Online campaigning grows up, and Vancouver leads the way
A Year of Elections
If you were breathing in 2008, you saw Barack Obama inspire millions with his vision for change and win the world's biggest contest. And if you’re in marketing or fundraising, your jaw dropped as you saw his technology strategy change the face of campaigning, a new high bar set for evermore.
Here in BC, our long-time friend Gregor Robertson — another young, passionate, and progressive outsider to politics who was sometimes compared with Obama — was also running the campaign of his life, heading up civic party Vision Vancouver in the city’s mayoral race. As with the US election, online and grassroots organizing would play a pivotal role in how the story unfolded.
Engaging and Empowering the Grassroots
After three years of uninspiring civic leadership, grassroots momentum was building around change and Vision Vancouver - barely 3 years old - had grown into Canada's largest municipal party. Communicopia was called in a few months before e-day. The landscape? An old flat website, creaky database, and no online team.
Working at warp speed, we created an integrated online campaign strategy and plan, aligned the team for how they would use these new tools, sourced a tech vendor, hired an online campaigner, and produced a powerful site and social media strategy that served as the centerpiece of their innovative campaign.
The site empowered supporters to make change from the comfort of their arm chairs. The drupal website, campaigning tools, and social networks allowed people to sign up to volunteer, phone, donate, fundraise, host or attend events, and spread the word to their communities. It held serious and fun campaign videos, Flickr photo streams, a unique Flash map that visually showing the support for Vision across Vancouver, and a bevy of news, blogs from candidates and campaigners, events, and stories.
Web Values — Gregor as Mayor
On November 16, 2008, Vancouver voters overwhelmingly elected Gregor as our new mayor, along with a near sweep of Vision city councilors, parks, and school board, to lead the city onto the world stage with the 2010 Olympics.
In many ways Vision was a dream client to work with. The reason it all worked so well was the party’s deep commitment to transparency, citizen participation, collaboration, and innovation. These are what we know as web values, and without them, all you have are tools being driven by the old models.
Gov 2.0
It is not only elections that have been changed by the web. Increasingly, governance is changing too. The Vision team now has a platform to communicate directly with people as they govern, as they use their own site and email list, their significant presence on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and hopefully update city communications towards more innovation and open goverment standards.
Taking the mantle of office during the deepest recession anyone can remember is sobering and challenging, but the world needs big and bold new ideas now more than ever. We were honoured to be involved with such an important campaign and wish Gregor and team Vision the greatest success in making Vancouver an even better - and greener and fairer and more creative - place to live and do business.