Message management

Crawford Kilian discusses the communications techniques used by one NDP riding in the federal election...and has some excellent suggestions for improvement:

(W)e should have been interacting everywhere, especially in a campaign that couldn't afford to spend much on print media. Instead, the Internet almost paralyzed the campaign. The avalanche of letters couldn't be efficiently answered. Other tasks went undone. Even when we could use the Web and email, it was only to pass along the Message Box just as Candidate Support had passed it along to us.

I can see how an online campaign might have worked better. With four or five full-time volunteers, a couple of them with good Web skills, we could have kept the candidate's website steadily updated. We could have used a blog to post answers to voters' questions. We could have worked more aggressively to get the candidate into other media through interviews and events...

(T)he Internet and traditional political campaigns are still at odds with one another. The politicians are still thinking ballistically, trying to blast a one-way message through the voters' thick skulls. The idea of an online conversation with the voters-with an unpredictable, unscripted outcome-is literally unthinkable. Better to strap down the loose cannons in every party, keep repeating The Message and hope it works.

At some point, however, we will all spend so much of our lives online that the FedEx strategy will simply not work anymore. Not in the next election, maybe not in the one after that, but some day, a party will run an improvisational, interactive online campaign.

My one area of disagreement with Kilian is in his assumption that a more interactive campaign can't happen next time out. I for one would love to see the NDP more on top of the possibilities - and there are at least some indications that the problem in North Vancouver wasn't an aberration.

Even during the campaign, the party was sporadic in releasing new content on its website, and the one visible form of user input was only a small part of the content on the party's site. And since the election, the NDP site has only been updated with one new speech. It's understandable that those in charge of the site might need a break after the campaign, but surely there has to be somebody available to make sure that the party's message doesn't disappear again until next time Canadians go to the polls.

At the same time, along with presenting its own message, the party also needs to be seen addressing the concerns of Canadians directly. No matter how much the campaign focuses on claiming that role, the party needs to be seen responding quickly and publicly to voters' issues...and sending an e-mail only a couple of days after the fact seems like a poor way to do that given the potential for instantaneous communication.

Some analysts may have taken the wrong message from Harper's "disciplined" campaign and assumed that voters respond positively to a one-way, predictable information flow. But while that stance may have differentiated the Cons from a Liberal party which couldn't even get its own message straight, there's plenty of room for a party to do better by presenting a generally unified message while also making itself more available to voters. We can only hope the NDP will work toward a fully interactive campaign model next time out in order to be able to point out a more stark difference between itself and a Con party which goes into hiding.