Dr. DigiPol

Dear Senator Kerry,

I joined your email list during the 2004 campaign. Despite your loss, I am happy to see that you are still using your list to promote a progressive agenda. But I must admit, I am disappointed by your lack of vision when it comes to leveraging your list for building a true progressive movement in this country… a progressive movement that can elect progressive presidents.

The key to making your email list work for America is to grow the list into a true community of Americans who will respond when you ask them to help change our country with a resounding “yes!”

Educate us about the issues and ask us to recruit our friends and family to join the fight. Give us tools to help us spread the message. Give us the ability to share our dreams with each other, like a real community.

In the past few weeks you have sent me three emails asking me to help you pass the Kids First Act (S. 114 and H.R. 1668). I applaud your desire to provide healthcare coverage to the 11 million uninsured kids in America, but I question your strategy.

The first two emails you sent asked me to send you money to pay for a TV ad promoting the Kids First Act. Leaving aside the $15 million you have left over from your campaign, which could easily fund the ad, let’s talk about your email. Why are you so narrowly fixated on asking for money? The Internet gives you an opportunity to break out of the old mold of money driving politics in favor of using information to drive citizens to act to reshape politics.

In the first email (June 8, 2005) you open by bashing Bush and the Republicans in Congress and ask us to focus our attention on the 11 million uninsured children. Aside from the problems of opening with a negative attack instead of a positive agenda, after reading the first two paragraphs, the only fact you give is the “11 million” statistic. There is nothing about the impact of being uninsured on the health of these kids, nor about the impact of the financial burden on the kids’ families. Not very compelling.

In the second email, I learn in the opening paragraph that thousands responded in the first day (thousands out of 2.6 million!?!?!?). I read again that we are talking about 11 million children. I learned nothing else about the issue.

Reading further down the second email, you refer to the “johnkerry.com community.” I had to laugh. What community are you referring too? All I see is a top-down email list. Nowhere on johnkerry.com, nor on keepingamericaspromise.com do I see any opportunity for me to become part of a community. A community is a group of people who share ideas and work towards common goals together. All I see is you issuing marching orders. I see no community.

And it is a shame, because the Internet offers so many opportunities for you to create a community—discussion forums, LISTSERVs, meetups, chatrooms, interactive Blogs—yet you offer none of these.

You simply declare community. It reminds me of President Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished.” Simply asserting it does not make it so. Communities must be grown, not asserted. And to call your subscribers a community without providing us the ability to become a true community is laughable, if not insulting.

And then there is your decision to focus your spending on a TV ad. What a colossal waste of money. Imagine if you spent a tenth of the cost of a running your national TV ad on building an online community platform and using it to educate, recruit, and mobilize citizens around the country. You would be able to build a community that wouldn’t need TV ads to spread the message to the people and to Congress.

But using TV ads is consistent with your top-down vision of campaigning. And it is a vision that probably cost you the election. Consider how the Republicans used GOPTeamLeader.com for several years leading up to the 2004 election to build a real grassroots community that including local volunteers organizing their friends and family at the precinct level. That is what a political community looks like. That is how you use the Internet to build a political movement that works at the polls, which can easily influence Congress to act.

I was heartened to see that your third email finally asked me to do something that didn’t sound like begging for money. On June 13 you sent an email with the subject line “Messing Up,” asking me to call Congress. Note, I must admit your subject lines are far from inspiring—“Wait ‘til you see this” on the first email and “Their arrogance, our patience” on the second—the first sounds like a porno SPAM and the other two hardly read like a call to action. But in your “Messing Up” email, you finally ask me to do something other than give you money. Hurrah!

I quickly clicked on the link asking me to call Congress, even though the email provided me with no guidance on what to say when I called Congress. This link took me to a web page on www.keepingamericaspromise.com with a map of the country and instructions to click on my state to find the contact info for my Members of Congress. Unfortunately, I use Netscape and the map doesn’t work on Netscape. After waiting for my Internet Explorer to launch, I cut and pasted the URL into the browser to try it again. Note, this delay would most likely discourage most Netscape users from completing the action—fortunately there aren’t too many of us.

Finally, I was able to click on my state. Up pops a list of phone numbers for my Senators and all of the Representatives from my state. Thank god I have a Ph.D. in Political Science or I might not have been able to identify which of those Reps was mine. We know that more than half of Americans will admit they do not know the name of their representatives. And on top of that, it is a toll call.

Now imagine that you used some of the money you have collected (either from the $15 million leftover from the campaign or from the money collected with these emails) to add software to your website that identifies anyone’s Congressional delegation using ZIP codes. No one would have to guess. And with so many of these products available (Capwiz, Democracy In Action, GetActive, Kintera, Convio, etc.) at prices often below $10,000 a year, it is inexcusable that you ask your supporters to pick from a list of Representatives in the hopes they get it right. In fact, these software provide easy interfaces for sending email, faxes, letters, and calls to Congress.

And as for making them pay a toll to call, it is very easy and reasonably inexpensive to set up a toll-free number that will patch citizens through to their Representative and Senators at no cost to them. Firms like Winning Connections have done this for years.

Of course, there is still the problem of what people are going to say when their call is connected. There are no talking points to help them make their call on the email or on the web page with the phone numbers. There isn’t even a reference to the bill number that you want passed. All you end up doing is setting those who call up to look silly when they can’t provide any details to support their request.

Aside from undermining your efforts to pass the Kids First bill, sending droves of citizens to make calls to Congress when they are unprepared will undermine the effectiveness of all grassroots phone campaigns. It only took a couple fake email campaigns to convince large numbers of Congressional staff that email campaigns are inherently suspect.

So, while I applaud your championing of the Kids First legislation and am encouraged by your attempts to use the Internet to move this bill, I am extremely concerned that you do not really understand the power of the Internet and you are squandering your efforts and resources.

Sincerely,
Dr. Digipol

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Digital Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.