We dabbled a little in the political arena and built the JustShutUpBC website. We also worked on the nomination site for Gregor Robertson (which has since been taken offline) and we built websites for Geoff Meggs and Heather Deal. Gregor, Geoff and Heather all won in the recent civic election which can only mean that having a site done by Raised Eyebrow is sort of like a good luck charm when it comes to election time ;-)

Ofcourse the big political website we worked on in ‘08 was for the BC NDP.

We also had a chance to work with a collection of musical clients. The Vancouver Recital Society got an updated look for their new season. The Vancouver Welsh Men’s Choir got a whole new site that allows site visitors to listen to their music, buy tickets to their shows and purchase their CDs online. The Chan Centre’s website was moved into Drupal and they were also given a new look for their new season.

This year we had a contingent of clients on the Educational side of things:

• The Federation of Post Secondary Educators got an updated look and we also helped reorganize their site when it was moved into Drupal.
• The BC Teachers of English Language Arts got a snazzy new site which has a really great Resource section and a dynamic Conference area.
• Economics for Everyone is primarily a book but we got to build the book’s online companion which houses further resources for educators, unionists, activists and anyone else interested in modern day capitalism.

As well we got to work on a few sites for people who do really great work to try to make this world a bit better for everyone:

• Covenant House Vancouver: an incredible organization dedicated to helping homeless youth.
• ThinkCity: they help to empower citizens to realize their dreams of having the city they want to live in.
• Citizens for Public Power: an advocacy organization working to keep the province’s power generation system in public hands.
• The Columbia Institute: they work to foster individual and organizational leadership to help nurture sustainable communities.
• Shareholder Association for Research and Education: a social enterprise that works to coordinate and implement responsible investment practices.

It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with such great clients who are doing such awesome work themselves.

We also got to launch a pet project that was waiting in the wings for some time: the RE Blog.

It’s been a fantastic - and productive - year at Raised Eyebrow. Happy Holidays everyone! All the very best to you in ‘09.

1. You could simply use the “Header” field in the create/edit view screen and place some text in there. However, that does not have a nice WYSIWYG editor, one could be assigned but it’s not ideal.
2. You could create a block and place it in a region above the view. Again, unless you have a WYSIWYG Editor set up for blocks, this is not perfect.
3. You could, in some way, add a view to the bottom of a page - ah!, that’s it.

The caveat with 1 and 2 above is that it requires giving the site editor/client access to views and blocks, in a lot of cases this is way too much control and will usually result in problems. 3 is the ideal solution. Once I figured this out, I began to develop the functionality: I created a Select CCK select field for all page content types which pulled a list of all available views by using the views_get_all_views() function. This field stored the name of the view, I then used the name of this view in page.tpl.php to load the view via the function views_get_view(). It started to get a little messy, so I decided to start building a module, only to find that one already existed.

It’s called Viewfield and does exactly what it says on the tin. It allows you to add a CCK field which is a list of views to choose from. The view will then display on a page in whatever position and format you choose. It works great.

You can see it in action on this page from the BCNDP website.

• Using Drupals internal URL alias functionality, Path Auto automatically(automagically) creates URLs for you when you create a new piece of content.
• The structure of this URL is determined by you, the user, via the Path Auto administration page (http://www.yoursite.com/admin/settings/pathauto).
• Each individual content type (via CCK module) can have it’s own settings
• The path can be hard coded to anything you like, or it can use “tokens” to determine how the page is made up, for instance:
  • The path can be made up of the title of the content (http://www.example.com/the-title-of-the-content)
  • The path can be made up of CCK types and CCK fields (http://www.example.com/albums/rock)
  • The path can be made up of vocabularies and taxonomy terms (http://www.example.com/2008/10)
  • The name of the author (http://www.example.com/colin/drupal-search-friendly-url)
  • There is a comprehensive list of the options (replacement patterns) available for creating URLs /aliases on the path auto settings page, some examples:
    • [nid] - Node Id
    • [title-raw] - Unfiltered node title
    • [yyyy]- Node creation year (four digit)
    • [term] - Name of top taxonomy term
    • [author-name] - Node author’s user name
• Once your paths have been setup you can then select the “Bulk generate aliases for nodes that are not aliased” for those paths you have configured. This will create new URLs/aliases for your existing content. Also note that this will generate aliases for all existing nodes which do not already have aliases.
• In the future, when creating new pieces of content, the URL/alias will be created for you based on the criteria you have chosen in the path auto settings.

So that’s it, not that difficult really. There are a few issues I’m come across when using path auto, and my one piece of advice is to decide on your alias structure before you start entering content. Or, if you have entered content and are running a bulk update, Think carefully about your alias structure. If you do mess it up there’s an easy way to re-run the alias update. You can do this via Update area of the “Content” management page. Select the content you want to update and choose “Update path alias” from the drop down options.

Let’s start with the latter and work our way backwards…

Collecting and Mining the Data

Okay, the fundraisers and marketers out there will instantly grasp the value of a good database, but for the rest of you who are wondering what the heck is so interesting about crunching data, here are a couple of examples of things the Obama campaign was able to do because of its database:

• The campaign had instant access to over 10 million people via email. (Sidebar from the Washington Post story that reported that number: “The list is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign.”) The Nation puts the list’s size (which they estimate at 11 million) in context: “It enables direct communication at a remarkable scale. The next President can instantly address 16 percent of his national supporters, based on the popular vote. To put it another way, the list dwarfs the audience of all the nightly cable news shows combined.”
• Volunteers who signed up to do phone canvassing could easily access lists of potential supporters, or non-voters, in their area by signing up to my.BarackObama.com, Obama’s social networking site, and entering their zip code. As a result the commitment threshold for volunteers was very low — they could sign up to make a half-hour’s worth of phone calls to neighbours if that’s all the time they could afford.
• On election day, one of the key tasks volunteers perform is to contact supporters (in this case, registered Democrats), both by phone and in person, to get out the vote. In the past, these volunteers would be provided with a full list of supporters, and they had no idea who had already voted; this time out, the Obama campaign tasked their poll checkers with a new responsibility: As one volunteer describes it, “We took the real-time results of who actually showed up at the polls and fed it back to the campaign so that they could adjust their GOTV [Get Out The Vote] calls and canvassing as the day wore on. Every time someone came in to vote, their names were entered into a computer system and their names disappeared or escaped, Houdini-like, from the call and walk lists.” The project was dubbed “Project Houdini,” and one can only imagine how much more efficient volunteers’ efforts were as a result.

So that’s what a good database can help you do. But the key to establishing a useful database is to set up the infrastructure well ahead of time, so that when the time comes to start adding names and profiles, you’ve got a framework that will stand up to rigorous road testing.

When it comes to political organizing, most parties and candidates start out with a pre-existing database of some kind, and often it’s a Frankenstein-like beast that’s been cobbled together over a series of elections. It’s critical to preserve the data that already exists, but usually that data is in need of a serious clean-up, and the database structure itself (from determining what data gets collected, to the kinds of queries that can be run on it) is typically a good candidate for a makeover. But more often than not, in the high-pressure, fast-paced campaign environment, data cleanup and database restructuring are tossed by the wayside.

Not so for Obama’s campaign database:

Howard Dean’s DNC brought the party in the 21st century. Under his direction, the party was able to create what the Republican Party already had — a single national voter file interface. The DNC struck data-sharing agreements with state parties, got everything uniform (more or less.) It spent tens of millions of dollars in 2005 and 2006 building this, much to the consternation of the incoming chief of staff (Rahm Emanuel) of the man who benefited the most from that money (Barack Obama.)
[Emphasis mine.]

Here’s what stopped me dead in my tracks when I read that: The work was done BEFORE election campaigning began. Someone with a vision (maybe Dean himself, given the groundbreaking nature of his 2004 online campaign, but more probably a group of people) made their database a priority during the post-election lull, when probably very few people were actually using the data — and when in fact, very few people were even thinking about it. That’s some solid long-term planning.

See this blog post from The Atlantic (from whence the above quote comes) for more details on the Obama campaign’s back-end setup; the breakdown is fascinating for those of us who gasp at the monumental task of organizing the amount of data the Obama campaign had at its disposal. And there’s another interesting piece about the daunting database cleanup process here.

Staffing Up

Let’s talk about staff resources for a moment. When our clients ask us about the costs of various technologies — whether we’re talking about video, podcasting, Facebook groups, or Twitter feeds — they frequently overlook the ongoing cost of the staff resources they will require to produce and deliver content through these various channels. The Obama website, email marketing, and associated social media channels were very well-managed; so what did they cost, staff-wise? We don’t have a dollar figure, but we can tell you that the Obama campaign employed 95 staff for its internet campaign.

So who was behind the campaign?

Answer #1: Some of the most brilliant and experienced minds available.

Blue State Digital, a company founded by veterans of the Howard Dean campaign (and which has honed its chops on a ton of Democratic political campaigns), provided the major back-end framework for the website, and two of the company’s co-founders key staff*, Macon Phillips and Joe Rospars, left Blue State to work full-time on the Obama campaign. (* Corrected @ 11:46 am, 1 Dec 08 - Rospars was indeed a co-founder but Phillips was not.)

The Obama website’s social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com (AKA MyBO), was set up under the guidance of no less than Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook.

That’s just a start to the list of great minds who came together for this project; there’s a full list of key Obama staffers here for those interested in more details. Some fun stuff there for the real political geeks — you can start seeing the strands that connect various people and campaigns. (It’s also here that I discovered the name of Obama’s chief speechwriter, who by the way turned 27 this year.)

Answer #2: An absolutely killer volunteer base. Obama’s volunteers were well-organized both on- and off-line, but let’s stay focused on the online effort here. Volunteers were given an enormous amount of leeway to self-organize on Obama’s campaign, which is consistent with the President-Elect’s repeated claim throughout the campaign that the campaign was not about him, but rather about the people who were electing him.

Have a look at this article at CIOZone (actually page 3 of an in-depth and well-researched 6-page article) describing the self-organizing tools Obama’s website provided to supporters; it indicates that during the primaries, staff support for volunteers was minimal for states where Hillary Clinton was expected to win, and furthermore, “in places like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Oregon, whose primaries might not have mattered as much if the race had been decided quickly, volunteers who found each other through the Web site organized their own freelance pro-Obama efforts long before the first campaign staffer came to town.”

In other words, a great deal of trust was placed in volunteer organizers, who held events, made phone calls, knocked on doors, raised money, all in the name of the Obama campaign and with minimal oversight from staff. The CIOZone article linked above goes into some depth about the relationship between staff and volunteers; I’m impressed (and a little suprised) by how few problems the campaign seems to have had with their volunteer base, given the size of the group they were working with. I would have expected more kooks in the mix, to be perfectly honest, but it sounds like they didn’t require much policing.

One description of the volunteer-management system goes like this:

[T]he system works like a pyramid, with state officials given access to a lot of functionality, and growing numbers of people below them, down to the volunteer level, allowed fewer and fewer functions, depending on what they need and how well they are known or trusted. The Obama system learns as it goes along, allowing volunteers to feed information gleaned from their work back into the database via their web browsers. Campaign staffers at the local, state, and national levels can see which volunteers do the most work and get the best results, making the organization more efficient over time. Nationwide, MyBarackObama.com has more than 1 million individual user accounts and has been used to promote over 75,000 campaign events.

If that’s accurate, then it sounds like the Obama team struck an appropriate balance between monitoring and managing their community, and allowing supporters enough leeway to do their own thing without too much interference from above.

Strategy First, Then Execution

A solid database is an essential campaign tool; great staffing is another. But tools are only tools — without a smart strategy, they can only get you so far. The Obama campaign seems to me (from an admittedly outside perspective) to have had a brilliant and highly consistent strategy from start to finish — and that strategy continues even beyond election day.

Here’s my off-the-cuff, incomplete summary of that strategy: Create an inclusive, forward-thinking movement that embodies hope and positive change. Empower self-starters and problem-solvers to effect that change. Set up mechanisms that allow supporters to connect (to each other and to the campaign), contribute their ideas, and elect Barack Obama.

That strategy informed decisions across the board, from the messaging that came through in speeches, interviews and debates, through policy statements, graphic design, and the selection of online tools. It was also consistently carried through in all online campaigning. Emails sent to supporters carried through the messages of hope, change, and the need for entrepreneurial ideas and hands-on election support. The website drove a million people to sign up for my.BarackObama.com and help elect the president they believed in. And perhaps most importantly, supporters were invited to make the campaign their own — to reach out to their neighbours, throw a fundraising party, post a note on their Facebook or MySpace profile, whatever the action that fit best with their personality, strengths, and social network.

Beyond the election, we’ve seen the launch of Change.gov, which promises to carry through the election campaign strategy into the transition period (and possibly beyond, though there are questions flying about how the election database can make its way to the White House without becoming the property of the U.S. government in perpetuity). There’s talk of how the White House site may evolve when the President-Elect becomes the President, but much remains to be seen there. We do know that some of the key staff members from the campaign have been hired on as part of the transition team.

One of the big questions that is on the minds of a lot of people right now is how the grassroots movement that helped elect Obama will interact with him as President. There’s an interesting piece here on that subject; here’s an excerpt:

[Organizing guru Marshall] Ganz makes three really important points: The first is that we’ve never had a president enter office with an organizing social movement attached to him, and there’s no precedent for thinking about how the participants in that movement have a voice in his presidency. The second is that this movement isn’t going away, and the critical question isn’t “who’s going to get the list” but how will this movement govern itself. The third, which is somewhat of an open secret, is that there is a group of organizers meeting in Chicago right now trying to figure this out, and Ganz believes that their deliberations should be more open. “I think it’s important to create the public space for this kind of discussion,” he told me.

I could go on and on about this campaign and its lessons, but I think I’ll stop there for now. If you have thoughts to share, please leave them in the comments — I’d love to hear them.

The website you see now is really a foundation for things to come. We’ve moved the BC NDP into Drupal and will be working with them in an ongoing relationship over the coming months to implement new features and functionality to build out a website that can better support the excellent work their team does in our province. As cool new features roll out, we’ll be sure to announce them here and there may even be some Drupal case study type content to contribute once we’ve all had a chance to catch our breath.

I’m particularly proud of our staff on the work they’ve done on this project and want to thank Melanie, Colin and Chris (who came into the project near the end) for all the hard work, talent and wicked brains they’ve put into the site. You’re all superstars.

10. In a nonprofit organization, most strategic IT problems are actually organizational development problems.

Is it a CEO who is resistant to technical innovations? A board of directors that hesitates to make the commitment to raise the money need for the IT infrastructure? Line staff who are already stressed and overworked, and can’t stop to learn and implement new technologies? An inability to make outsourced IT consultants or in-house IT staff understand organizational processes? All the information technology in the world won’t resolve these issues, if you don’t address them at the organizational level.

I think we can all fall victim to wanting to believe that technology can solve all our problems — I for one like to fantasize that once I have enough apps installed my iPhone may actually save the world — but really technology alone isn’t the only answer. One of the things that we often do in our website development processes with our clients is help them work through a real life challenge/business case issue and then figure out how we can use their website to help them streamline things to work better/more efficiently, but without solving the initial challenge the website alone can not solve the problem.

This week an article featuring us, and some other local female entrepreneurs came out in BC Business Magazine. Entitled What Women Want and written by Dorothy Bartoszewski, the piece touches on many topics that we covered in our book such as:

• The rate of growth of women in the business sector. Currently, in Canada, women are starting four out of every five new businesses.
• The different ways that women tend to measure success in their careers and business lives. Quoting from the article “a 2005 study that found that small-business owners look beyond mere profit or growth figures when assessing their business success. Other criteria they value include business excellence (such as positive customer relations), professional achievement (such as having control over their career) and personal satisfaction (such as balancing work/life demands and “giving back”). Women cared about these “other” criteria more than men did.”
• How we define sustainability as small business owners. Again quoting from the article “For these women, sustainability means paying themselves and their staff well; anything else, they say, isn’t sustainable over the long term. Bacon and Mears also choose to work with people they really enjoy; Raised Eyebrow’s clients are mostly non-profits and progressive businesses. Sustainability for Bacon and Mears also includes, in theory, avoiding the 24-7 workweeks typical of entrepreneurs – something the two women admit they didn’t always manage to achieve as they built their firm.”

In addition to all the positives the article also notes that the average female entrepreneur earns $30,000/year to the male $50,000. While some suggest this might have to do with women working less hours in order to be more flexible with their family lives (I’m really not sure who those women are, the ones I know who juggle work and family seem to work as much or more than their male counterparts), this trend disturbs me. We need to make sure that as women we are starting and running businesses that pay us competitive wages and salaries. While that’s more easily said than done, and while we are strong advocates for measuring success outside of an exclusively financial paradigm, I can’t stress enough the value of paying ourselves well.

The full article is well worth a read and includes the stories of some other local female entrepreneurs as well.

• TheUptake.org is, in effect, a citizen journalism aggregating website, allowing users to upload campaign related video content that they produce to the website. They have a group within The Uptake of “Vote Chasers” that are focusing specifically on the highly contested states of Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Colorado and New Mexico to look at questionable tactics both parties are using to win those states. On November 4th, their citizen journalists will be monitoring polling stations to make sure voters are able to cast their ballots and reporting any voter suppression issues that arise. Due to the volume and distributed nature of their information gathering model — using many individuals who can capture video and images via cel phone technology — they’ll be able to report more widely than the current “traditional” news outlets can simply due to the sheer numbers of feet on the ground. The model is one that will be very familiar to any of you who recall the role of IndyMedia in the Seattle WTO events, though the advances in technology and the way that The Uptake is pulling content together and redistributing all contribute to a very strategic campaign.
• TwitterVoteReport.com is using Twitter feeds to get everyday citizens to report back on their voting day activities and then track those activities in one centralized place. In Twitter Vote Report’s own words, the idea is to achieve the following:
  

  Voters can read these messages and help one another solve problems, liking letting someone know when a polling place has been moved. Advocacy groups can use them to spot problems. Citizens can figure out how to lend fellow voters a hand. And the press can zero in on local voting stories worth telling. Just sending in short reports can help your fellow citizens to vote.

  They’re doing all of this through the use of specific “hash-tags” for people to report on specific topics, so things like “#machine” for voter machine issues, or “#wait:[minutes]” for reports of long lines at specific polling stations. Now there are, to date, a fairly limited number of registered US voters using Twitter, however, the concept of using the power of individuals to amass a larger picture of what is happening around a vital issue like voter access is a powerful vision for a seemingly frivolous tool like Twitter.

If you know of other cool web tools being used for election campaigning, please leave them in the comments, we could I’m sure write a book on all the examples out there.