Five Tips For Your Campaign Website

Enhance your website with something that will help you create a memorable brand

An old pal of the blog, Eric Hogensen, is a campaign professional, currently freezing his ass off in Wisconsin while working in Matt Flynn's gubernatorial campaign. He has 5 tips to offer for candidates-- at any level-- who want to make a successful campaign website, calling it a "great way to interact with voters and allow them to research your positions" and cautions that "there are many things to keep in mind when designing your website." Key phrase there: "allow them to research your positions." The DCCC suggests to their candidates to not include controversial positions and to keep issues pages either entirely off a campaign website or to keep the issues as vanilla as possible. That's why the DCCC keeps losing elections and why there are dozens and dozens of fewer Democrats in Congress today than there were in 2008, just one decade ago. Eric is way, way too polite to say it, but rule number 1 for all campaign websites should always be: ignore the DCCC. They're the biggest losers in politics and they can only win races in wave cycles.

1. Take advantage of modern website creators:

Gone are the days when you need a dedicated web designer to create the perfect page for you. There are numerous places that make website creation simple and easy, like Squarespace and Wix. Do some basic research and find a provider and site that works for you.

2. Keep it simple:

As with most things in campaigns, it is easy to get carried away with all the bells and whistles that come with the modern website creators. Your website needs to allow voters to learn about you, contact you, and support you. A simple and clean design achieves those purposes.

3. Make sure your domain is easy to type:

Once again simplicity is the key here. If you plan on putting your URL on a palm card or piece of mail, make sure it is easy to read and type in. Voters aren’t going to spend extra time if they are struggling to type in a long, confusing URL.

4. Make it easy to find anything:

If a voter wants to find something out about you, your website is a place they will often look. Don’t make it difficult for them to find something. This is doubly true for contributions. You should always be able to get to the donation part of your site with one click from anywhere on the site.

5. This is your chance to use details, don’t abuse it:

Your website is the one place where you can spell out details in their full glory. The problem is many candidates forget is the rule of being concise. Make good use of the phrase “click to read more.” You want to make it easy and simple to read about any issues, and then give people the option to read the detailed plan.

  

Do You Look Forward To Opening Campaign E-Mails?

Alan Grayson's e-mails are legendary because they say something worth taking a few minutes to read. No one likes being bombarded with pointless spam-- like "we're almost there" or "the sky is falling," or whatever pointless bullshit the DCCC tells candidates to use. And at the end of the FEC quarters, it's just horrific, since most candidates share their lists with crooked operations-- like EMILY's List, End Citizens United and the DCCC who sell the names to every candidate they can find, making sure everyone is flooded with garbage e-mail from the worst candidates, like Ann Kirkpatrick, who literally sends a policy-free e-mail begging for money every single day. This was today's idiotic, witless spam:

Does anyone still fall for the "all contributions will be doubled" scam?

On the other hand, there are a few candidates, usually progressives who follow the examples of Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson and do not send out crap e-mails. Here's an example of the difference, the polar opposite of EMILY's List/DCCC/New Dem candidate Ann Kirkpatrick. Compare her typical e-mail above to the one Paul Clements send out at the same time.

The American healthcare system is badly broken. A new report from Senator Claire McCaskill shows that the prices of the top-20 most prescribed drugs have each increased an average of 12 percent each year over the past five years-- nearly 10 times the rate of inflation.

Our pharma costs are so convoluted and dangerous to the public that the Financial Times launched an investigation into the January death of a Texas teacher who died of the flu after leaving the pharmacy when she couldn’t afford a $116 co-pay. FT found that if she’d used a coupon and paid cash, Heather Holland would have paid just $51.94-- insurance, in the convoluted pricing schemes favored by insurers and pharma, made her medication cost even more than the full cash price.

Our drug pricing system is predatory and destructive. Why isn’t Congress acting?

It’s money. Pharma’s lobbying efforts are vast, and its contributions large-- my opponent, Fred Upton, is one of the top Congressional recipients of pharma cash - $1.44 million in the past 20 years. Upton and his Republican allies are using their power to protect the industry. Since Trump and the GOP Congress took control, no pharma CEO has been forced to testify before Congress. When STAT asked Upton, former chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee (where in 2015 he helped Rep. Tom Marino pass legislation easing DEA enforcement against suspected black market opioid shipments) about a chair’s power, he said, “As chair, you can do just about anything you want.”

Since Republicans refuse to act on pharma greed, we must make them answer at the ballot box.

Your support today will help me fight for fair drug pricing and against Big Pharma greed. If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:

In Congress, I will act to ensure that Americans pay drug prices no higher than those in Canada and negotiated by the VA. I will stand up for single-payer Medicare-for-All to ensure that fewer of our neighbors suffer and die because they cannot afford care.

In so many ways, this is a life-and-death election. As always, I am grateful for your support.

The difference is palpable, but the DCCC tells its pathetic and generally dishonest candidates to send out crap like Kirkpatrick's nonsense and to never send out policy-laden emails like the one Clements sent. Especially at a time like this, at the end of the quarter, it's worth rewarding candidates treating us like adults and giving us something of substance to read, instead of the raw sewage we get pouring out of desperate and useless careerist candidates like Kirkpatrick. Please consider chipping in to Paul's campaign by clicking on the Blue America congressional thermometer on the right. I'm proud to say that most of the Blue America candidates send out the intelligent e-mails, not the useless, embarrassing kind the DCCC encourages their candidates to flood our e-mail boxes with.

Another way to reach voters-- and contributors-- is to just send an especially compelling video. If a candidate's got the goods, a great video can really do wonders. A video sure launched Randy Bryce's campaign. Now we're in the middle of a viral explosion on social media for this Kaniela Ing video. Watch it and listen to what he has to say-- and remember, the population of Hawaii is less than a million and a half people and Kaniela's district is about half that. Yet this video has been viewed by over 7 million people:

Sometimes There Are Ways To Vet A Candidate Without Asking If They Support Medicare-For-All

There's a progressive organization this cycle that was-- they are no longer-- forcing candidates to sign a contract that stipulated, among other things, that the candidate would instruct ActBlue to send all their contributions not to the candidate's own bank account but to the organization's bank account. The organization would keep 95% of the funds and send 5% to the candidate. Eventually the candidates said, collectively, "Duh! This isn't fair"-- and forced the organization to change the deal. The new deal left the organization with 65% and the candidates with 35%. In return for the 95% or 65% the organization was supposed to run the candidate's campaign. The candidates I discussed it with said they did virtually nothing of value at all.

They sounded like scam artists you would expect from religious right hucksters or from Republicans, maybe from EMILY's List, but not from progressive Democrats. Eventually I spoke to the guy who founded the organization and he said they weren't scam artists and, in any case, they had stopped ripping off the candidates. But while they still were it was a convenient way for me to look at artists and say no one stupid enough to read that contract and sign it would make a good member of Congress. A handy tool for vetting, right?

Another handy tool has to do with ActBlue itself. ActBlue started around the same time Blue America did. Tact Blue's function is to provide the infrastructure for candidates and groups like Blue America to raise funds for candidates. They're facilitated the raising of $1.89 BILLION for Democratic candidates and organizations.

Almost all candidates start out as novices. They hire consultants and staffers who are supposed to know something that will help them get elected. Another vetting tool we use is whether or not they can figure out how to use ActBlue. If they can't figure out how to use ActBlue, they;'re not going to be able to figure out how to get from their office to their seat in Congress. And we tell 'em-- register with ActBlue. "My campaign manager," I occasionally hear, "wants to use another service instead," Depending on my mood, I may tell them they have the wrong campaign manager and they have no chance to win if they keep him. More often I just say something to the effect, you can keep working with whoever your campaign manager wants to work with but if you don't also use ActBlue, many grassroots donors won't contribute to your campaign, because they trust ActBlue to not be a scam operation and they don't really know about the others who are trying to replicate what ActBlue does. But they're not ActBlue. ActBlue does not charge a fee. Legally they are required by the FEC to pass along a flat rate of 3.95% on each donation to cover credit card and bank processing cost. If they didn't pass that along it would be an in-kind donation. It's the only expense candidates ever incur working with ActBlue. No one is asked to sign a contract and, better yet, local school committee candidates use the same tools that Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama did. Their main source of income is from the small tips that donors can optionally leave when they make a contribution.

In the words of ActBlue's executive director, Erin Hill, "ActBlue is a nonprofit dedicated to building fundraising technology for Democratic campaigns, committees, and organizations. We believe that grassroots, people-powered campaigns are what we need for the future. That 1- raises more money; 2- connects campaigns with the folks they represent; and 3- provides a path for new voices to organize and build competitive campaigns." She issued this statement after the big wins Tuesday night.

All year, grassroots donors have been leading the Democratic Party by participating in special elections in unprecedented numbers, funding new groups that fight back in innovative ways, and expanding the map of candidates running for office. Small-dollar donors funded races in districts where Democrats haven’t contested for years. They also funded races where first-time candidates with diverse perspectives will now be setting policy as elected officials. Small-dollar donors fueled last night’s historic wins across the country.

For example, we were thrilled to see Democrats win big up and down the ballot in Virginia last night. Every Democrat who won in that state was an ActBlue user. It was truly a testament to the hard work of grassroots supporters who made over 220,000 donations on ActBlue this year to 335 candidates and groups at the state and local level in Virginia for this election. These extraordinary numbers are just a snapshot of the incredible energy we've seen sitewide this year, with small-dollar donors raising $413 million for 6,985 candidates and organizations from 13.5 million contributions in 2017 alone.