An Alternative To Wordpress for Political Campaign Websites
WordPress is a very popular content management system (CMS) that runs about a quarter of all websites as of this writing.
Many political campaigns use WordPress as their website CMS. It’s a powerful solution, but whether it’s the right solution for your campaign depends on your needs, budget, and technical abilities.
WordPress uses themes for design. There are thousands of free and low-priced ones available. There are also a number of political WordPress themes available. However, all themes require installation and customization. If you purchase a theme with a lot of bells and whistles, the customization can take quite a bit of time.
WordPress plugins provide additional functionality without requiring custom programming. Again, there are thousands of free and paid plugins available. They may include forms, calendar features, and so on. However, for plugins to work, they must be installed, configured for use, and kept up to date.
While the WordPress software may be open source (and free) and themes are fairly inexpensive, getting the site configured and customized takes a lot of time. For a person without technical skills, there can be a steep learning curve.
You can get your site built on the cheap. However, you usually get what you pay for, so you might not want to put your online presence in the hands of an inexperienced developer or with a poor design. A WordPress template can become a mess in the wrong hands, or the site may not be optimized for search engines.
Another downside to WordPress is that you need to perform backups, security updates, and any necessary upgrades yourself. If you don’t keep up with updates, you run the risk of having your site hacked. Because WordPress powers so much of the web, it’s the biggest target for online hackers.
So, is a WordPress campaign website worth it? Ultimately, that’s up to you. It’s certainly not a bad choice, but only if the site is properly designed and configured.
Though we now offer WordPress Campaign Websites, the Online Candidate platform has been developed and refined to make websites simple to update, even for people with little technical skill. It contains built-in tools and functionality specific to political candidates. The templating system is built-in and is simple but very flexible. Even our custom designs are affordable because we have a fast and efficient production process, allowing us to pass on the cost savings to our clients.
Learn more about our Online Candidate political website platform and learn why hundreds of campaigns use us every election cycle.
Campaign Dollars and Sense
Money fuels the engine of every political campaign. The bigger the budget, the easier it is to rally existing supporters and spread your message to new groups. Once you have inspired the masses, the last thing you want to do is create obstacles for them to donate.
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Power to the People
Imagine for a moment giving a compelling speech to a cheering crowd. The supporters have embraced your platform, endorsed you as their candidate, and vowed to donate to the campaign. The same energetic crowd goes home, reaches for their wallets and heads to your website eager to donate…except they find the only way to donate is by check. Suddenly, their desire to give has met a roadblock. Never take away the ability of your supporters to decide which method of giving is right for them.
Checks in the Balance
Writing checks used to be the golden standard for payments. Now, debit and credit cards have steadily taken over as the preferred payment method. Analysis by The Campaign Finance Institute has shown the average online supporter gives less than $200 per donation, but is more likely to donate multiple times over the duration of the campaign!
According to Pew Research, a non-partisan research group, nearly 54% of all U.S. adults receive their information regarding the 2010 elections online. With that number of engaged potential donors, doesn’t it makes sense to have an online donation option for them?
Choose Wisely
There are many companies willing to help you with campaign donations; however, they are not created equal.
1. Use your donation tool to your advantage. There are flexible programs that allow you to not only accept donations on your website, but also provide a secure payment page to send out by email.
2. Compare programs. Many processors charge up to 10% in fees and surcharges, and some charge as little as 2.19%.
3. Deposit your funds automatically. To avoid interruption in your campaign cash flow, your donation processor should deposit funds directly into your bank account within 24-48 hours. Many processors only mail physical checks to the campaign office once or twice per month.
4. Beware of long-term contracts. Choose a provider that honors month-to-month agreements. Don’t make the mistake of getting locked into a long-term contract.
5. Remove the risk of handling credit card data. The safest way to handle a credit card transaction online is to allow a compliant and secure third party to handle it for you. This allows you to collect the money, but removes the risk of handling or storing credit card data.
Donations Made Easy
Increasing your campaign donations can be easier than you think. By empowering your supporters with an option to donate online, you give them the ability to give easily and often.
Amy Airhart is the Director of Business Development at LawPay, a credit card processing program specifically designed for attorneys and is recommended by more than 60 Bar Associations across the country.
Election Day – Now and Throughout the Year
For many candidates, Election Day is here. The general November elections always seem to get the most attention and greatest turnout. But other elections are also held throughout the year. There are school board, local elections and primaries.
For candidates that have elections that fall in ‘off’ months, voter turnout tends to be lower, so supporter turnout is the key to victory. Engaging voters early is particularly important.
By getting people excited and invested in your campaign, they are more likely to actually vote for you. People are busy. If they have followed your campaign, gotten to know and like you as a candidate, and perhaps even contributed, then the odds are greater that they will take the time to go to the polls on Election Day. By then, they have become psychologically invested in seeing you win.
If you have an election in the spring, late summer or even next November, start building support as early as possible. With online political activity growing each year, candidates of any type cannot ignore the web. Begin now to establish yourself online and create your online reputation. Start using social media and build out your campaign website. (We are seeing many candidates starting their websites a year or more before the election). These are the building blocks to online promotion and fundraising.
Done properly, you will build a strong following that will turn out and vote for you on Election Day – no matter when it occurs!
Running for local office or just considering a run? Check out OnlineCandidateResources.com. It covers everything from establishing yourself online though building a campaign site to online promotion and fundraising strategies leading up to Election Day. Free for Online Candidate clients.
Are Short Links Blocking Your Campaign Email?
Link shortening services are a great way to reduce a long URL to a nice, short one. While these services have been around for quite a while, they’ve become very popular with the rise of Twitter and Facebook. While link shortening works well for social media posts, does it work well for email?
In a word, no.
While shortening links in emails (particularly text emails) is appealing, link shorteners are a favored tool by spammers. They like them because a shortened URL masks the true link that they want you to click on.
So how does this affect your email delivery? If a shortened link begins to appear in a large volume of spam, ISPs may block emails that include that particular link-shortening domain to block the spammers. If you are using the same link shortener in your emails, then your email messages may be inadvertently blocked, as well.
This can hurt your email deliverability rate.
Why take the risk? Send emails with an HTML version instead of plain text-only emails. With HTML email, you can easily link up text or images instead of putting the full URL in the message. (Most email marketing services primarily use HTML message builders.)
If you use a full URL, it’s probably better for your subscribers. After all, seeing exactly where a link points to is better than taking a risk clicking a shortened URL. Anything you can do to improve response on your email list is helpful, and using full links in your messages can improve your click-through rates. This can make a real difference in your fundraising and recruitment drives.
Link shorteners are great for social media, where space is at a premium. Just don’t use them in your email.
Hey! For less than the cost of a (print) mailing, you can easily build a political website for your campaign. Online Candidate sites feature a content management system, volunteer, and donation forms, social networking links, and more.
5 Common Campaign Twitter Mistakes
Political candidates and campaigns have several reasons for using Twitter. They may want to build overall public exposure, establish branding, share information and increase voter support. While Twitter is simple to set up and use, it’s not without its quirks. To attract and keep more followers, avoid these common Twitter mistakes.
Mistweeting from the wrong account
Many people have multiple Twitter accounts. They may have a personal account and another for a political campaign. If you run multiple accounts, make sure you are logged into the proper account before you tweet! This mistake is more common than you may think, especially in the business world.
Confusing a direct message and a general tweet
Former New York Representative Anthony Weiner learned the hard way that there are big differences between a direct message and regular tweet when a lewd photo was posted to his campaign Twitter account. The scandal eventually led to his resignation. The lessons? Make sure you know who you are sending your messages to – and never assume that electronic communications will be kept private.
Being overly emotional
A little emotion in your tweets is fine. After all, you don’t want to give the impression that you are a campaigning robot. On the other hand, too much complaining, vitriol and anger can become across poorly. And keep your language clean, no matter what!
Letting the numbers fool you
The quality, not quantity, of your followers is important. You’re running to win an election, not a social media contest. Having 1.3 million Twitter followers doesn’t really matter if they are all mostly fake. Honestly, do you think anyone actually compares the number of social media followers between campaigns and throws their support behind the more ‘popular’ candidate?
Being too ROI focused
Although marketing through social media is arguably measurable, it does not mean you should obsess over the traffic and retweet metrics. The intangible benefits from relationships and message promotion are more important. (But for those who are interested, a few tools to help measure your social media ROI include Tweetreach and TweetDeck.
Online Candidate allows you to easily integrate social media into your campaign website. Start a website for your political campaign today.
Legend of The Missing Web Designer
Nothing is more frustrating and potentially damaging to a website owner than to be unable to reach their web designer. Maybe they’re sick, maybe they’re busy – or maybe they’ve gone out of business and didn’t bother to tell their clients! When you’ve been in the web business long enough, you’ll hear some strange tales.
Some clients come to us because they cannot track down their web designer to make site updates or changes. The story usually goes like this: “I had [friend/acquaintance/volunteer] offer to build me a campaign site. They [finished it/never finished it], and now I can’t get in touch with the person to make any changes…”
Or the web designer may be slow in making updates. That might not be terribly important early in a campaign, but when things start to move fast, and you need to react quickly, your campaign cannot be at the mercy of someone who will make a change ‘when they get around to it.’ A ‘free’ website by a volunteer is not a great deal when the designer puts you at the bottom of their priority list.
The lesson here is that you cannot place complete control of your campaign website in the hands of a single outsider.
You, as the candidate, need to be able to make changes to your own website. If someone is not able to make the update or a news item or text change needs to be made immediately, you need the ability to log in and do what you have to do. Timing is everything on the web. For breaking news, voters and reports go to the campaign websites for updates and reactions.
Whether you go with one of our political website design packages or you go with someone else, you need to have control over your own website – and your domain name.
In the worst cases, clients have had to register a completely new domain name and recreate their website because they were unable to reach their missing designer. One client of ours had to do this within a month of his election. Ouch!
The only thing legendary about Online Candidate is our ability to provide a great campaign website system that you control. Turnaround time is fast – a finished site design can be completed within a few business days. With our design customization and built-in, you don’t need to hire a web designer or programmer.
