techPresident - campaign websites - Comments

Richardson and Obama

Catmoves — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:53:04 -0400

Really. Do you suppose that even if two cadidates use very similar approaches it would really matter in the long run? Neither of these two are likely to be elected to more than a small town dog catcher job. It seems as though y'all are discussing how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
The point is both of them are distinct minorities and won't make much of a tinker's damn in this election.

Same tools don't mean same strategy

Alan Rosenblatt — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:06:38 -0400

Your point is well taken. Both camapigns use versions of the DNC's Party Builder platform designed by Blue State Digital. But I want to caution you that tools do not equal strategy. I have seen plenty of examples of two campaigns using the same exact tools to very different ends. It is all about strategy and tactics.

How the call to action is worded, even what the call to action is, is not inherently restricted by the software used. In my earlier critique of Obama's petition campaign I identified problems in the "ask" language and instructions. These are mistakes in both strategy and implementation that are not due to the limits of the technology.

Further, the Blue State Digital platform is built in open source code, so there is no reason why any campaign using it could not integrate other tools not included in the platform into its website. In fact, additional tools could be integrated into the site even if it used proprietary technology.

Alan Rosenblatt
Executive Director, Internet Advocacy Center
AKA DrDigiPol (drdigipol.com)

The DNC, Obama, and Richardson have the same feature set

Luigi Montanez — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:09:35 -0400

Thanks for the review Alan. It should be noted, however, that Obama and Richardson have the same exact tools -- only the skin around them and how they are used by the particular campaigns change. The tools are furnished by vendor Blue State Digital (which also did the DNC's Party Builder), so in reality these campaigns are limited to what their vendor provides, or is willing to build via custom development. Don't get me wrong -- I think they are overall very effective and well-built (just look at the success of My.BarackObama), but it'll be interesting to see how campaigns using the same technology compete.

Online Volunteers

Michael Turk — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 10:04:23 -0400

ID numbers are usually a great way to look at these things as well. Programmers like to see the ID numbers so they can be sure their data isn't corrupted.

On the campaign in 2004, we used that fact to track how many volunteers Kerry signed up on his site each day. His website assigned sequential id numbers to new volunteers and published that number in your profile as your unique volunteer ID.

We could go in and see what number he was on and tell how many people had signed up the day before. We created a spreadsheet to track how many people we had signed up in the previous 24 hours as a basis of comparison and reported that out to our Political guys.

They were likely maintaining a separate database for volunteers that included offline volunteers (which we assume accounts for the significant difference in how many were coming in online and their public numbers.)