Kevin Bondelli's blog

Flowgram - Flowgram is a screen-casting tool that lets you walk people through the use of a website, comment on items online, or a number of other applications with audio and text commentary.

SlideRocket - SlideRocket is an online presentation application that allows you to create rich presentations with a lot of features, effects and transitions. You can see one I made here.

Summize - Summize lets you search the Twitterverse for keywords to see what people are tweeting about your organization or cause.

Last week I wrote a post about horizontal segmentation in political communication on my blog, and this post will look at ways you can harness the concept online in promoting your own campaigns.

The example I will use for this post is the Vote Pledge campaign from the Young Democrats of America. The desired action of the campaign is to get young voters to sign an online pledge to vote for Democrats on election day. Specifically this post will deal with getting people to take an online action, but many of the strategies are applicable to offline actions as well.

E-mail
Once you have created an online campaign you should start with your old stand-by: the e-mail. For online actions, I suggest that your e-mails do two things: first, get the people on your list to take the action, and second get them to use their own social networks to encourage others to take the action. Check out the TechPresident post on writing a good e-mail.

Call-to-action completion page
Too many times we have people take an online action and leave it at that. Your action completion/confirmation page should include a call-to-action to spread the word about the campaign. Possible actions could be:

• Send to a friend
• Share on Facebook
• Online button/profile picture

Online buttons/profile pictures
Many of your supporters will have blogs, websites, MySpace profiles, etc. where they could put up an html graphic linking to your online action page. By creating one with copy/paste html code you can increase your exposure as well as increase the Google Rank of the action page. Here is an example:

<a href="http://yda.org/votepledge"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3061/2625068863_f23311d597_o.jpg" alt="Pledge to vote Democrat on Election Day" /></a>

The same graphic can be used as a profile image for supporters to use on their social network profiles. Make sure that the image includes the link.

Status Updates
Most social networking sites now allow you to update your status, and these updates can include links. Encourage your supporters to occasionally set their update to the call-to-action of your campaign. Example: Pledge to vote Democrat in November http://yda.org/votepledge.

Instant Messenger
Encourage your supporters to use IM to contact their friends, family and co-workers to ask the to take the action. You can also have them use the call-to-action as their away message or status message similar to the status updates mentioned earlier.

Twitter
Have your supporters that use Twitter send a tweet out with the call-to-action. For more on using Twitter check out my post on using Twitter for your organization.

Blog Outreach
Reach out to bloggers and try to get them to write something about your online campaign or even to put the online button on their website. Larger blogs tend to online put buttons on their site for money, but a lot of bloggers will be willing to do this for your campaign for free if they believe in the cause. For more on blog outreach check out my Blogger Outreach 101 post.

Facebook
I have already mentioned status updates and profile pictures, but there are additional ways to use Facebook to promote your action. Message the members of your organization's Facebook group, as well as reaching out to the administrators of allied Facebook groups asking them to do the same. You can also use Facebook's share feature to post the action page and encourage your supporters to do the same.

You can also write notes on Facebook with the action and ask to spread the word. By tagging supporters in the note it will put it in their mini-feed for their friends to see as well as definitely get their attention.

You can upload the online button image to Facebook and tag a bunch of your supporters in the picture. Have the photo description ask them to take the action and change their profile photo to the image. This will put the image in their mini-feeds as well.

Continue to innovate
There are always new methods of promoting your actions online, so keep looking at the online tools that are popping up and think of ways that they can be leveraged by your campaign.

What methods do you think online campaigns can use to promote their actions? Share in the comments.

Over on my blog I just posted about Facebook's new phonebook feature. Phonebook is exactly what it sounds like: an alphabetically organized list of the phone numbers of all of your Facebook friends that list them. Check it out if you are interested.

I spent this last weekend doing trainings for Arizona high school students who are interested in starting Young Democrats chapters at their schools. In a little experiment, we confirmed that by calling the people that RSVPed as attending or maybe attending to our Facebook event we dramatically increased turnout.

A lot of organizations utilize Facebook events, yet not enough take the second step of confirming attendees using alternative online and offline methods. It is a common practice to calculate a significant "Facebook dropoff" when determining how many people will actually come to your event. If 50 people signed up to attend, you expect 20-25 to actually show up. Instead of taking this as an inherent characteristic of Facebook events, a little extra effort will bring you much closer to the actual number of people that RSVPed.

The day before your event, have a couple of people go through the list of confirmations and maybes and call through it. Many of the people that you invited to the event will be people that you know personally and have contact information for, so contacting them will be easy. For those that you do not know personally, go to their Facebook profile and find their contact information there. Many people put their cell phone numbers and/or IM names on their profile. You can also see if those people share any friends with you. If they do, ask one of your mutual friends to call them or to share their contact information with you. If your organization has voter file access you could also look them up there if you are having a hard time contacting them.

Following up with RSVPs with phone calls and instant messages will not only increase turnout to your event, but will also give you a much more accurate count in determining attendance in advance.

What methods have you or your organization used to increase turnout for events listed on Facebook? Share in the comments.

While many people are aware of Flickr as a photo sharing site, there are a number of features and uses that are underutilized by organizations.

Flickr Tags

Have you ever wished that there was a way to aggregate all of the pictures that people took at one of your events? Well, with the use of Flickr tags it is possible. By deciding upon a Flickr tag for your event in advance and sharing it with your members, they can tag all the photos they took at your event. A search for that tag will result in showing all the pictures uploaded of your event. You can put the Flickr tag in your event's program, on the Facebook event, send the tag to people that have signed up, or just make an announcement at the event about it. By encouraging your members to sign up for Flickr accounts and use the accepted Flickr tag, you will have access to a lot more pictures than you could have through other means.

Flicker Groups

Flickr also has a groups feature that is useful. Have your members join the Flickr group and upload their related pictures to it. This enables an organization to have access to a wide variety of pictures of their activities to use when needed. It also will let you create slideshows that can be embedded on websites and MySpace pages.

Official Flickr Accounts

Your organization itself should create a Flickr account in order to upload and share official pictures and graphics. This allows you to create embedded photo galleries using only pictures that you approve. Photos can be organized into sets (and collections of sets with a $25/year Pro account). This way you can have a collection for each year and a set for every event, or any other organizational combination that you choose.

You can also use Flickr to host online button images so their use doesn't use too much of your website's bandwidth.

Also, check out Andy Beal's post on using Flickr groups to build traffic to your website.

Do you have any questions about using Flickr? Have you used Flickr for your organization? Leave a comment and share.

Over the weekend Michael wrote about the vote pledge and peer-to-peer program kick-off at the Young Democrats of America conference in Nashville. During the conference there was a lot of excitement about the program and I had great attendance at my trainings on using the internet to collect vote pledges. However, as Michael stated earlier, not everyone is sold on the idea of vote pledges, but I am going to show why they should be.

The concepts of peer-to-peer and vote pledges were developed after extensive research on marketing behavior and social psychology. Social psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini from Arizona State University explains the power of commitment and consistency in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion:

Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.

The process of a young person signing a pledge to vote for a Democrat in November is a commitment to take that action, and they will be much more likely to actually do so in order to be consistent: "Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand."

The power of word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer will lead young people to take the commitment of pledging to vote. The ability to use peer influence to encourage action in places where young people live and hangout, both on and off-line, enables the Young Democrats to reach a large number of potential young voters and have them take an action that dramatically increases the likelihood that they will vote in November and that their vote will be for Democrats.

The vote pledge itself provides a great deal of value. The Young Democrats are able to collect the information from those that sign the pledge in order to follow up and remind them of their commitment. With the difficulty finding good contact information for young voters due to increased mobility and exclusive use of cell phones, this data is extremely valuable.

During the YDA Conference state chapters and caucuses set goals for the number of vote pledges that their organizations will collect by the election. Research shows that groups are much more effective when they are seeking a specific goal as opposed to a vague or generic goal. Instead of just having the goal of YDA chapters being the very vague "increase youth turnout," they have a concrete goal of "collect X number of vote pledges." This combined with the strength of commitment and consistency explained earlier will result in a successful coordinated volunteer program across the country with metrics that will allow the organization to judge success.

Sold yet? Go to www.yda.org/votepledge and sign the pledge yourself, and don't forget to spread the word to your own social network encouraging them to do the same.

When we find ourselves talking to people about the Millennial Generation or reading articles about the youth vote, there are a number of myths that seem to consistently pervade these discussions.

Here are the top 8 myths I have heard about Millennials and the arguments to counter them.

1) Millennials are apathetic.

This is the mother of all young voter myths. Young people just don't care about politics and voting. This myth has gained strength over the years because traditional political campaigns fell for the self-fulfilling prophecy. They thought it would be a waste of money to contact young people who wouldn't vote, which led to young people not voting because they were never contacted by campaigns. Young voters were not apathetic, they just weren't being engaged. The development of peer-to-peer programs by youth political organizations and the creation of youth outreach components of campaigns have resulted in dramatic increases in youth turnout over the last few elections.

2) Millennials are uninformed.

I recently had to deal with this myth in the comments on a recent Rock the Vote blog post. Some older people have the belief that youth are ignorant and lack the reasoning ability to think critically about issues. One of the reasons that this myth has prevailed is that there is a difference in the issues that are important to the AARP and those that are important to young voters. How informed do you think the average AARP member is on the issues of college affordability, net neutrality, or digital rights management?

As a matter of fact, Millennials are very informed about the issues that are important to them and are following the 2008 election closely.

3) 2008 is an anomaly for youth involvement.

This is a favorite for those pundits that have only paid attention to the youth vote this year. Since 2000 youth turnout has been steadily increasing, and the record youth turnout in the 2008 primaries did not come to be in isolation, but is just continuing the trend. The trending indicates that the youth vote will continue to be strong in the 2008 general election and beyond.

4) Millennials are selfish.

This myth is the exact opposite of the truth. Millennials are more engaged in community service than older generations (CIRCLE). It is also important to recognize that Millennials are the majority of those currently fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Millennial generation is a civic-minded generation.

5) Millennials are lazy.

The claim that Millennials are lazy is the bookend myth of "Millennials are selfish." Critics of the generation point their fingers at statistics showing that Millennials are more likely to move back in with their parents after graduating from college in order to save money, or the record-high sales of video games to create an image of lazy kids sitting around playing video games all day.

Conveniently the counter to this myth is similar to the answer to the selfish myth. In addition, Millennials actually tend to pack more activities in their day than other generations, especially high school and college students.

Here is where the cynical members of prior generations attack the optimism and hope of Millennials. Young people are not naive, they are still realistic, but they have not given up on the possibilities of the world and believe in their ability to make those changes.

7) Millennials will become conservative when they get older.

This is a very popular myth and is currently the defense mechanism used by the Republican Party to help cope with the looming electoral realignment. Research has shown that this myth is not true, and that in fact a young person that votes for the same political party in three consecutive elections is likely to identify with that party for the rest of their life.

8) Millennials have a feeling of entitlement.

This myth results from the inability of older generations to understand the concept of actually trying to find a job that you would love and not settling for a job that you will hate for 40 years. There is a big difference between having a feeling of entitlement and choosing to not be relegated to something that may make you miserable for years. In my opinion, the Millennials have chosen a much healthier philosophy.

Bumped - Mike

In the wake of articles discussing the destruction of the Republican brand, it is important to look at our own organizations and chapters as brands.

There are some activists that get very angry any time someone refers to a political party, organization, or candidate as a brand, saying that democracy is not a business and all that jazz. Regardless of that utopian view of the political world, your organization's branding and fundraising is pretty similar to the business world.

As a political advocacy/outreach organization your "product" is the impact you will have in reaching a political outcome. For non-partisan voter registration organizations this is new voters. For partisan youth organizations this is getting young voters out to vote as Democrats, and thereby electing Democrats to office.

When you ask a potential donor to contribute money to your organization, they expect a return on their investment (ROI). While in the business world ROI normally refers to revenue, in the advocacy world it is the impact your organization will have in reaching shared goals (your product). The opportunity cost of a donor's contribution to your organization is a contribution to another organization (In actuality, the opportunity cost is anything that could be purchased by the amount of their donation, but we will assume that they have allocated that amount to political contributions). Your organization needs to have the reputation of being extremely successful in reaching its desired outcomes, or else a donor will look somewhere else.

Your brand, then, is essentially the general perception that is held about your organization. Most importantly, what you stand for and the expectations of your efficacy.

Your brand is also what your organization is associated with in people's minds. Are you seen as energetic, active, and hip? Or are you seen as boring, lackluster, and weak? The conceptions people hold and adjectives they would use to describe your organization are extremely powerful.

Maintaining your organization's brand image is extremely important. Recovering a brand that has a tarnished reputation is much harder than building up a brand from scratch.

Here are some tips for developing and monitoring your brand:

Keep track of what people are saying about you.

This involves media monitoring and listening to your supporters. Check out my post on media monitoring for ideas. Frequently ask your members and supporters what they think about the organization and what they have heard people say about it. Word of mouth is extremely powerful and you don't want to let anything negative slip passed you unanswered.

Decide what you want your brand to be.

When companies start out they spend a lot of time determining what the goals of their brand are. A lot of political organizations don't. Think about what adjectives you would want people to use when describing your organization, and then create a plan that would result in that. It is important that your branding is carried out over all aspects of your organization. If you want people to describe you as energetic and active, you don't want to have a boring website that is rarely updated. Your brand is your message. Don't stray off message.

Do your absolute best.

The best marketing team in the world would have a nearly impossible time making an organization that doesn't do anything look like it is extremely active and effective. That is why you need to do everything you can to make your organization the best it can be. In the world of political activism, where your products are results, hard work and continued effort are the best ways to build your brand.

When Michael asked me to be a guest writer here on Future Majority last month it was mostly because of my tutorial and organization tips posts that I wrote on other blogs. While a few were cross-posted on here I figured I would write a round-up post with my previous tips and tutorials articles. Many of these were targeted to a Young Democrats audience, the tips should be useful for anyone involved in youth organizing.

Tips for College Chapters Starting a New Year
It’s that time of the year again when college chapters are looking to recruit new members from the influx of wide-eyed freshmen joining their campuses. Here are are a few ideas for new member recruitment that have been used effectively by chapters in the past.

Blogging for Young Democrat Chapters
Blogging has grown from being a novelty in political communication to a vital tool for candidates, campaigns, and organizations. This post is designed to guide Young Democrats chapters in developing their blogging strategy.

Why You Should Get Involved in Your Local and State Parties
We all know the stereotype of the composition of local and state Democratic Parties: a plethora of old activists that consider anyone under 50 a young Democrat. While this keeps many younger voters from becoming involved in those entities, it would be to your advantage to bite the bullet and take the plunge.

Blogger Outreach 101
One of the best ways to get your message out to an audience that is likely to be receptive to your message is by working with established bloggers to cover your organization. Good blogger outreach is a subtle art, and this post is a crash course in implementing a strong outreach program.

Making Your Website’s Posts Social Bookmark-Friendly in Textpattern
A lot of state and local chapters use Textpattern for their websites. Sometimes the page templates don’t have adequate textpattern code for the titles of your posts. This means that no matter what page, article, or post is being viewed the same title will appear. While this may not seem like a big deal, it makes a difference on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. I use del.icio.us for my links posts, as do a lot of bloggers. With some chapter sites when I go to add a post it will just show a generic title, for example if it were YDAZ every post would show up as YDAz.org :: The Young Democrats of Arizona. I have to write in every post title that I share. While I am willing to do this, some bloggers won’t, and it can limit your exposure.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 1: Media Lists and Press Releases
So I have written about reaching out to new media, but it is always important to develop a traditional media strategy to get your message out to print, radio, and television news. This post will help you create a media contact list and learn some best practices about writing and sending press releases.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 2: Working With Reporters
In Part 1 of the Developing a Traditional Media Strategy series I discussed how to create a media contact list and best practices for writing and sending press releases. Today’s post will give you some advice on working with reporters once you have their attention.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 3: Media Monitoring
It is important for you to know what is being said about your organization in both new and traditional media outlets. You may also want to keep track of posts and stories about candidates, issues, and legislation that your organization is interesting in. This post will give you two tips to efficiently monitor the media. These are the methods I use in compiling all the stories in my link posts.

Developing a Traditional Media Strategy Part 4: Rapid Response and LTE
This is the fourth and final part of my Developing a Traditional Media Strategy series. Part 1 covered media lists and press releases, Part 2 covered working with reporters, Part 3 covered media monitoring, and this post will cover rapid response and letters-to-the-editor.

Getting the Most Out of Your Members
Chances are that the members of your organization have a wide range of experience, skills, and knowledge that you may not even know about. This post is designed to help you learn what you members bring to the table and how to effectively utilize their skills through goal-setting.

The Importance of a Quality Website
We have reached the point in the internet revolution where organizational websites are not only common but expected. If you don’t have a website, you don’t appear to exist. With more people using search engines to find information than ever before it is critical that your organization have a strong web presence. This post will cover the importance of chapter websites and ways to improve or start one.

More Tips on Blogging and Websites
I have come up with some additional tips on blogging and websites since I published my Blogging for Young Democrats Chapters and The Importance of a Quality Website posts. Here are those tips.

The Bring Back Bondelli’s Blog Strategy
Following the success of the “Bring Back Bondelli’s Blog” strategy (if it wasn’t a success I couldn’t be posting this right now) I thought it might be helpful to explain my methodology and show how you can apply the same techniques for your own causes and campaigns.

Using Twitter for Your Organization
This post is an attempt to unravel the mystery that is Twitter for the youth organizing community. While Twitter is pervasive amongst the early adopter crowd, it is just now beginning to gain traction with regular internet users.

So these are the tutorial and tips posts up to this point. I hope they will be helpful to you and your organization. If there are any topics that you would like to see a tutorial post on, please leave a comment and I will try to fill your requests.

This post is an attempt to unravel the mystery that is Twitter for the youth organizing community. While Twitter is pervasive amongst the early adopter crowd, it is just now beginning to gain traction with regular internet users.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that consists of 140 character "tweets" that are broadcasted to a person's subscribers. Think Facebook status updates but not constrained by Facebook. The question you are probably asking yourself is "if this is essentially the same thing as Facebook status updates, why is it even useful?" Well, here are a few reasons:

• With Facebook status updates, only your friends see them. With Twitter, anyone can subscribe to your updates.
• Facebook updates are more one-way than Twitter. Twitter users can direct message or reply to tweets, creating two-way communication.
• For the most part only people that go to your profile will see your status updates. Twitter updates are sent directly to subscribers.
• Twitter works with text messages (SMS), instant messages, and online.

Here is a video from Common Craft that explains the concept:

Getting started with Twitter

The first thing that you need to do is go to Twitter.com and set up an account. You can set up your cell phone, AOL Instant Messenger, and/or Google Talk to send/receive tweets. Once you have an account, start sending updates and find people to follow. You can start with me.

Enough about the basics, now it's time to see how you can use Twitter as an effective tool for your organization.

Applied Twitter

There are a number of ways that you can use Twitter for the benefit of your organization. The first is as a general SMS communication tool. SMS short codes are extremely expensive, which rules them out as an option for most organizations. Twitter provides a free alternative. You can set up a Twitter account for your organization and encourage people to subscribe to it. Use it to send announcements about upcoming events, rapid response items, to share links, etc. While it is true that currently most Twitter users are technology early adopters, those people tend to be online influentials, those who help get your message out there. As more and more users sign up for Twitter, the more effective a tool it is.

My favorite idea for using Twitter involves intra-group communication. Though Twitter does not currently support group functionality, using the free GroupTweet service gives you that power. Let's say for example that your group is at a conference and wants to be able to easily communicate with one another during it. I'll use the Young Democrats of Arizona and the upcoming YDA conference in Nashville as an example. I create a Twitter account named YDAZNashville. I register the Twitter account on GroupTweet. I make sure everyone in the delegation signs up for a Twitter account and follows YDAZNashville and I as YDAZNashville follows them back. I now have the equivalent of an SMS Google Group to coordinate the delegation during the conference. Whenever someone in the delegation sends a direct message to YDAZNashville, like (d YDAZNashville Everyone needs to head to Room A for welcome reception at 7), everyone in the group will get it.

I am sure there are a number of creative ways that you could use such a service in your organization.

Tips and Tools

If you have mobile internet on your phone, you can access Twitter at m.twitter.com.

To direct message someone you send "D username message" and to reply "@username message."

To share links easily without worrying about length you can use short-url services like TinyURL.

There are a number of Twitter desktop applications you can use. My favorite is Twhirl.

If you have a Blackberry, Twitterberry is a solid application.

The Twitter Facebook application allows you to use your tweets as status updates.

Links to Twitter Resources

Ultimate Guide to Twitter Tools

101 Must-See Twitter Resources

Twitter Tools, Tweaks and Theories

Newbie's Guide to Twitter

Big Juicy Twitter Guide

What the Web Strategist Should Know About Twitter

I hope that this helps. Now go sign up for a Twitter account and think of ways you can use this tool for your organization. Don't forget to follow me.