A lot of hay has been made about effective “e-campaigning” in recent election cycles.
Having advised campaigns on “e-campaigning” and “political IT” in the past I can say the two need to be seperated and clearly defined.
Given the nature of political campaigning they are all short-staffed, overworked and often times underqualified (not a bad thing just a reality). So often you find the youngest guy/girl on the campaign who has no more experience than they guessed right when setting up the wireless network in the office be annointed “tech person” – the “tech person” becomes the defacto point of contact for everything IT (fax machines, emails, data management, website, etc.).
No matter how you look at e-campaigning or political IT, those portions of the campaign are no longer considered the geeky guys in the corner who send out emails rather they are integral parts to winning campaigns (emphasis on the winning)
Candidates, campaign managers, and political directors often demand esoteric mail lists of just 1/4 Independants in a certain zip code who vote absentee and believe those things appear out of thin air – think about it for a second if you had to do that personally how would you do it? Others think that a donor database is well catalogued and safe if its sitting in an excel file on the C drive of some desktop computer that sounds like its taking off everytime you turn it on. While even more think that if you buy an email list it will send itself.
The above are some examples of critical tasks involved with campaigning and intersect heavily with Political IT.
You will find many campaigns believe that a website can be built in a day, cost $500 and be as functional as Barrack Obama’s because they saw the neighbor kids website and if he can do it so can we. Others think that a viable email strategy is to load the body up with HTML, pictures, and lots of “Click Here to Contribute” buttons and send the same email to your list 2 times a day for 2 months – then wonder why they get no responses and the messages end up in SPAM folders. More surprising to me is the fact that more campaigns spend thirty minutes setting up a myspace/facebook account and nothing more and wonder why they have no followers.
The above are some examples of critical tasks involved with campaigning that intersect heavily with E-Campaigning.
As you can tell there is a clear difference between E-Campaigning and Political IT and until campaigns realize that and spend equal/time and resources at it they won’t see the maximum benefit.
Furthermore the difference in a race can be how effectively it handles E-Campaigning and Political IT. Think about it, the very core purpose of IT is to do tasks more efficiently and effectively – if you do it right every $1 you spend optimizing your work on IT is like spending $2 doing the same task the non-IT way – if you do it right it can be the difference maker in every election.