thing Dean has learned is that the drive to elect a Dem has to start the day after Inauguraton, for many reasons including the fact that software takes time to develop.