Organizing Virginia Pt.1 - The latest online organizing platform

The 2008 election cycle has set a new trend in political organizing with the use of online collaboration tools that empower supporters to take the campaign into their own hands. These tools have proven to be successful, as we all saw  My.BarackObama.com and Hillary Clinton's HillRaiser platform help to mobilize millions of activists, volunteers and donors in the 2008 election cycle. While these platforms were not the first social-network inspired political organizing platforms (i.e. Dean for America,  DevalPatrick.com and Democrats.org), they are the greatest examples of successes using social networks to mobilize a political base seen in Democrat politics to date. As we move into the 2010 election cycle, I expect to see more and more of these platforms springing up and the barriers to entry (cost and availability) lower as more and more firms begin to offer toolsets like those offered by Blue State Digital and the Mayfield Strategy Group.

The first of these new platforms I have seen is Organizing Virginia, Virginia Gubernatorial candidate Brian Moran's campaign impressive new organizing tool built by Jerome Armstrong's firm WebStrong Group.  I am not too familiar with work WebStrong has done in the past other than building out the tools for Mark Warner's campaign and their pioneering work with the use of Salesforce as a CRM solution for political campaigns.

The Organizing Virginia platform is built with Ruby on Rails with a PostgresSQL backend, as are all of WebStrong's sites from my understanding. This may not matter much to most people, but a useful tidbit for nerds like me who tend to look at a site's source code to see what platform it is built on. 

The site is broken out into 5 key areas, each of which I will do a seperate post on:

1) User Dashboard - A centralized location for organizers to view updates and notifications from other users and groups

2) Groups - A section for supporters to self-organize into groups to support the campaign

3) Events - An area for constituents to find and organize events

4) People - A search page for supporters to find each other and connect online

5) Profile - User profile listing a persons interests and activities on the site

These are pretty standard social networking features that will help Moran's campaign supporters organize effectively. There are a couple of interesting features to this tool I felt deserve an honorable mention:

• People You May Know - There is a region that suggest other people who are registered with Organizing Virginia you may know. I am not sure what criteria is used to determine your connection to these people, but it seems useful in allowing supporters to build strong networks they can collaborate with.

• Social Network Integration - The site aggregates the latest tweets tagged with the #VA-Gov hashtag from Twitter to the site. There is also a list of Facebook groups which allows users to easily find where people are organizing outside of this organizing platform. It looks like the list of Facebook groups is static, but useful nonetheless.

• User-defined Relationships -The tell-a-friend page has a feature I have not seen before, allowing users to define the relationship to the person they invite to the site before that person joins. I am guessing there is some data matching happening on the back end which creates the relationship between the two users once the invited friend joins. This is a beautiful feature, as tracking relationships between constituents is a huge bare.

• User Points - There is some debate over whether user points in a system like this makes sense or not because it in essence makes organizing into a game and strips away the sense of importance to your movement. But, I think it does incentivize people to actually come back and see they earn something for their hard work (other than electing a great candidate to governor of Virginia).

My next post will delve into the user dashboard, discussing it's usability and usefulness to a political organizer.