In Australia, Voters Robo-Call You!
BY Nick Judd | Friday, August 13 2010
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition is asking constituents to robo-call their members of Parliament.
Here's a switch: In Australia, one online organizing group is having their constituents robo-call their members of Parliament.
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition is using a tool they're calling "Power Vote" to allow constituents to put in their name, email and postcode, and with a click of a button, the coalition's phone bank sends the constituent's MP a pre-recorded phone call. The constituent doesn't say a word; the recorded voice message works in each user's name and postcode, but otherwise, unlike most click-to-call tools, it's the same, automated call, every time.
Beyond the obvious irony — how many voters have picked up the phone at dinner time to hear the Bill Clintons or Sarah Palins of the world delivering a "personal" message on behalf of a candidate on this or that ballot? Talk about flipping the script — there are serious questions about what this type of campaign does to the signal-to-noise ratio in politics.
This Australian initiative is happening at a time when online petitions are being criticized, commentators are panning "clicktivism" of the click-to-call type as harmful to the causes they're supposed to help, and a British MP, Dominic Raab, has removed his email address from public view in an attempt to stop a "deluge" of messages instigated by another online organizing group.
The line of thinking that's surfacing here — a call for campaigns that better package their message to politicians in the legitimacy of a breathing, thinking constituent's personal efforts — is not new. And it wasn't new when it came up at PdF 2010 this year, although professor-slash-Internet-smartypants Clay Shirky was able to put to words a problem that the engineers behind online activism had been chewing on for at least most of last year.
Raab proves Shirky's point, which was, in a nutshell, that the deluge of automated contacts in general and emails in particular that politicians get is so massive as to drown out any meaningful signal.
There are very different ways to engineer solutions, and they don't all involve abandoning email as the medium of choice.
An example is the method used by the team at We Also Walk Dogs; it collects the "signatures" on an online petition into a CSV file that is then made available for secure download by a campaign manager or chief of staff. The theory here is that a tidy spreadsheet with the names, locations and email addresses of constituents who care about a specific issue is enough of a carrot for a legislative staffer to also understand and pass along the message the petition was meant to convey.
Another way is to attempt to circumvent the filters that legislators and politicians put up to try and block out automated contacts. The folks at Capitol Advantage use this approach: What the their development team does is try to stay ahead of the CAPTCHA tools installed in the contact forms on congressional websites — tools built to prevent a third-party piece of software like Capitol Advantage's CapWiz from stuffing those contact forms with content generated on the website of an advocacy organization somewhere. (Capitol Advantage reps would say that they don't stuff email forms; they make it easier for real people to contact their members of Congress. And they keep a representative on Capitol Hill to iron out any problems with legislative staff.) This doesn't seem to me to really change the problem of the signal-to-noise ratio, but it does make sure that if any signal gets through, at least it'll be your signal.
Those methods are, of course, for email rather than phone calls, but it's fair to assume that if you don't pay any real mind to a call from robo-Clinton, your legislator's staff members — wherever they are — probably aren't going to pay much attention to a call from robo-you.
In his talk, Shirky also explains how the various types of engagement — phone, email, in-person — work, or don't work. It's worth going back and re-watching.
H/t Shaun Dakin