Campaign Tactics

I am loathe to report on good things about Republicans but J. McCain's site sports one very innovative feature: Donor Lookups. I have long been a proponent of integrated donor transparency applications. Features like this one build trust and suggest that a candidate's donors aren't anything he/she wishes to hide.

Don't get me wrong, I am sure John McCain's donor's are shady, but this feature is illuminating and a step in the right direction for online political campaigns. Democrats and candidates on the local, state and federal level should learn from this tool and implement their own lookup. The tool need not be as sophisticated as McCains, rather a simple link from their campaign page footer to a third party donation database website is a substantial step in the right direction.

Joshua Levy at TechPresident has his take on the McCain web campaign's email tactics:

...his most recent email clocks in at a whopping 497 words, or 3.55 Twitter posts that reach the 140 character limit (maybe we should use a "TWT:EMAIL" ratio to describe the brevity of candidate emails).

But the length is just half the problem. A campaign email is centered around the ask, which needs to be front and center. Yet this email scans very badly; it's hard to tell what Sen. McCain is asking for, and how to do what he wants. It comes across as a vague thank you and a rambling description of why he's running his campaign, accompanied by a nice picture that you click on to get a special message...

Campaign email communications face any number of challenges in their journey to the readers eyes and the McCain campaign adds one more hurdle in by making his emails too long and too dependent upon images. If you have a contribute link as an image, and only an image a vast majority (70% according to some sources) won't even be seeing the contribution ask. Why? Email clients are by default set to turn images off, additionally spam filters are likely to strip out images or reject emails loaded with them entirely.