MyBO.co.uk: MyConservatives.com goes live later today
BY Dominic Campbell | Thursday, October 1 2009
UPDATE: MyConservatives.com now live
“MyConservatives is a first in UK politics, and probably the most advanced party political campaigning network of its kind outside of America. Although the General Election is still likely to be months away, the campaign to gear up our supporters and give them simple-to-use tools to make campaigning easier is already underway and MyConservatives represents a big part of that” - David Cameron, Leader of the Conservative Party
The Conservative Party will launch their very own take on My.BarackObama.com (or MyBo for short) later today - MyConservatives.com. Timed to be released ahead of next week’s Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, ‘MyCon’ (or even #MyCon, as it's bound to become known on Twitter) provides a very British take on Barack Obama’s revolutionary approach to online campaigning and organising.
Developed in conjunction with global digital media agency LBI, the Conservative Party will no doubt be hoping the site can achieve the same profile and uptake as its American counterpart, fêted as one of the driving forces behind Barack Obama’s historic win. Equally LBI will no doubt be looking to reach the legendary status of Blue State Digital, the people behind MyBO, in the new media world.
Rishi Saha (Head of New Media at the Conservative Party and speaker at next month’s PDF Europe event in Barcelona) stresses that while drawing on many of the core features of Blue State Digital’s MyBO platform, it has very much been developed with a UK audience in mind.
In contrast to other sites such as Labour’s membersnet social networking platform, the Conservative Party have chosen to steer away from many of the standard social networking features such as ‘friending’ and blogs - although it does include leader boards to incentivise engagement in the site. Instead the site leans towards the business end of political organising, focusing on features such as campaigns and events at this stage. Core features (again many lifted from elsewhere although much toned down for the UK audience) include the ability to:
- Set specific fundraising goals and take donations for campaigns online – a microfinancing approach to campaigns
- Recruit activists to do leafleting and door-to-door canvassing
- Promote and organise social action
- Telephone canvass from home
- Set up events, create online tickets and sell them to attendees
- Connect with other supporters and get them involved in your campaign
- Set up campaigns and fundraising goals based around local and national issues
Perhaps the most direct and potentially powerful feature to be adopted from the MyBO site is the ability for users to more effectively and efficiently organise telephone canvassing, a task traditionally organised badly in the UK by political parties. Through a structured approach to telephone canvassing, there exists the potential to reach out to and organise a wider audience than ever before. Certainly a feature that pushes at the boundaries of traditional electoral Britishness.
In contrast to the Obama campaign, the site centres primarily not around the party leadership but instead both candidates and single issues at a local level, in line with the party’s stated localist policy agenda and is also intended to bridge the divide between the traditional representative and participative democratic divide.
Control and content have been delegated to a local level, with around 600 primary content creators in the first instance, with the site organised from Central Office by ex-Conservative Home deputy editor Sam Coates.
However, that is not to say the leadership have been forgotten on the site. Each of the Shadow Cabinet will maintain their own campaign pages featuring policy areas relevant to their portfolios, whether relating to health, education or the economy. What’s more, users of the site will be incentivised to participate through the offer of rewards, for instance dinners with the party leadership, rewarding not only donations but also participation.
In terms of the technology underpinning the site, MyConservatives.com is relatively unique in UK government circles, built on the Drupal open source platform (already widely used in the rest of European government) and drawing on third party tools such as Eventbrite and Paypal to manage event ticketing and payments. It also enables users to log in using Facebook Connect, again a technology actually developed during and with the Obama campaign in mind providing ease of access and the viral distribution of content to contributors’ wider social network.
Online Communities Editor Craig Elder points out that this is an early stage release in beta, with MyConservatives intended to evolve over the coming months as it responds to feedback from users with the ability to add in new features as and when required.
