Iowa Caucus Recap – Technology Dilemma
Filed under: Campaign Technology, Red Alert Dossier, local politics
I attended the Iowa Caucus yesterday and learned quite a bit about the process. See an off year caucus is designed to elect leadership and fill county volunteer positions on committees, to elect delegates, etc. I am now a delegate for my precinct and feel that much more connected to our great process. But here’s something I ran up against in my precinct huddle.
The group was vigorously discussing how we need to get sons and daughters engaged. We have so many voting age college students/high school seniors that are seemingly ignored by most candidates/officials. Ask Chris Hagenow how important even 80 little votes can be to winning a seat? What if those 80…or 200 or 1000 were between 18-24? There were great ideas but it wasn’t until the very end where someone mentioned “That twitter that all the young people are on”. I don’t expect Citizen USA to know demographic data on these tools…but she was headed in the right direction.
I sat back trying to assess where this group was regarding technology and I chimed in, “Does anyone here NOT have email and is anyone unwilling to provide it as a method of organization?” (silence). So we had our 100% possible compliance technology. So I raced home, built a WordPress site, set up an email list on Aweber’s email marketing platform and bought an easy to remember URL. After all that, I had a moment of reflection, dropped what I was doing…and created a Facebook Group. The thought was “Keep it simple stupid”.
I’m sure we’ll end up doing what campaigns and candidates should do..and that’s to be where people ARE and communicate in the ways THEY want. Is that more work? YES. Does it require more infrastructure? YES. But can one tie them all together to provide a “web” or network of information that “disperses to all of the content outposts” for a campaign automatically? You bet.
We’ll see how this plays out and I will report on a regular basis….but now that I’m in the trenches of my actual neighborhood, I’m going to learn a lot more about what works, what doesn’t, and what we can pass onto other precincts.
More to come.
2012 Iowa Caucus
I can’t believe this but I’m already amped up for the 2012 Iowa Caucuses! I know that’s it’s years away…but really when you live life in election cycles it’s not that far off. Will this be the year that you go out and ensure that we don’t have another vote for “Change” or “The guy who might be a little better than the guy with all that social media prowess”. You’re looking to vote for PEOPLE not PARTIES right? So make sure when you huddle around your candidates sign in the Democrat caucuses or write a name on a piece of paper on the Republican caucus side remember where we are. Remember what got us here. And, KNOW what you can do about it. Vote. Vote in smart people who will lead and won’t waiver. Vote in realism. Vote in favor of the constitution.
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