Drupal has powered a number of politech widget systems this election cycle, such as the Register to Vote widget from Rock the Vote. We are proud to add this new Get-out-the-Vote (GOTV) widget to the ranks of distributed technology systems this year.
Our strategy department teamed up with some old friends from the Howard Dean campaign, and a new organization that popped up suddenly this summer called Music for Democracy to tap into music communities for Barack Obama.
The idea is this: small network clusters communicating in trusted spaces in a conversation sequence.
In other words, artists talking directly WITH their fans in the online communities where the fans already are comfortable talking. Less broadcast messaging, more building & leveraging the trust of close networks.
Musicians who are participating agree to record a pro-Obama GOTV message, as well as make a few live calls on election day. They then seed the widget to their fan base directly by posting the widget on their website/MySpace page, emailing their list, posting it on Facebook, etc.
Fans of those artists then sign up for political messages from the artist they choose. Fans can call the artists back through the system, and artists can reply to the fans too.
Using voice and SMS text messaging in an organic and personalized thoughtful conversation about the election, the conversation sequences build to election day with a final, urgent, Get-out-the-Vote call.
Music for Democracy assumes that engaged voters rightfully demand more than a smiling celebrity civic pep-talk. This campaign gives fans a chance to hear the logic behind the artists’ thoughtful endorsement, and as a result they can respect the artists’ position as more than a hollow photo-op.
The widget synchs up with each artist’s account on the phone-based community website SayNow.com. A custom module built for the Drupal back-end gives fans the power to recruit friends and family into the program in order to earn points. The highest point earners win a live phone call from their chosen artist on Election Day.
Anticipating an enormous spike of traffic from high visibility promotion on front page of sites like MySpace, Music for Democracy turned to Advomatic’s specialized expert Drupal hosting team to keep the data moving in and out of the widget.
In this project, Advomatic provided our meaty hosting, an innovative social networking strategy, and Drupal provides the spine.