RE: i'm finally checking out the ecampaign tool!
Jon Stahl
I guess the best place to post feedback is at:http://groups.google.com/group/eCampaigningTool since this will be the list that is used for tool users over time - so we may as well use it!
Petri: can you ensure you are subscribed too?As for releasing 0.1.9 - I discussed it in depth with Petri - and we are still debating if it should be released at all. it is a fine product - it is just that version 0.2.0 is such a big change anything you create in 0.1.9 is incompatible with 0.2.0 (unless someone develops some migration elements). However on the 'pro-release' side is that it is likely the only version that will work with Plone 2.0.x
Jon Stahl
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There is a pretty robust marketplace of expensive, high-end "all in one" systems serving US-based groups that do online advocacy, CRM, email blasting and sometimes CMS. These are really only affordable to national-scale organizations, and even then not so much.
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There are a couple of providers targeting smaller groups with less feature-rich products, but they have not gotten much marketshare, and are mostly still very "closed' systems. I'm thinking most particularly of ActionStudio.org (developed by a very good friend of mine, Jeff Reifman), the folks at Democracy In Action (http://www.democracyinaction.org) and the folks at TheDatabank (http://thedatabank.com).
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The eCampaigning functionality of open-source platforms is right now pretty minimalist. The CitizenSpeak module of Drupal seems pretty much like the high water mark (excepting your work thus far!) and even that is not very ambitious.
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A lot of elected officials are putting up higher and higher barriers to inbound email from constituents. Mostly, this is taking the form of web-forms instead of email addresses. At present, this is mostly at the federal level, but trickling down rapidly to state and even local officials.
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This and other thoughts are leading me increasingly to think that delivering online advocacy communications directly to officials immediately and one-at-a-time may be a tactic that is rapidly decreasing in value in many circumstances. I believe that allowing the organizers to download and deliver online advocacy communications in large batches, probably "offline", is likely to become more and more important for many targets.
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Being able to capture personal information from folks who take action online is extremely important. Being able to easily move that information over to a CRM (constituent relationship management) platform is essential if the organizers are to take effective followup actions with people. ONE/Northwest has been focusing a lot of our effort on using the Salesforce.com platform for advocacy-related CRM tasks, largely because of their extremely powerful, flexible, enterprise-class system and the fact that they have excellent web-services APIs to let external applications push and pull data to/from the system. The SalesforceConnector product (http://plone.org/products/salesforceconnector) is the first fruit of those efforts. It still has a little way to go before being a production-ready release. But the underlying tool it takes advantage of, Beatbox, a Python wrapper for the Salesforce SOAP API, is pretty powerful and a lot more could be done with it. (e.g. dumping online advocacy info straight back into salesforce.)
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Reliable, deliverable, scalable broadcast email is a surprisingly hard trick technically, and getting harder by the day in this age of spam. There are zero truly satisfactory open-source solutions for this, and I don't think it is wise to attempt to build such a capacity into native Plone/Zope. Far better, IMHO, to focus on integrating with proven broadcast email service providers. We've had pretty good luck using WhatCounts.com, a small company based here in Seattle. Again, we chose them because of the combination of power, nonprofit orientation, and a strong Web Services API for integration.
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Being able to match constituents to decisionmakers based on their address/postal code is a very important feature. There are several steps in such a matching chain. Going from the user's address/postal code to identifying the political jurisdictions they live in is relatively easy. Maintaining accurate contact information for many decisionmakers can be a bit trickier in many jurisdictions, but is ultimately solvable, too.
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Letters-to-the-editor are a very important part of ecampaigning, as well as letters-to-decisionmakers and sign-on letters/ePetitions. (As I think you've already figured out.)
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Making the new-online-action creation process as simple and step-by-step-wizarded as possible is the most important usabilty aspect. There are lots of decisions to make, and they need to be presented in a logical order. ActionStudio does a reasonably good job of this without sacrificing a lot of flexibility. Democracy in Action is terrible here.
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The flexibility that ATSchemaEditor offers is great. But it's usability is terrible. That's a shame. I can't help but wonder if PloneFormGen helps at all. It may be that a significant revamp of SchemaEditor, targeted a narrow set of use-cases and taking full advantage of KSS javascript goodness, is needed. Online form creation is a tough, tough problem.
From: Duane Raymond [mailto:duane....@fairsay.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 12:43 PM
To: Jon Stahl
Subject: RE: i'm finally checking out the ecampaign tool!Hi Jon,Don't know if you are holding off until the eCampaigning Tool v 0.2.0 - but I'd love to hear your thoughts (on the list is fine) on what you mention below:-- some general thinking about the evolving nature of online advocacy and what kinds of demands i'm hearing from my smallish-to-medium environmental clients here in the Northwest.-- some specific feedback and suggestions for your roadmap (mostly about prioritizations)-- some examples of things that I've seen in competitive tools that I think work well in terms of features/usability/etc-- a few other random thoughts.Plus, I'd love to help you figure out how to raise some resources around this problem space.Cheers,Duane===========================================================
Duane Raymond
FairSay
+44 (0)207 993 4200
http://www.fairsay.com
Duane Raymond
Thanks for this - this is excellent. Let me comment on each
point.
> First of all, I should probably start with the obvious
> disclaimer that what you see depends on where you sit.
> Where I sit is this:
>
> ONE/Northwest primarily serves small to mid-sized environmental
> advocacy organizations in the northwestern US and British
Columbia,
> Canada. Most of these groups work on local-to-state scale
issues,
> with the occasionaly bit of federal work thrown in. And of
course
> we span two countries and two political systems, but there
virtually
> no groups working across the border in ways that are relevant
to
> online advocacy. (I.e. no integrated multi-country campaigns).
> We don't do any work with national-scale organizations (or
larger
> multi-national groups like Oxfam), so I can't say that I
understand
> their needs from personal experience.
'Where one sits' (context) is absolutely critical - so thanks for
clarifying it. In general, I'd like the eCampaigning Tool to be
something which works for people and organisations of all sizes
and where a campaigners' ingenuity and skill is their main
constraint - not the tools.
My 'context' was originally working in Oxfam GB - a very large
organisation with a fair-sized internet and campaigning staff -
and I was the eCampaigning Manager. However in the 'Oxfam world'
Oxfam GB is in practice also supporting other Oxfam operations
which may only have one person part time on campaigning - so I am
aware of the challenges of each extreme. Since then I've worked
with a growing range of the world's top campaigning organisations
(each of whom face similar extremes as I experienced at Oxfam
GB). I've also worked with coalitions where these extremes are
taken even further with hundreds of small campaigning groups
working with a few large ones. Due to this I've always
envisioned a tool that 'scaled' to meet the needs of the whole
range of realities since getting ALL those realities to work
effectively is what makes the campaigning more successful.
I also generally work on the UK and global scale - vs. you
working on the US-Canada side of things so I think together we
can make a tool that works for most people and organisations.
> Given that, what I see going on is this:
> There is a pretty robust marketplace of expensive, high-end
> "all in one" systems serving US-based groups that do online
> advocacy, CRM, email blasting and sometimes CMS. These are
> really only affordable to national-scale organizations, and
> even then not so much.
Yup. And in addition to being expensive and high-end, they are
proprietary which means my creativity as a campaigner is limited
by their tool and I can't extend it for custom requirements. It
also means that many 'best practices' are not possible using the
tools.
There are a couple of providers targeting smaller groups with
> less feature-rich products, but they have not gotten much
> marketshare, and are mostly still very "closed' systems.
> I'm thinking most particularly of ActionStudio.org (developed
> by a very good friend of mine, Jeff Reifman), the folks at
> Democracy In Action (http://www.democracyinaction.org) and
> the folks at TheDatabank (http://thedatabank.com).
I think the more options small-to-medium campaigning non-profit
groups have, the better (and I didn't know about Action
Studio.org before)
> The eCampaigning functionality of open-source platforms is
> right now pretty minimalist. The CitizenSpeak module of
> Drupal seems pretty much like the high water mark (excepting
> your work thus far!) and even that is not very ambitious.
I'm glad to hear the current early version of the eC Tool is
> already approaching the high water mark. Are you referring
> to the version you've tried (0.1.9) or the roadmap aspirations?
> A lot of elected officials are putting up higher and higher
> barriers to inbound email from constituents. Mostly, this is
> taking the form of web-forms instead of email addresses. At
> present, this is mostly at the federal level, but trickling
> down rapidly to state and even local officials.
Yup - this isn't happening much in the UK yet - but will - so
this is where the form 'reverse-engineerer' tool comes in
(currently on roadmap at version 0.8 but that - as everything on
the roadmap - can be changed.
> This and other thoughts are leading me increasingly to think
> that delivering online advocacy communications directly to
> officials immediately and one-at-a-time may be a tactic that
> is rapidly decreasing in value in many circumstances. I
> believe that allowing the organizers to download and deliver
> online advocacy communications in large batches, probably
> "offline", is likely to become more and more important for
> many targets.
Yes - I share some of those concerns - and regular encourage
clients to also plan a 'printed' version to deliver in a stunt or
other physical form. However I also think the development of
tools for politicians (and other targets) to organise and manage
their constituent communications will help since ultimately
ignoring communication (in whatever form) is counterproductive
for them. I see it not as a one-or-another strategy - but do both
to ensure the message gets through.
> Being able to capture personal information from folks who
> take action online is extremely important. Being able to
> easily move that information over to a CRM (constituent
> relationship management) platform is essential if the
> organizers are to take effective follow-up actions with
> people. ONE/Northwest has been focusing a lot of our effort
> on using the Salesforce.com platform for advocacy-related
> CRM tasks, largely because of their extremely powerful,
> flexible, enterprise-class system and the fact that they
> have excellent web-services APIs to let external applications
> push and pull data to/from the system. The SalesforceConnector
> product (http://plone.org/products/salesforceconnector) is
> the first fruit of those efforts. It still has a little
> way to go before being a production-ready release. But the
> underlying tool it takes advantage of, Beatbox, a Python
> wrapper for the Salesforce SOAP API, is pretty powerful
> and a lot more could be done with it. (e.g. dumping online
> advocacy info straight back into salesforce.)
Yup - agreed. At present the eke Tool doesn't centralise data
and this is primarily a factor of its initial rapid development
and the initial need to minimise additional system requirements
(SQL DBs, CRM systems, etc) We'll maintain this 'install and
run' benefit - but integrating it into a CRM/central data
repository is definitely a priority...and the Salesforce
connector will likely be one of the tools we use (following an
investigation into it that it can handle what we need!)
> Reliable, deliverable, scalable broadcast email is a
> surprisingly hard trick technically, and getting harder
> by the day in this age of spam. There are zero truly
> satisfactory open-source solutions for this, and I don't
> think it is wise to attempt to build such a capacity into
> native Plone/Zope. Far better, IMHO, to focus on integrating
> with proven broadcast email service providers. We've had
> pretty good luck using WhatCounts.com, a small company
> based here in Seattle. Again, we chose them because of
> the combination of power, nonprofit orientation, and a
> strong Web Services API for integration.
Yes. In the eC Tool roadmap this suite of functionality is
listed as 'integrate with' which would likely initially mean not
build from scratch. I know 'Campaign Monitor' also has a rich
API so there are several options. I'd _love_ to see an open
source broadcast email system - but I _definitely_ wouldn't do it
all in Plone. I'd use Plone for authoring the emails and
displaying the results and Python (or something) for the actual
sending mechanism. In fact we hope to make a lot of the eC tool
as low-level as possible to both avoid the bottlenecks of plone
due to the layers and to see if we can eventually develop
'wrappers' for the tool in other open source CMSs.
> Being able to match constituents to decisionmakers based on
> their address/postal code is a very important feature. There
> are several steps in such a matching chain. Going from the
> user's address/postal code to identifying the political
> jurisdictions they live in is relatively easy. Maintaining
> accurate contact information for many decisionmakers can be
> a bit trickier in many jurisdictions, but is ultimately
solvable, too.
Yes. This is definitely in the plans - although as a 2 person
outfit (of which only 1 can code) this feature is likely to
require collaboration or funding. But we have the data (or where
to get it) and the geo-location ability to make this a reality.
Probably this should be split into a 'shared' data repository for
the geo-political data and the matching algorithm. The big
challenge is geo-coding beyond US, Canada and the UK since most
countries don't have postal systems that map down to the same
accuracy as in those three countries.
> Letters-to-the-editor are a very important part of
ecampaigning,
> as well as letters-to-decisionmakers and sign-on
letters/ePetitions.
> (As I think you've already figured out.)
Yup - and hence why the are the two types of actions that have
come with the tool from day 1.
> Making the new-online-action creation process as simple and
> step-by-step-wizarded as possible is the most important
> usabilty aspect. There are lots of decisions to make, and
> they need to be presented in a logical order. ActionStudio
> does a reasonably good job of this without sacrificing a lot
> of flexibility. Democracy in Action is terrible here.
Yes - I see this as the focus of the 0.3 version so once we get
past 0.2 I can mock-up some processes and screen-shots and then
pass them around to get your (and others') input.
> The flexibility that ATSchemaEditor offers is great. But
> it's usability is terrible. That's a shame. I can't help
> but wonder if PloneFormGen helps at all. It may be that a
> significant revamp of SchemaEditor, targeted a narrow set
> of use-cases and taking full advantage of KSS javascript
> goodness, is needed. Online form creation is a tough, tough
> problem.
Yes - so any suggestions (for 0.3) on this front would be welcome
as well. The eC Tool Roadmap does not just mean developing the
eC Tool - but contributing to whatever underlying technologies we
use to make them better. So this is definitely one candidate for
it (and the Widget Selector which I think also needs
improvements!)
Anyway - I think we are in agreement about the needs as you might
have guess from the number of replies beginning with 'yes' or
'yup' :-) . FairSay's long term commitment is to evolving this
into a powerful campaigning tool. The daily reality is that
we're currently committed to releasing 0.2.0 and then from that
point on we will need collaborators (coders especially) and
funding for it. Both of which are achievable I believe and your
help in those would be valuable.
Cheers,
Duane
===========================================================
Duane Raymond
FairSay