INTRODUCTION TO PEER-TO-PEER

Peer-to-peer campaigning is built on three principles:

1. The more personal a contact, the more effective it is in turning out voters.
2. People are most strongly influenced by people they know and people that are similar to them.
3. The most effective way to reach potential voters is to go to the places where they live or hang out.

Personal Contact

Most field programs in the past were based on the assumption that young Americans were not receptive to political appeals, however research done over the last decade reveals that young voters are just as affected by political contact as other age demographics.¹ While this research tore down one assumption, it confirmed another: personal contacts are much more effective than impersonal methods. The findings of Green and Gerber showed an 8-10% mobilizing effect from door-to-door (in person) contact and a 3-5% effect from calls made by volunteers. Other less personal contact methods such as calls made from professional phone banks, leafleting, and direct mail all yielded a mobilizing effect of 2% or less at a dramatically higher cost-to-vote ratio. ²

Influence and Similarity

A person is influenced the most by their family, friends, and neighbors. These social bonds increase the pressure to say yes to a request and carry the strength of trust. The eminent social psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University uses the following example in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion:

Take, for instance, the growing number of charity organizations that recruit volunteers to canvass for donations close to their own homes. They understand perfectly how much more difficult it is for us to turn down a charity request when it comes from a friend or a neighbor.³

This principle applies not only to charity requests but to political requests as well, from registering someone to vote to turning them out on Election Day.

People are also more likely to comply with a request made by someone that is similar to them. For example, you are more likely to do something that is asked of you if the requester is dressed like you, and you probably will not realize that it had any effect on your decision. Cialdini highlights a study from the 1970s where “marchers in an antiwar demonstration were found to be not only more likely to sign the petition of a similarly dressed requester, but also to do so without bothering to read it first.” ⁴

When it comes to electoral participation, young voters “need the authentic encouragement of a peer to become a participant.” ⁵

Homes and Hangouts

The greatest challenge in reaching young voters for traditional field programs is finding them. Millennials move more frequently and are more likely to rely solely on a mobile phone than older generations.⁶ The key to reaching this important demographic is to go to the places where young people live and hang out. University campuses, concerts, cultural and community events, parks, sporting events, progressive churches, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and shopping centers are all places that campaigns can engage peer-to-peer with young voters. As Michael Connery described in Youth to Power, “concert halls and bars became the progressive equivalent of how evangelical churches are used by the conservative movement.”⁷ The key is to contact and engage young voters using the context of their own lives.

PEER-TO-PEER TACTICS

Location, Location, Location

The ideal location for peer-to-peer outreach will have a large concentration of young people and an environment that is conducive to socializing and communicating. A great way to find out where the best opportunities are is to ask your young supporters: nobody knows where young people hang out better than a young person. Here are some examples:

• High traffic areas of college and university campuses – Outside the entrances of the library, student union, residence halls, and large classroom buildings. It is important to not focus solely on a single location but to periodically switch locations so you reach a variety of different people.⁸ A successful tactic that many Young and College Democrats chapters have used is to help students move in to their residence halls during the first week of school and use that opportunity to talk to the students.
• Outside of sporting events – Talk to young people as they enter and exit a stadium for a sporting event. Using the principle of similarity mentioned earlier, have your organizers wear clothing representing the home team.
• Community and cultural events – For example, in Phoenix there is a First Fridays art festival on the first Friday of every month. The Young Democrats of Arizona reserve table space at the festival and have been extremely successful collecting voter registrations, petition signatures, and email list sign-ups.
• County fairs and 4-H events – In rural areas county fairs provide a great opportunity for reaching rural youth, which is one of the hardest demographics to reach. 4-H clubs are also very popular with rural youth.

Tabling

Tabling is a very popular tactic among campus organizers due to it being particularly effective on college and university campuses. However, tabling can be effective anywhere that allows you to set up space in a high-traffic area as long as it is not so crowded you are completely drowned out.

The most common mistake made while tabling is for organizers to just remain seated at the table waiting for people to come to them. The main purpose of the table is for visibility and to hold campaign materials. While an organizer should always remain at the table, other organizers should only use the table as a home base and spend their time out in the crowds engaging young people.

The campaign should also prioritize the actions that they want people to take, whether it is registering to vote, signing a petition, signing up for an email list, or completing a vote pledge. Once a person has taken your priority action, this may be your foot-in-the-door for secondary and tertiary actions. Be careful not to be too aggressive with people, be polite even when someone blows you off, and always thank someone for taking an action. You want to ensure that people leave with a positive impression of the campaign.

In addition to your general campaign materials, the table should also have plenty of voter registration forms as well as any other technical forms depending on your jurisdiction (for example, in Arizona there are forms to request a ballot by mail or to sign up for the permanent early voter list). Your table should be fully equipped as a resource for any election needs, including the ability to give polling place information closer to the election.

Vote Pledges

Vote pledges are based on the power of commitment and consistency. According to Dr. Cialdini, “once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.”⁹ A vote pledge asks a voter to commit to voting in the next election.

The vote pledge was the primary tool in the Young Democrats of America organizing arsenal during the 2008 election. The YDA vote pledge was not only a pledge to vote, but a pledge to vote for Democrats throughout the ballot. The young people that signed a vote pledge committed to take that action, and they were much more likely to actually do so in order to be consistent: “Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand.” ¹⁰

For this commitment to truly take hold of the signer, the must take ownership of their pledge. This means that campaigns and organizations should not offer external incentives for people to sign:

Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. ¹¹

Using incentives such as raffle tickets or free chum diminishes the sense of inner responsibility, and while it may boost your numbers in the beginning, your results on Election Day will suffer.

An effective vote pledge form must allow you to collect contact information from the signers, specifically their name, address, email, and phone number. Hard copies of vote pledge forms should also include a signature line, since the act of signing a document increases psychological commitment.¹²

Collecting the vote pledge is only the first step. With the information you have collected you can follow up with the people that signed to remind them of their pledge and give them voting information such as the location of their polling place. Following the election you can check the voter file to evaluate how successful you were in getting those people to the polls. Given the difficulty of finding good contact information for young voters due to increased mobility and exclusive use of cell phones, this data is extremely valuable.

Voter Registration

David Plouffe’s memoir of the 2008 Obama for America campaign, The Audacity to Win, frequently returns to the importance of expanding the electorate to winning the election.¹³ To expand the electorate a campaign must register and turn out new and unlikely voters.

A campaign or organization’s emphasis on voter registration should depend on the mission and the distance to an election. There are organizations that focus almost entirely on registration, and for them it is a priority up until the registration deadline. A candidate or partisan youth organization will benefit from registration efforts early in a campaign but will be better served focusing on turning out voters as the election draws near. However, organizers should always have registration forms on hand regardless of the timing.

One tactic that has been successful with some youth organizations are Pledge to Reg programs geared towards Millennials that are about to turn 18. Similar to the vote pledge tactic, organizers get 17-year-olds to complete and sign a Pledge to Reg form with their contact information so the organizers can follow up with them once they are eligible to register to vote.

Campaigns should always make photocopies of collected registration forms so the new registrants can be later contacted with election reminders and polling information. Organizers should also be trained to be able to quickly look over a registration form to ensure that everything is complete.

In states and districts with a Republican registration advantage, registering new young voters and following up with them to get them to the polls can be the difference between a celebration on election night and a heartbreaking close call.

Get Out The Vote

The most important aspect of a youth GOTV effort is to convey information to contacts about when and where to vote.¹⁴ In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes a study at Yale University that tested methods used to encourage students to visit the student health center and receive a tetanus vaccination. While information packets with fear-inducing information about the disease had virtually no effect, researchers were able to increase the vaccination rate by 28% solely by “including a map of the campus, with the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.” The interesting aspect of the study was that the students that responded to the map already knew where the building was. According to Gladwell:

The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk – a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career – to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.¹⁶

This same principle applies to getting young voters to the polls on Election Day. Your campaign needs to give young voters the information that puts voting in the context of their lives. A GOTV effort on a college campus that has an on-campus polling location could include a handout of a campus map with the polling location circled with the times that the location is open. You can email young voters that were registered or contacted earlier in the campaign a Google Map with the directions from their registration address to their polling site. At a minimum your campaign should be telling voters when and where to vote.

Cultural Outreach

Successful cultural outreach does not happen overnight. In the past the ‘cultural outreach’ efforts of campaigns and organizations were just “campaign rallies and civic drives in cultural drag, exploiting the culture to attain a specific goal.”¹⁷ Using Malcolm Gladwell’s definitions from The Tipping Point, Michael Connery argues that “a real cultural outreach strategy finds the mavens, connectors, and salespeople within each subculture and uses them to change the entire culture itself from the bottom up.”¹⁸

Biko Baker of the League Young Voters Education Fund highlights some of the errors organizations make in organizing non-college youth. First, campaigns have to earn the trust of young people in low-income communities: “you can’t just pop up in a neighborhood and get respect. You have to earn it.”¹⁹ Second, the focus must be more on organizing and less on just promoting your campaign or organization: “Low income communities only respond when they see a real commitment to organizing and local leadership development.”²⁰ Cultural outreach is a powerful tool in organizing non-college youth, but to be successful you need to earn the respect of a community’s influencers and develop them into organizers.

Cultural outreach requires active and continuous engagement in order to be effective. Because of this, many campaigns and organizations ignore cultural outreach and instead focus solely on college students – the low-hanging fruit of youth organizing. By neglecting non-college and low-income youth, campaigns waste important opportunities to expand the electorate with new progressive voters and empower these communities.

Notes

¹ See Friedrichs, Ryan. Mobilizing 18-35 Year Old Voters: An Analysis of the Michigan Democratic Party’s 2002 Youth Coordinated Campaign, 2003.; Green, Donald P. and Gerber, Alan S. Getting Out the Youth Vote: Results from Randomized Field Experiments, 2001.; and Nickerson, David W. Hunting the Elusive Young Voter, Journal of Political Marketing, Vol. 5 (3) 2006.
² Analysis of Green and Gerber’s findings in Friedrichs 2003.
³ Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Quill, 1993. (169)
⁴ Cialdini (173)
⁵ Nickerson (26)
⁶ Pew Millennials Report (32)
⁷ Connery, Michael. Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority. Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2008. (158)
⁸ Student PIRGs Activist Toolkit (6)
⁹ Cialdini (57)
¹⁰ Cialdini (67)
¹¹ Cialdini (93)
¹² Werner, Carol M., Jane Turner, Kristen Shipman, F. Shawn Twitchell, Becky R. Dickson, Gary V. Bruschke and Wolfgang B. von Bismarck. Commitment, behavior, and attitude change: An analysis of voluntary recycling. Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 15, Issue 3, September 1995. Pages 197-208.
¹³ Plouffe, David. The Audacity to Win. New York: Viking, 2009.
¹⁴ Gerber and Green 2001 (4)
¹⁵ Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Back Bay Books, 2002. (97)
¹⁶ Gladwell (98)
¹⁷ Connery (156)
¹⁸ Connery (157)
¹⁹ Baker, Biko. Doing REAL work with Non-College Youth. FutureMajority.com. March 4, 2010.
²⁰ Baker, 2010.

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Many organizations fail to take advantage of their data from email campaigns. Too often those who are in charge of these campaigns only look at each of their email’s statistics in isolation if at all and in doing so waste an opportunity to improve their email tactics by looking at their output as a whole.

Most of the major mass email tools provide important statistics for every email that is sent out. Unfortunately many of these tools fall short of providing easy ways to look at data over time the way that web analytics software (ie. Google Analytics) does.

I suggest using a spreadsheet to keep track of the results of each email blast. Below is a sample spreadsheet (click for larger view):

This particular spreadsheet contains the following data:

• Date - The date that the email was sent.
• ID - This is an internal reference name for the mailing.
• Type - What category of email was it? Action alert, fundraising ask, event invitation, etc.
• Action - What action do you want the recipients of the email to take? Sign an online petition, RSVP for an event, donate, write a letter to an elected official or newspaper, etc.
• Subject Line - The actual subject line from the email blast.
• From - The text used for who the email is from. It may be just a person’s name, a name and then the organization, etc.
• Universe Parameters - What was the targeting for the blast? Full list, distance from zip code, previous donors, county, etc.
• Number of Recipients - The size of the blast universe.
• Day of Week - The day of the week the blast was sent: Sun.–Sat.
• Time of Day - The time that the email blast was sent. I prefer to use 24-hour military over the 12-hour clock.
• Open Rate (24) - The open rate after 24 hours. The time frame can be whatever you prefer, but it is important to choose a time and stick with it in order to accurately compare blasts.
• Click Rate (24) - The clickthrough rate after 24 hours. What percentage of people clicked your action links?
• Action Rate (24) - The percentage of recipients that took the desired action.
• Unsubscribe Rate (24) - The percentage of unsubcribes from the email link.
• New Sign-Ups (24) - The number of new email subscriptions within 24 hours. Your mailing service may or may not track new subscriptions from forwards, etc., but you can measure list growth during that period generally to see if there are spikes in sign-ups following certain actions.

Your spreadsheet can include any fields for data that you are able to track on each email. For example, you may want a field to enter what issue an action alert covers.

As you send more mailings and input more data you will be able to use it to see the strengths and weakness of your email program and use it to improve. For example, you may find that mailings sent on Fridays have a much lower open rate than Wednesdays, or that the response is higher when the mailing comes from a different name.

If you do a lot of fundraising mailings, you may also want to create a second sheet that includes total dollars raised, number of donations, and average donation amount.

In addition to the spreadsheet, it is a good idea to keep a copy of every email that is sent out in an organized folder. If you are serious about improving your email results, I would include a page with each email with some statistics and notes. For example, the information that was put into the spreadsheet as well as more specific information particular to that email: comparative clickthrough rates for each link and/or clickable graphic, unsubscribe comments, etc.

Finally, with your compiled data you should be able to come up with some good A/B tests to further improve your data about your email campaign and increase the response rates on future mailings.

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On Saturday the Young Democrats of Arizona’s leaders of working and young professional chapters met in Phoenix to discuss recruitment, street teams, and best practices.

The discussion began on street teams for both advocacy and collecting vote pledges, specifically brainstorming locations:

• Bars, coffee shops, and local hangouts
• Sports events
• Cultural events
• Concerts
• City, community, and county events

Street teams are an example of peer-to-peer organizing, so you should look for places where young people live or hang out. In Maricopa County there are bar districts, ASU games, county events, First Fridays in Phoenix, and tons of concerts and local events.

Stan Williams, Executive Vice President of YDAZ, talked about how to engage with young people at these places. It is important to be friendly and talk to people as you would if you were hanging out there yourself. You can’t wait for people to come up to you, you have to go talk to them. Another important tip is to make sure that the action you want them to take, whether it is signing a vote pledge or a petition, is as easy as possible.

The other big topic discussed was recruiting and maintaining membership of a young professionals chapter. In Arizona members from these chapters tend to either be alumni of university chapters or brand new to the organization.

One of the big draws of a young professionals organization is that it is an opportunity to meet new people and friends. Once a person has graduated from high school or college it is no longer as easy to find people that are close in age with similar interests. A lot of people that have never been involved before are looking to find new people.

Young professionals groups should be somewhat consistent. Members tend to have busy schedules, so it is helpful to know that meetings are always on the second Thursday of the month at 7 or whatever the time and frequency may be. The way for someone to find out when a meeting or event is should also be consistent. If the group has a web page, the meetings should be posted. If an email or Facebook message goes out about each meeting, you can’t forget to send one a certain month. If you do, people may think that the meeting isn’t happening.

Finally, it is important that the group’s officers and members are inclusive. Being overly cliquish can turn potential members off, and talking above their heads using political lingo can make them feel that they don’t belong or are too behind the curve. Young professionals are going to vary greatly in how much they are going to put in to an organization, and a person who is only able to come to some social events should not be looked down on. Many of those people will eventually do more if your organization does a good job being inclusive and creating events that people want to attend.

Every area and young professionals organization is different. Share your ideas and experiences with street teams and young professionals in the comments.

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One of the big criticisms of Google Wave is that people don’t see how they can use it for anything productive. My post yesterday on 60 Free Online Tools for Organizing was based on a crowdsourcing effort with Colin Curtis and Sarah Burris using Wave, and I wanted to give a brief description of how it worked.

The first thing I did was create a Wave, start of the list, and add a comment to it explaining what I wanted to do. I added Colin and Sarah to the Wave and from there were started dumping all of our potential resources onto that first post.

Once we had a pretty big list, I created a comment below it to organize resources into categories with the links to each tool. This functioned as the main outline to the post combined with our notes from the first list.

Throughout the process we used the comment functionality to explain why certain resources should or should not be included, as well as anything else pertaining to the post.

Since it seemed to work so well, I created a tag called “Post Ideas” that I now use for Waves discussing potential posts. I can filter my inbox to only show these, which provides a good resource for posting in the future.

And that’s how we did it. Wave allowed us to combine the document collaboration of Google Docs with an easy to follow thread of discussion that drove the development of the post. While it worked extremely well with only a couple of people involved, it is possible that a large number of collaborators could make the process bulkier and harder to follow.

Have you used Google Wave effectively as a productivity tool? Did you try it out after reading this post? Share your experiences in the comments.

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At the Young Democrats of America Fall Conference in Orlando last month attendees had the chance to break off into discussion circles for various topics. One of these topics was free online tools.

Using Google Wave, Colin Curtis, Sarah Burris, and I came up with this list of free online tools that are useful for organizing, communications, and productivity with political organizations in mind.

Free website/blog hosting/software

WordPress – WordPress is currently the most popular blogging platform around today. With a huge library of free themes and plugins, it is easy to customize to your own specific needs. Free site hosting is available from wordpress.com, but you are required to have .wordpress.com in your domain name and there are limits to customization and the types of things you may embed. You can host your own installation of WordPress with the free software from wordpress.org (which is what I do for KevinBondelli.com), and be able to use your own domain name with no limits to customization or content, but you will need to pay for site hosting from another company.

Tumblr – Tumblr was originally created for what used to be called micro-blogging before Twitter redefined it by 140 characters. Today Tumblr is a full-featured free hosting platform with a built-in network of other users. For an example of an A-list site on Tumblr, check out Gary Vaynerchuk. Tumblr has many customization options, is extremely easy to use, has a bookmarklet for sharing, and best of all allows you to use your own domain name without any additional cost.

Blogger – Blogger, which is now owned by Google, is another popular free service for hosting blogs and websites. I used Blogger for my first blog (if you don’t count LiveJournal) years ago and it has improved quite a bit since then. Similar to wordpress.com, hosted sites have .blogspot.com in the url. Since it is a Google service, it integrates very well with other Google tools. Some big sites that use Blogger are Google’s blog (obviously) and PostSecret.

TypePad – TypePad isn’t as popular as it once was, but still provides a good free hosting service. Site urls include .typepad.com in the name. TypePad has added a number of social networking features to the service (check out Zachary Quinto’s site for an example) and offers additional services, such as using your own domain name and full site control for a monthly fee.

Ning – Ning is more a free hosted social network than it is a traditional website. I have mixed feelings about the service. I used it a few years ago for the YDA Southwest Region with only lackluster results (It has since been abandoned). I’ve talked about my issues with creating your own social network before, and some of those arguments hold for Ning as well. However, there are some groups who are able to use the service effectively. The YDA Women’s Caucus has done a pretty good job with it.

Drupal, Joomla, and MovableType – Behind WordPress, these three pieces of free software are the most popular content management systems for self-hosted sites and blogs (Future Majority is built on Drupal).

Online Video

YouTube – The service that everybody already knows about. Has the benefit of being the first place people go to look for online videos as well as a strong user community.

Viddler – My personal favorite. I like Viddler because it allows you to include your own branding in the video player (check out a video from my profile for an example).

Vimeo – Vimeo’s big thing is video quality and high-definition. They offer a ton of additional features for an annual fee, including player customization.

Seesmic – The original Twitter for video. Seesmic has a strong online community with threaded video discussions and the ability to embed entire discussions onto a website. They have great support and a ton of tools to make the service even more useful.

12 Seconds – If Seesmic is the original Twitter for Video, 12 Seconds is the most similar: swap 140 characters for 12 seconds of video. Unlike Seesmic, where there is not a strict limit to video length, you only have 12 seconds per video.

Ustream – Ustream allows you to live broadcast video online and gives viewers the ability to chat alongside. It is perfect for conferences, question and answer sessions, as well as interviews.

TubeMogul – TubeMogul allows you to upload videos to a number of platforms concurrently, as well as providing detailed analytics. Horizontal segmentation is important, and not just across different media but also across different platforms within a media type, and TubeMogul makes it easy for online video.

Qik – Qik lets you share live video taken from your mobile phone. Think of it as a mobile Ustream.

CNN iReport – This may seem outside the box, but not uploading videos to CNN iReport is a missed opportunity. Both Sarah and I have had our videos played on CNN (Sarah multiple times) after uploading them. For example, students in the University of California system could definitely get traction by posting videos of the tuition protests, statements from students who may have to leave school, etc.

For a huge list of online video resources, check out Mashable’s Video Toolbox.

Productivity

Google Calendar – Not only can you keep track of your own schedule with Google Calendar, but you can share and coordinate with your friends, create event calendars for your organization and publish them, as well as embed them onto websites.

Evernote – Evernote is a combination online/offline note-taking tool. With a desktop application, browser plugins and bookmarklets, and iPhone application (opens iTunes), and the ability to access your notes anywhere, Evernote is a great tool for keeping your thoughts and organizational notes in order. The free service will be sufficient for most users, but there is a robust premium version available for an annual fee.

Bubbl.us – Bubbl.us is a collaborative mind-mapping tool that allows multiple users to work on outlines, charts, and more. One of the best features is the ability to embed your mind-maps onto a website.

Google Wave – As invites are becoming easier to find, more people are on the Google Wave preview. While most people are still figuring out how to use it and what it should be used for, it has the potential to be a strong collaboration tool. As I mentioned earlier, we used Google Wave to come up with the tools for this post.

HassleMe – If you are the type of person that needs to be reminded of things often, HassleMe is probably a good tool for you. You are able to set up the service to periodically remind you to do things via email. While it is not so great for strict deadlines since they send their emails at “semi-unpredictable intervals,” it is good for other recurring tasks with rough deadlines. For example, if there is a general info email account for your organization that you are always forgetting to check, you can have HassleMe email you a reminder every couple of days.

Online Storage and File Sharing/Management

Scribd – My personal favorite file sharing service. I use it primarily for my paper length work or manuals, but you can post any PDF, Word, PowerPoint and Excel file. You can embed the documents onto websites, people can rate and comment on them, and you can link your account to Facebook and Twitter. You can also choose to allow people to download your files, making it a great way to post organizing manuals, bylaws, etc.

Dropbox – Dropbox enables you to create a virtual shared drive in the cloud. Files in your dropbox are available online and will also sync with selected users that also have the desktop application. It also features an excellent iPhone application (opens iTunes) that lets you view your files from your phone. The service is free for up to 2 GB of storage, and monthly premium options are available for 50 GB or 100 GB.

SlideShare – SlideShare was originally designed for sharing and embedding PowerPoint presentations, but now also works with PDF and Word documents. The embeddable presentation player is excellent and it is easy to post your presentations to websites and social networks. Check out an example of the White House using SlideShare.

Issuu – Issuu is a file sharing service that focuses primarily on online editions of magazines and reports. The interface of the player gives your document the feel of a magazine, with the viewer able to flip through the pages. There is also a premium version available.

Keep and Share – Keep and Share lets you share documents and photos, provides an online calendar, to do list, and address book, as well as discussion boards. The main negative of Keep and Share is that it is extremely ad heavy, and we are talking ugly Adsense all over the place.

Zamzar – Zamzar is an online file conversion tool. You can change the file formats of image, document, music, and video files without downloading desktop software and a ton of codecs.

4shared – 4shared is another file sharing tool with 10 GB of free storage. It functions as an online virtual drive and offers premium options for additional space and bandwidth.

RSS, Tracking, and Dashboard Tools

Google Reader – Probably the best RSS feed reader available. Adding new feeds is extremely easy, and the ability to organize, tag, share, like, and comment on stories sets it above other readers.

Netvibes – Netvibes allows you to create a home page dashboard. For example, if you are a statewide Young Democrats chapter, you can have a box with the RSS feeds of your local chapters’ websites, your organization’s Facebook activity, Google and Twitter search results for your chapter, etc. It enables you to get a birds-eye view of what is happening online in your organization as well as what other people are saying about you.

Google Alerts – It is important to know when people are mentioning you or your organization online. Google Alerts email you when certain keywords are mentioned or sites are linked.

Topikality – Topikality is similar to Google Alerts but with easier targeting and a back-end. It will also suggest articles based on your preferences, serving also as a discovery engine.

SocialMedian – I was an early Alpha tester for SocialMedian back at the start of 2008, and the service has really come a long way since then. You can become a part of different topical news networks, clip stories to share or read later, and subscribe to people to be your “newsmakers.” I head up the news networks for Technology in Politics, Democratic Party, and Youth in Politics. You can create your own news network, choose the sources that you want to populate it, and clip stories to the network as you see them.

Check out Mashable’s RSS Toolbox.

VOIP/Phone

Skype – Skype is a great tool for people to talk for free within the United States via their internet connection. Skype has built-in conferencing functionality and many people use it to record podcasts when not all the participants are in the same place.

Google Voice – While Google Voice is more of an individual tool, I see opportunities to use it for an organization. An example would be to set up a Google Voice number for the organization. You could have the number forward to multiple different people’s mobile or home phones.

Website Tools

Google Analytics – Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool available. It provides detailed information about the visitors to your website, allows you to set and track goals, and will give you the information you need to improve.

Woopra – Woopra is a live web analytics tool that enables you to see your site traffic in real time. Woopra has a WordPress plugin and a desktop AIR application, allows you to chat with site visitors, and see how many visitors are on your site at any given time. Woopra is free up to a certain number of pageviews.

Feedburner – Feedburner, now owned by Google, is the best RSS feed tool for site owners. Upon setting up an account you use your Feedburner link instead of your standard RSS feed link for your site, enabling you to track the number of subscribers, what they click, and how they accessed your feed. Feedburner also allows people to subscribe to your site’s feed via email.

Disqus – Disqus is a popular blog commenting system that operates in the cloud as opposed to natively on your web server. The good thing about this is that Disqus users do not need to create a separate account to comment on your site. The bad thing is that you technically don’t have your comments on your server. Disqus allows for threaded comments, comment rating, and video comments.

Photos

Flickr – Flickr is the biggest player in the online photo business. There have been a lot of great tools built from the Flickr API that let you embed photo slideshows from your photostream and other applications. There is a limit to the number of photos you can have in your stream with a free account, but the pro account is available for a ridiculously low annual fee.

PhotoBucket – The strongest alternative to Flickr. It has similar features but a weaker community.

Check out Mashable’s photography toolbox for a lot of resources.

Online Office Tools

Google Docs – Google Docs offers word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and form tools. It is by far the most popular collaborative online document tool available. The form tool is especially useful in creating surveys, collecting sign-ups, and signatures for online petitions.

Adobe Buzzword – The best thing about Adobe Buzzword, now a full Acrobat productivity suite, is that it is pretty. It features a word processor, presentations, tables, PDF export, and with ConnectNow an online meeting function (though the free version only allows 2 additional people in the meeting).

Social Networking

Facebook – Pretty much everyone knows what Facebook is, so in lieu of a description I am going to include a couple of links to posts about how to use it as an organization.

• Facebook’s Phonebook Feature
• Facebook Group Membership Building
• Facebook Page Best Practices
• Increasing Membership of the YDA Facebook Page

MySpace – MySpace might not be the king of the hill like it once was, and trust me I sure hate it, but it is still the best place online to reach out to non-college youth.

LinkedIn – Ever since LinkedIn added more social functions to what was originally just an online resume, there have been more opportunities for organizing with it. You can create groups and discussions as well as answer people’s questions, which builds up your profile as well as your organization’s.

FriendFeed – Friendfeed is a life-streaming social network that has yet to really hit the mainstream. Friendfeed allows you to consolidate your online presence from multiple sites into a single stream, where other users can like, comment on, and share your content. I created an account a while back for the Young Democrats of America.

Microblogging

Twitter – While Twitter is also a social network, I primarily view it as a microblogging platform (though the name microblogging kind of sucks). Here are some resources I put together in the past about Twitter.

• Using Twitter for Your Organization
• Creating Pre-Populated Twitter Links

Twitter Search – While it is now technically a part of Twitter, Twitter Search is important enough to be included on its own. You can use it to see what people are saying about your organization or issues in real time, as well as subscribe to RSS feeds of searches. For example, I had subscribed to the RSS feeds for “YDA” and “Young Democrat,” and on occasion someone would ask a question about how to find their local chapter. Since I was tracking the search I was able to respond and direct people to the right place.

Twitterfeed – Twitterfeed lets you automatically tweet your recent blog posts as they are published using its RSS feed.

act.ly – act.ly is a Twitter petition tool that lets users ‘sign’ the petition by retweeting.

Ping.fm – Post to nearly all of your accounts at the same time. Works with mobile phones as well.

Plurk, identi.ca, and Jaiku – While none of these platforms have anywhere near the userbase of Twitter, they do have dedicated followings. By using the previously mentioned Ping.fm you can hit these networks as well.

URL Shorteners

bit.ly – bit.ly is one of the most popular shorteners right now because of its integration into Tweetdeck and the fact that you can get statistics on your links to see how often they were clicked.

TinyURL – The original. Allows custom URLs which is extremely convenient.

Podcasting –

PodBean – PodBean is a free podcast hosting tool with a good feature set. I used to use this when I had my brief 2 episode podcast, but when I tried to log back in to my account today it said it was locked. I guess use it at your own risk.

PodOmatic – PodOmatic is a very full-featured podcast hosting tool, though the paid version is significantly better.

For a ton of podcasting resources check out Mashable’s Podcasting Toolbox.

Though this list may seem long it is nowhere near comprehensive. That’s where you come in. Is there a free online tool that you love that we didn’t include on the list? Is there one on the list that you absolutely hate? Share in the comments!

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This post was from 2007 but it’s relevant once again. Also, check out the YDA Welcome Guide for College and University Chapters.

It’s that time of the year again when college chapters are looking to recruit new members from the influx of wide-eyed freshmen joining their campuses. Here are are a few ideas for new member recruitment that have been used effectively by chapters in the past.

1. Have a presence at your university’s club/involvement fair.

Most schools have a fair with clubs and activities for incoming freshman, and this is a great place to find new members. I was actually recruited by the ASU Young Democrats 7 years ago at such a fair. A lot of incoming students come from Democratic families or were interested in politics in high school, but they don’t know how to get involved now that they are in college. Have a presence and let them know that the Young Democrats is right for them.

2. Help freshman move into their dorms.

This works especially well if your chapter has t-shirts that identify you as a member of the Young Democrats. Everyone needs help moving in, and you will be the first new people the student meets in their college career. Have fliers that you hand out to the students you help with your meeting time and place and you will surely see some of them again.

3. On-Campus Tabling.

Some schools are better about this than others. The ASU Young Democrats reserve a table on one of the most popular areas of campus and have a constant presence every day. This is a tactic that can be used not just at the start of the year but throughout the entire semester. The table will have information about the organization, meetings, events, etc. It is also a good way to register students to vote.

Those are only three ideas for the start of a new semester. If anyone has experience with different techniques please leave a comment and share them here with other chapters.

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As members of the largest bloc of uninsured Americans, Young Democrats believe quality, affordable Health Care to be a fundamental human right. In our communities and alongside friends, family, coworkers, classmates and neighbors, we will fight to enact farsighted health care reform.

The YDA Ensure You’re Insured Youth Organizing Kit will help you and your Young Democrats chapter organize in support of the health care reform we need.

YDA Ensure You’re Insured Manual

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I have been spending a lot of time working with Facebook Pages recently, and I wanted to share some best practices that I have picked up.

Status Updates

Status updates are the bread and butter of Facebook Pages. They are your primary source of communication and through likes and comments the primary source of interaction by your fans. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your updates:

• Update Frequently – But not too frequently. You want to find that happy medium where your fans are engaged but not turned off. Your updates will appear in your fans’ home feeds, so you should provide content that will be of interest to them. You want your page to be active, since it in turn reflects on the activity of your organization, but you don’t want to appear spammy.
• Be Personal – When I post an update to the Young Democrats of America page, I include my name before the update. People prefer to know with whom they are communicating, and unless you identify yourself in your update it will feel impersonal.
• Ask Questions, Encourage Interaction – Your Facebook Page shouldn’t be a one-way communications tool. Fans have the opportunity to communicate with you and with each other. Asking questions encourages your fans to comment on your updates, which elicits a feeling of participation as well as boosting the exposure of your page (updates that receive a lot of interaction appear on the homepage sidebar). It also provides you with an opportunity to learn more about your fans.
  

• Share – You shouldn’t solely post updates based on your own content. If you see a news article that would be interesting and relevant to your fans, share it. If an allied organization is doing something impressive, let your fans know.
• Promote and Recognize Members/Chapters – If one of your members or chapters is doing something interesting, received press coverage, or wrote a great article, share it with your fans. People like to know what other members and chapters are doing, and your members/chapters that you mention will appreciate the recognition.
• Don’t Update Using Twitter – While Facebook Page status updates and tweets seem like similar media, there are differences between the two, and using a one-size-fits-all approach will not be as effective. Though you may end up sending the same update to both sometimes, it should be a case-by-case decision.

Content

Status updates aren’t your only communications tool on your page. Here are some tips for other types of content:

• Blog Syndication – If your organization has a blog or website with an RSS feed you should import the posts into your page using Facebook notes. This will increase the reach of your blog content and help drive your fans to your website.
• Multimedia – You can share photos and videos on your Facebook page, and often this content generates the most response from fans. Post multimedia content from events, rallies, campaign videos and photo galleries, etc.
• Help Fans Connect to You – You should make it easy for your fans to connect to you on different platforms through your page. Occasionally share your website, Twitter account, YouTube or Flickr accounts, etc. You want your fans to be as engaged in your organization as possible.

Insights

Insights is the built-in analytics tool for your Facebook page. It is important to keep track of the statistics of your page and fans in order to chart your progress in growth and engagement.

Through Insights you can see how many new fans you have added each day compared to the number of fans that have removed themselves, which is a good way to measure whether you are posting too frequently or not enough. You can also see how engaged your fans are with your content.

Another useful feature is the ability to look at the demographic of your fan base by age, gender, and location.

Conclusions

Your Facebook Page can be an extremely useful communications and engagement tool if used effectively. Hopefully these tips will help you improve your results. If you have any of your own best practices for Facebook Pages, please share them in the comments.

P.S. I still need your support in the DFA Netroots Nation Scholarship Competition, so if you could send a vote my way I would appreciate it.

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A little less than a month ago we decided to make a concerted effort to increase the number of fans for the Young Democrats of America Facebook page. I want to talk about how we were able to add almost 1,000 new fans during this period.

First, we had the advantage of having a Facebook group with just under 5,000 members. Previously, these members had never been sent a message asking them to become fans of the page. Rob Dolin sent a message out to the group asking them to join and then posted about YDA’s online presence on the YDA blog. This was the first big momentum boost of the effort.

Second, we used Twitter and our Facebook statuses to promote the page. This combined with the new members joining from the group solicitation made the page rank fairly high on people’s home feeds, which brought in new members.

Third, I began to actively put content on the page. Since status updates from pages show up in home feeds, it helps bring traffic to the page. I used status updates that I thought would elicit the best responses in terms of likes and comments, which would help increase their reach.

I decided that I wanted to try out using Facebook ads to help build membership. I created an ad and targeted it to users between the ages of 18 and 35 who live in the U.S. and identify with the Democratic Party. I chose to buy ads on a Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) rather than a Cost Per Click (CPC) since I preferred the visibility (the ads have the YDA site url) and because I thought the targeting was strong enough. I set a max bid of $.25 CPM with a daily budget of $2 (this was my own money, so I really couldn’t break the bank.) I ran the ads on-and-off for a week and ended up with 49 clicks, and it seemed that most of the clicks converted into membership based on the growth numbers. While it may seem like I spent $13 for 49 new members, it will actually be more than that. With each new member comes the opportunity to reach their networks, so there is a good potential for a butterfly effect.

While the initial boost seems to have come from the group solicitation, the steady growth afterward seems to indicate that the other membership building tactics have been successful, especially when compared to the stagnancy in membership during the four months before the effort began.

What are your thoughts on building up the membership of a Facebook page? Share in the comments, and don’t forget to become a fan of the Young Democrats of America.

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Proposed Charter for the Greater Boston Chapter of the Massachusetts Young Democrats

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Law & Government Business & Law governance democrats

Kevin Gilnack from the Massachusetts Young Democrats is using Scribd to share and get feedback on the proposed charter for the Greater Boston Young Democrats.

I have been a fan of Scribd for a long time and this is a good example of how it can be used by Young Democrats chapters to foster transparency and collaboration within their organizations.

Chapters can use Scribd to share best practices guides, promotional materials, print-at-home flyers, fundraising packets, and more.

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