OnQ Social Media Consulting » Campaigns

VoterFetch lets you run phone banks in-home

Jeff Quinton — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:36 +0000

Wesley Donehue and Jordan Von Tress are the brains behind VoterFetch. They’re both consultants in my native state of South Carolina. I’m intrigued by some of the possibilities with VoterFetch so I decided to mention it here.

Phone-banking has always taken a lot of organizational efforts and resources in campaigns. You have to find a physical location to have your volunteers come in and make the calls. You have to actually find the volunteers. The list goes on and on. VoterFetch aims at removing the physical location and phone line barriers by allowing the volunteer to make the calls from home. There have been campaigns giving lists to volunteers to make calls at home, but I have yet to see anyone else doing what VoterFetch does in this area.

The FAQ for VoterFetch is a pretty good summary of current and future capabilities.

Volunteers log in to VoterFetch and download call lists that have been placed there by the campaign. As they make their calls, they log the results online and the campaign gets them in real time. There is also an offline mode that allows the results to be uploaded later.

Currently, their program is not set up to integrate VOIP systems, but they are exploring that as a possibility in the near future. Their pricing is based on the level of office your candidate is running for. They have demos available (see their website for more information.)

Other possible uses are mentioned in the FAQ. Additionally, VoterFetch can be integrated with CiviCRM and Salesforce. It can also be customized to match a campaign’s website. They also seem to be looking into developing an iPhone app. Please also note that they only work for Republicans.

The below video is from VoterFetch.com:

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Google search trends on campaigns in VA, NJ and NY

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:09:26 +0000

I just wanted to consolidate my previous three posts on the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia along with the congressional race in New York. Links are below.

Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month
Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race
New Jersey Governor’s race search trends

New Jersey Governor’s race search trends

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:18:55 +0000

The first chart is the past 30 days worth of search trends from New Jersey for Chris Christie, Jon Corzine, and Chris Daggett. I initially compared just Corzine and Christine but noticed Daggett was showing up in rising search trends so I re-did the comparison.

Christie has been getting the most searches in New Jersey over the past month or so. Daggett had a spike earlier in the month. All the candidates had a dip last Saturday on October 24th and now Christie leads Corzine with Daggett in third. Corzine started a slow decrease before that across the board dip that seemed to follow President Barack Obama campaigning for him.

New York is the Metro area with the most searches in New Jersey, with Philadelphia in 2nd. As far as specific cities goes, most of the searches seem to be centered around Newark.

The next chart is the one with national search trends for all three candidates.

Daggett seems to be a little bit farther under the radar nationally at times, but he is also a rising search trend nationally. The dip last week seems to not be so much across the board nationally. It would seem that Corzine dropped last week after Obama’s campaigning for him while the other candidated didn’t fall off that much. Christie is leading searches nationally with Corzine second and Dagget third nationally as well.

The top three states for searches on these three candidates are New York followed by New Jersey and Pennsylvania.The New York metro area is dominating any other metro area nationally in searches.

After reading Doug Heye’s piece on how the Yankees and Phillies facing off in the World Series could impact earned media in the race, I did a comparison of all three candidates that also includes Yankees and Phillies. The chart for that (with searches originating only in New Jersey) is below.

As you can see, compared to searches on Yankees and Phillies, all three candidates have negligible results. Both teams got spikes immediately following their series-winning victory in the respective League Championship Series and then fell off afterward. The Phillies also seemed to enjoy a spike after their Game 1 win last night. Either way, much of New Jersey’s media will be focused on the World Series with either team being the local team for a signifcant number of voters in the state.

Search trends in Virginia Governor’s race

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:10:30 +0000

The first chart below is a comparison of Google Insights for Search trends for Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell over the past 30 days. This first chart only covers the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The search trends for both candidates have been going back and forth over the past month as stories occur in the news cycle. Most of the search traffic in Virginia for these two candidates has been in the DC Metro area. After that, Charlottesville, Roanoke, Lynchburg, Harrisonburg, and Raleigh-Durham round out the Top 5 metro areas with Virginia search traffic for McDonnell and Deeds. If you look at specific cities, Fairfax and Richmond are where most of the search interest has been in Virginia.

The next chart compares the two candidates nationally.

The results nationally are almost identical for both McDonnell and Deeds. The top 3 regions searching for the two candidates are DC, Virginia, and California. Richmond and Washington are the top two cities nationally search for the Virginia candidates.

I did a comparison of Bob McDonnell and McDonnell Thesis for the past 90 days both nationally and in Virginia. There was a spike at the end of August for the thesis search nationally that died out right after that. Results for that comparison in Virginia had negligible results on searches for the thesis.

Search traffic in NY-23 for the past month

Jeff Quinton — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:41:45 +0000

If you look at the graph below on the search traffic on Google in NY-23 for the past month you will see some interesting, but not necessarily unexpected trends. I found this data via Google Insights for Search. (Note: this search data is isolated to New York state only in the first chart below.)

Until October 14, Bill Owens was getting the most attention via Google searches in New York. About that date, searches for both Dede Scozzafava and Doug Hoffman started increasing. Later traffic proved that Hoffman was outpacing Scozzafava by a decent amount for the next few days.

Around October 18 and when Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman, his traffic started a rapid ascent that has continued since then with other endorsements and national attention on the race. Searches for Scozzafava have declined since then. She is now at or below the same level of searches as Owens, who has seen a slow but steady increase in searches on his name in New York.

The next chart is the same as above for all of the United State instead of just for New York. No other state even approaches New York in the amount of search traffic on the 3 candidates’ names. Both Virginia (possibly NoVa?) and Texas have seen a lot of searches on Hoffman’s name.

Bing’s stats show similar trends for these candidates.