Posted June 30, 2010 04:51 PM
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The campaign of Frank Comunale has launched their new website, frankcomunale.com, and Blue Campaign Solutions is pleased to have been selected as the designer and hosting provider.  The Comunale campaign joins Blue Campaign Solutions' growing list of clients who have taken advantage of the unique blend of quality and value that BCS provides. 

The Comunale campaign will be able to take advantage of tools like Website Manager from Blue Campaign Solutions to get their message out about this important race through multiple mediums like the web, email, and social networks with one simple solution.  Blue Campaign Solutions is proud to be a part of Frank Comunale's race for the state senate.

For more information on how your campaign can take advantage of Blue Campaign Solutions' offerings, visit our website at www.bluecampaigns.com.

Posted March 24, 2010 01:05 PM
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What is call-time?

Call-time is essentially just that.  The time which you spend on the phone asking people for their support, usually in the form of donations.  If you're a smaller campaign, you may be calling mostly people you know... friends and family, and trying to get them involved in your campaign.  Larger campaings may be calling not only on individuals, but organizations, asking not only for money but endorsements, their time, etc.  If you've ever spent any time on the phone asking someone to support your campaign, you've done call-time.

Why is call-time so important?

Call-time is critical to every political campaign because generally, it can be one of the most powerful ways to raise money for your campaign.  Without spending time on the phone asking people for their support, a campaign will generally flounder.  No matter if your campaign is big or small, you should plan on doing call-time as often as is possible.  When it's done right, call-time helps get your message out to active supporters, and brings money and volunteers in.

What makes for effective call-time?

As you can imagine, call-time can take up a lot of time if you're not doing it right.  Let's imagine some various methods for doing call-time and how we could do them better. 

The Phone Book Method

Imagine grabbing a phone book and calling people randomly asking for money to support your campaign.  Sounds pretty rough, right?  Chances are you'd spend every day making calls and getting very few contributions.  That's a pretty bad return on your investment.  That's why even small campaigns benifit from compiling lists of all their supporters or potential supporters and focusing on those people. 

The Spreadsheet Method

We'll skip the paper list method and jump right to what most people think is a pretty obvious way of handling call-time.  Imagine entering the name and phone number of every potential supporter in a spreadsheet.  This sounds a lot more managable than the phone book method.  We're focusing on likely supporters now.  But spreadsheets aren't well suited for this.  What happens when you email a copy of your list to various people on your campaign.  How do you keep track of who has the most up to date list?  Are you backing up your list regularly in case of a hard drive crash?  How do you keep your list from getting into the wrong hands if you're emailing it back and forth?  Think of how hard it could be trying to navigate a spreadsheet as you're on the phone with a potential donor, trying to find their name so you can enter in how much they're pledging to contribute. There must be a better way.

The Calltime Express Method

Now imagine all of the contact info for each of your potential donors stored in a secure, online database, where you decide who has access to it.  You can keep track of every call you make, how much money you ask a donor for, every pledge, and every contribution.  You can add donors to a call list, and print out individual call sheets for each of them, containing all the important information, including their contribution history with your campaign.  You can see how your fundraising is progressing with reports.  And you never ever have to worry about finding the latest copy of the call list because it's always available from any internet-connected computer.   You'll find all of that and more in Calltime Express.  It's a software package built to make your call-time process as accurate and efficient as possible for $99/month.  And if that's not enough, you can easily upgrade your campaign to Calltime Pro to take advantage of even more powerful features.  Features like automatic donor lookup from public state and federal sources, a mobile phone interface, paperless calltime, and printing of follow up letters and labels.

As you can see, there are a lot of different ways to manage your call-time process.  If you're interested in learning more about Calltime Express or Calltime Pro from Blue Campaign Solutions, please visit our website.  Now that you know what call-time is, why it's imporant to your campaign, and how best to do it, get out there and make some calls!

Posted March 18, 2010 05:27 PM
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The Friends of Marilyn Brown committee has launched their new website, brownforfranklincounty.com, and Blue Campaign Solutions is pleased to have been selected as the designer and hosting provider.  The Friends of Marilyn Brown committee joins Blue Campaign Solutions' growing list of clients who have taken advantage of the unique blend of quality and value that BCS provides. 

The Friends of Marilyn Brown committee will be able to take advantage of tools like Website Manager from Blue Campaign Solutions to get their message out about this important race through multiple mediums like the web, email, and social networks with one simple solution.  Blue Campaign Solutions is proud to be a part of Marilyn Brown's race for Franklin County Commissioner.

For more information on how your campaign can take advantage of Blue Campaign Solutions' offerings, visit our website at www.bluecampaigns.com.

Posted February 23, 2010 03:47 PM
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The Judge Cocroft Committee has launched their new website, cocroftforjudge.com, and Blue Campaign Solutions is pleased to have been selected as the designer and hosting provider.  The Judge Cocroft Committee joins Blue Campaign Solutions' growing list of clients who have taken advantage of the unique blend of quality and value that BCS provides. 

The Judge Cocroft Committee will be able to take advantage of tools like Website Manager from Blue Campaign Solutions to get their message out about this important race through multiple mediums like the web, email, and social networks with one simple solution.  Blue Campaign Solutions is proud to be a part of Judge Kimberly Cocroft's race for Franklin County Court of Common Pleas. 

For more information on how your campaign can take advantage of Blue Campaign Solutions' offerings, visit our website at www.bluecampaigns.com.

Posted January 11, 2010 12:58 PM
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It's a fair question.  Why does my campaign need to spend our hard-earned money every month on fundraising software?

Increased Efficiency

Resources on campaigns are often scarce, and dedicated fundraising software helps your campaign make the most out of the available resources (time, energy and money).

Think of your fundraising operation as a large machine.  Each "action" of the machine requires time, energy and sometimes money.  Again, all of these are scarce and should be conserved when possible.  Fundraising software reduces the time and energy (and sometimes money) required to complete each fundraising machine task.  It, in effect, reduces the friction necessary for your fundraising machine to operate.

In practical terms, here are some "fundraising machine" tasks your campaign might be doing and how fundraising software can improve their effectiveness

• Researching donor histories
  • Software can connect a few bits of information (name, location, zip code) to other databases to automatically give you information about your donors.  This information can be automatically displayed on callsheets.
• Looking up phone numbers
  • With a first and last name, phone number lookups can be made completely seamless with good fundraising software.  Get your volunteers doing something else - this can all be done automatically!
• Organizing data into callsheets
  • Getting candidates comfortable with the calltime process is critically important, and the way they see the information in front of them has a lot to do with that.  Using software, each field can be displayed the same way every time.
• Printing callsheets
  • A consistent and easy-to-read format will make calltime substantially easier on the candidate.
• Sitting w/ the candidate on calls
  • Some systems make the recording of information (notes, amount pledged, etc) easy and completely paper-free
• Doing follow-up letters, emails, faxes, etc
  • This can be a massive time investment - with a system like CallTime Pro, you can print letters, labels and envelopes easily, and spend the rest of your time on other things.

Conclusions

What is the result of all of this?  Generally, campaigns that utilize campaign software will raise more money in less time than campaigns that do not.

Peter Lytle is the founder of Blue Campaign Solutions, a company dedicated to more effective and efficient campaigns through the use of software and other technologies.

Posted January 4, 2010 02:55 PM
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Today it seems like there are as many website vendors as there are websites on the Internet.  That can make finding the right vendor for you feel like a complicated task.  But there are 5 questions you can ask a website vendor that can tell you the quality of the vendor.

1. Will my website be tested in multiple web browsers?

Different web browsers can display the same website differently, sometimes making the website unusuable.  In some cases, different versions of the very same web browser can have the same problem, like Internet Explorer 6 vs. Internet Explorer 7.  Making sure a website looks consistently good in all versions can be a tedious task, but if not taken seriously, it can make it impossible for your site to be viewed by large portions of your audience.  Make sure that your site will be tested in the following browsers: Firefox (all major versions), Internet Explorer 6.0 or better, Safari (3.1 or better), and Opera (current version).

2. Will it be easy for me to add content and make changes to my website?

A website without fresh content is almost worse than no website at all.  So having a simple to use way to add content to your website is critical.  If adding content to your website is a complicated task, your staff will probably put it off or ignore it, making your site stale, and giving your visitors the wrong impression.  Make sure your website will include a way to easily add photographs, blog entries, news items, calendar events, and press releases. 

But that's just half of the question. Posting a press release or blog entry is one thing, but what about making a change to the actual pages of your website?  Imagine your campaign was just endorsed by a high profile group, and you want to get your candidate's biography page updated as soon as possible to reflect the endorsement.  If a vendor tells you that you just need to give them a call or send them an email and they'll make the change for you, it's a red flag.  What happens when they're on vacation/out of cell coverage/etc.?  If you can't make minor edits to your own website easily without needing to learn HTML, you may be in trouble when it comes time to make a simple but urgent change.

3. Will my website be backed up?

Web servers, like any computer, can have bad days.  Even the best website vendors can have a server crash.  Make sure your website's data is backed up daily, and that those backups are stored at a location different from where the webserver is.  This means that in the off chance that something bad does happen to your web server, your data is safe, making it easy to quickly recover.

4. Will my website integrate with social networks like Facebook and Twitter?

Update your website, update Facebook, update Twitter... it can sometimes feel like a never ending loop.  Keeping the content fresh on your website and social networks can be tough if you have to do it all manually.  A good website vendor should make it easy for you to post once, and see that content end up in multiple places, without you needing to worry about the difference between a "tweet," a "status update," and a "blog post."

5. Will I be able to accept donations via whatever provider I want?

Accepting donations via your website is a critical feature for any campaign.  But there are many different ways that you can accept donations online, each offering uniqe pros and cons.  Being able to choose between them is important to ensure that you don't pay too much for your online donations.  Some campaigns prefer services like ActBlue, while others like the value of using their own mrchant account.  In any case, make sure your website vendor will help you pick the method that best suits your campaign.  Additionally, make sure that whatever method you pick, your provider makes it easy to monitor those contributions through a central management page.  You shouldn't have to sign in to another website to see your ActBlue contributions. 

That's it.  A quality website vendor should answer "yes" to each of these questions, and be happy to show you a live demonstration of of each feature.  This way you should be able to see what your vendor believes is "easy" and "simple" for yourself.  Asking these questions of your current or potential website vendor should give you a good feel for the quality of the website vendor you're dealing with, without needing to become an expert yourself, and ensure that you get the most value from your website now and in the future.

Chris Marshall is the CTO of Blue Campaign Solutions, a company dedicated to more effective and efficient campaigns through the use of software and other technologies.