Fair Elections Now
Public Campaign
In March 2009, legislation was introduced in the US Senate and House that would revolutionize campaign funding by making public money available to federal candidates. This bill, named The Fair Elections Now Act, would allow candidates to choose to run for office without relying on large contributions and donations from lobbyists.
By the summer of the following year, a vote in Congress looked likely before the fall. In anticipation of the upcoming vote, campaign leaders needed a way to educate constituents across the county about the critical issues behind the legislation, to build momentum around campaign actions, and to populate a centralized database with information on supporters.
Actions + Goals + Progress = Momentum
Support for the Fair Elections Now Act is shown for each state
Users can see members of Congress who support the Act
Users can register to keep track of completed actions
When the Campaign for Fair Elections approached Aten in the summer of 2010 to help create a solution in Drupal, we quickly focused on their needs for promoting campaign actions and building momentum. Together, we began planning a Drupal-based system to provide rapid deployment of sophisticated actions, trackable goals, and simple but clear visualization tools to communicate progress.
Supporting Custom Actions
A content type fittingly named “Campaign Action” is central to the solution. Content administrators can create new “Campaign Actions”, and can associate other custom content types as forms that complete a specific action.
For example, an administrator might create a new action called “Host an Event”, using the typical content creation process in Drupal. Once that action is created, the administrator might add a custom content type called “Event”, and would have the option to indicate that the “Event” content type completes the “Host an Event” action. When authenticated users visit the “Host an Event” page, they are presented with a simple form to describe the event they are hosting. Submitting that form creates a new “Event” entry.
With each action, administrators can create one or more goals. At its simplest, goals simply tally the number of “completions” for a given action, displaying the result as a percentage of actual completions to target completions.
Supporting Custom Custom Actions
Since the entire actions system is built within Drupal’s modular architecture, actions and goals have all the typical Drupal hooks available for performing additional functionality. In the case of a “Donate” action, showing total number of completions (or number of donations) was less important than showing dollars donated. In this case, the goal was set for a specific dollar amount, and progress was measured with simple custom code to compare total donated funds to the established target.
Design
Thermometers show progress for each goal
Flexible, trackable actions are useless if not presented in a compelling way. The interface for Fair Elections Now focuses attention on campaign progress and ways to get involved. Not surprisingly, the design is inspired by patriotic themes, but pushes this widely-used genre in a fresh, inviting direction.
Visualizing Progress
Thermometers indicating progress toward goals, combined with maps that show current support from both candidates and representatives, provide a simple but clear toolset for communicating momentum. Visualization tools are rendered dynamically based on progress, and adapt flexibly to customized actions and goals.
Facilitating Campaign Communication
The Fair Elections Now Coalition in comprised of several organizations, each with significant staff dedicated to organizing and promoting the campaign. The team is large and distributed, and needed a way to help centralize communication. To that end, we deployed Open Atrium, a Drupal-based communications and collaboration platform, with single sign-on between OA and the main website using the "bakery" Drupal module.
Convio Integration
In addition to supporting custom actions within FairElectionsNow.org, the system reports user activity to Convio, the third-party CRM used by the campaign. At the time of launch, Convio developers were continuing work on an open API that will soon support even greater levels of integration between the two platforms.
Next Steps
In the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to work with the Fair Elections Now Coalition to roll out new actions and support ongoing campaign activities. Work is already underway to deploy the custom actions platform for several other campaign websites managed by the coalition.
