Mobile Voter - Txt:Politic

Of course, it’s not practical to sit down with each constituent. Instead, we’ve got to create groups of people who share similar characteristics/perspectives and then shape our products/services/messages in ways that meet the needs and desires of this market segment.

The process of gathering constituent data, defining segments, creating segment-specific services/messaging, getting feedback from the constituents, and refining services/messaging based on this feedback (a feedback loop) is what CRM & VRM are all about.

CRM is Customer Relationship Management and it’s been a hot concept in the private sector since the mid-90s. It’s a broad reaching concept that boils down to developing a customer-centric business strategy. The important takeaway here is that CRM is not software, it’s a holistic business philosophy.

Of course, there are a slew of vendors selling CRM software. The general consensus is, however, that software doesn’t do much good if the customer-centric business strategy doesn’t pervade every aspect of doing business.

In the private sector, some of the benefits of an efficient & effective CRM system are:
· A 360 view of customers
   o Preferences
   o Motivations
   o Buying habits
   o Demographics
· Personalized & streamlined marketing & sales based on the above data
   o Marketers can better understand the customer/customer segments and therefore do a better job of targeting the marketing efforts
   o Same goes for sales
· Quick and efficient customer service (since all of the above data is available to the customer service rep). No need to re-ask for information.
· Analysis: because all of the above data is tracked, a company can do segment and overarching analysis – looking for weak spots, identifying cross and up-sell opportunities
   o A key component here is that sales, marketing, customer service, etc can be modified on the basis of this analysis.

Clearly, much of this thinking applies to political campaigning. Instead of buying a product, a constituent is buying the party line and voting for a candidate – or volunteering, donating, sending a petition, etc...

The campaign has ‘business’ objectives that it would like to achieve (ie: generating N-Thousand votes in an upcoming election). Every campaign could benefit from a constituent-centric approach: continually honing the campaign, customizing it to individual constituent segments, and improving marketing/messaging based on feedback. Most sophisticated campaigns already use some variation of this process.

Within the past year or so, vendors have caught on that what sells in the private sector is going to sell in the political sphere. Enter VRM: Voter Relationship Management. As in the private sector the term VRM is conflated with the concept/philosophy of VRM. In browsing the web, I found little written about how to shape a campaign around a VRM strategy. Instead, I found a bunch of vendor pitches for VRM software.

VRM software focuses on enabling a campaign to precisely target voters via various media. For example, a web-based VRM tool allows a campaign to sort a database using the following criteria:
· Geographic: statewide, congressional, senate, and house districts, counties, precincts, and neighborhoods;
· Demographic: gender, age & ethnicity;
· Voting History: primary and general election history, early and mail voting, voter registration dates;
· Custom criteria: any statistical voter information can be integrated into the Voter Relationship Manager, and then it can be used to further increase the precision of targeting.
(from http://www.votermanagement.com/)
There is also some reporting and analysis capability. It seems to me though, that for VRM to work, there’s got to be systematic campaign buy-in (as in the private sector), otherwise it’s going to be a nice piece of software sitting behind the same old types of campaign tactics.

CRM Vendors:
Good list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CRM_vendors
Hundreds of offerings. Big players seem to be: PeopleSoft, Salesforce.com, SAP, Siebel (being acquired by Oracle), Oracle

VRM Vendors:
e-Campaign: http://www.epoliticalcampaign.com

Votermanagement.com: http://www.votermanagement.com/

Votilogy: http://www.votilogy.com/ (republican focus)

CiviCRM by OpenNGO (http://www.openngo.org/) – an open
source solution built on top of Drupal / Joomla! /
Mambo (popular open source content management solution
(CMS)). The team is currently working on a new release
of their CRM software – this offering seems to be one
of the most exciting in the field.
http://www.openngo.org/

GetActive: a higher end offering that is very popular. http://www.getactive.com/

Kintera & CTSG: Kintera seems to be mostly a CMS aimed at non-profits while CTSG provides more politically focused software/services including a VRM (although differently named).
http://www.kintera.org
http://www.ctsg.com

Democracy In Action: low cost suite of online tools to manage a campaign. This stuff is really unbelievably cheap for what you get.
http://www.democracyinaction.org