[cvn-developers] IMPORTANT: Getting the message out

[Seb Bacon]

Hi,

I think we now need to focus on making sure as many ordinary voters as
possible get to see what we have done. So far we're only reaching the
twittery-type online crowd. We've been getting fantastic feedback,
lots of people saying it's made them think again about who to vote
for, so I'd like to ensure as many people as possible have heard about
it. I want to do a report after the election with quotes from people,
and statistics, to show its impact, so that next time the Tories join
in, too.

Just trying to come up with some ideas in the shower. I concluded
we've probably achieved most of what we can in the media, so now we
need to go straight to the voters. The key as ever is the volunteers.
Some initial thoughts:

1) A task for each volunteer to email 10 friends about the survey.
The email should say in it something along the lines of "If you like
this, forward this email to 10 friends". The message is really
important. We have tapped into a lot of feeling already; people are
talking a lot about fairness and transparency in the emails they are
sending candidates. It could perhaps have a message along the lines of
"The project is run by volunteers and was built by ordinary voters.
Now it needs ordinary voters to get send the politicians a clear
message that we want to know more real, unspun information about them,
not the party machine; we aren't apathetic, we're just not interested
in the soap opera they're trying to fob us off with."

2) A task for each volunteer to research and write to their local
paper about it. (Do we have a good database of local papers still?)

3) Could we somehow find funds to print lots of business cards with a
simple message and URL and post them to volunteers, and ask them to
hand them out at work? How about these Moo cards,
http://uk.moo.com/en/products/minicards.php? £12 for 100. Would there
be a budget to maybe get 100 packs? Is there a cheaper option along
the same lines?

4) Going back to the mainstream media, could we somehow convince the
Metro to print an advert? Could we *pay* for an advert? Anyone know
how much they cost?

5) Also ask people to print out a poster and pin it up at work or somewhere.

I like 1 and 3 the most.

Any thoughts, other ideas?

Seb

--
skype: seb.bacon
mobile: 07790 939224
land: 020 8123 9473

[Richard Pope]

Printing + mailout times for moo where about 4 days at best when I was
there.

I'd go for #1 plus the following:

Design a PDF of all the questions and answers designed to be printed
at a3 /a4 and get people to put them up in prominent positions.

Every pub toilet, student noticeboard and WI meeting house.

Possibly borderline legal, but that's probably good.

[Tim Green]

To summarize, I like ideas 1 and 5 the most - more gabbering in the
quoted text.

I also think we should seriously consider giving average agreeness
ratings of the party for candidates who haven't answered. Francis? How
quickly could you hack in giving the party average (perhaps even
including standard deviation if we're being scientific ;)) for
candidates without answers? It'd be fairly easy to inject into the code
for the current UI (just add fake candidates with the same name as the
party). I say this, because I suspect quite a few people feel the value
of their quiz is lower due to the lack of them - and a simple party
stand in would be sufficient as a reference point.

I think this'd be useful - I imagine there are still a lot of people who
still primarily social network by email. We never did try enforcing our
email invite system for all new volunteers, but a simple email to
everyone encouraging them to pass it on would be cheap and could work
well. With the new system to say who you've agreed with I think people
could be quite enthusiastic.

Richard from Democracy UK has said he'll post us on their Facebook feed
sometime this weekend (not so far...), they have about 136k fans, and
I'm quite keen to get the survey out on Facebook as a step beyond the
twitter-type crowd.

> 2) A task for each volunteer to research and write to their local
> paper about it. (Do we have a good database of local papers still?)
>

I think Countculture and some other people were looking at hacking this
together, not sure how they're doing.

> 3) Could we somehow find funds to print lots of business cards with a
> simple message and URL and post them to volunteers, and ask them to
> hand them out at work? How about these Moo cards,
> http://uk.moo.com/en/products/minicards.php? �12 for 100. Would there
> be a budget to maybe get 100 packs? Is there a cheaper option along
> the same lines?
>

Not sure how effective this is for funds spent, I'm mostly keen to stick
online. How much do Facebook ads cost?

> 4) Going back to the mainstream media, could we somehow convince the
> Metro to print an advert? Could we *pay* for an advert? Anyone know
> how much they cost?
>
> 5) Also ask people to print out a poster and pin it up at work or somewhere.
>

I like this, going with my idea from ages ago of making posters of all
the candidates with a link to the quiz at the bottom or something.

My project hand in date is next Monday, so I really shouldn't be doing
much coding (and I need to stop obsessively replying to emails), so
ideas involving lots of coding by all of us are probably less useful.

-t