Case 13 - The Online side of Atlanta's 2001 Election

It started by accident on June 19, 2001. I was helping the Grady High School PTSA park cars for "Screen on the Green" at Piedmont Park. Suddenly, Jannie Gerds, candidate for the 6th council district, appeared beside me and before I knew it I was wearing her campaign sticker. I barely noticed, I was too busy directing traffic.

When I got home I saw Jannie's URL on the sticker so I checked out her site. Well, that raised a boat-load of questions: Who else has site? When was the election, anyway? Who were the candidates? Who had websites? Did campaign sites actually work?

The ultimate quest was, "Why is this stuff so hard to find on the web?" On June 29 I published the site for the first time. I wasn't quite sure where I was headed but I had a few goals:

List all of the candidates
List all of the campaign websites.
Do a brief critique of each website.
Find critiques of other campaign websites.
List other sources of information about the election.
Learn more about the election and candidates.
Learn about the design, use, and value of campaign websites.
Publish what I found.

I had another brainstorm on August 1 when I added a column with links to online news articles about the election. Now I was really getting somewhere. It made me follow the news and for the first time allowed folks to see all the candidates, all of the websites, and all of the online news in one place. I had a reason to update it each day and surfers could expect something new each morning.

My personal experience as a surfing voter

Were campaign websites good for me? Well, yes. But my campaign surfing distilled to three things. I wanted to see the candidates' pictures and biographies and I wanted to see if the websites were any good. I'm afraid the platforms and issue statements didn't excite me as much as how well they were presented on the web.

How did the candidates expect me to use the web? Did they expect me to visit their site once, daily, weekly to check for updates, changes in their calendar, their endorsements, their T-shirts? I don't know but it's the key question.

Here is what I faced. This just lists the candidates that I had to deal with as a voter:

Office	Candidates	Websites
Mayor	14 5 serious	3
City Council President	5	3
Council At Large 1	4	2
Council At Large 2	4	2
Council At Large 3	4	1
Council District 6	3	2
School Board District 3	1	0
School Board At Large 7	2	2
School Board At Large 8	3	0
School Board At Large 9	3	0
House Seat 47	8	6
Judges	Didn't cover these
-- Totals	47	19

It would be tough for any surfer to visit 19 websites regularly. The conscientious surfing voter had a bigger problem: Twenty-eight candidates didn't have sites so information had to come from elsewhere.

The state of online election coverage

These were the sources:

Atlanta Journal-Constitution had by far the most coverage and it really picked up as the election approached. Everything printed in my morning paper also appeared in the website. On election night and the next day they presented up to date voting results and the run-off status of the mayoral election. The big problem was that their links only last a week and you have to pay to use their archive.

Creative Loafing is a weekly that had occasional election coverage. The coverage was a little more of the muckraking variety and usually fun to read. CL's links last forever.

Southern Voice Atlanta Edition only covered the election from a gay/lesbian perspective. They had articles occasionally.

Atlanta Daily World didn't really update articles daily but occasionally had interesting articles from a black perspective.

Atlanta Business Chronicle had an article every couple of week and some editorials.

Atlanta Tribune Online has a website but doesn't publish its articles online.

The Committee for a Better Atlanta's Candidate Evaluations interviewed and evaluated the candidates and, bless them, published the results online.

Grant Park Neighborhood Association election news and Guide to City Elections 2001 had an excellent site geared to the candidates who represented the Grant Park Neighborhood. The published pictures of the candidates side by side.

Make and educated choice is about the school board elections and seems to be associated with the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. The published a guide to the "ideal" candidate but no analysis of the candidates themselves.

I probably learned as much about how the online media covered the election as I did about the election and candidates. In retrospect, studying the headlines in the news column might be revealing. What it reveals, I'm not sure.

Good sites and better sites

The two best sites were Shirley Franklin's and Cathy Woolard's. There are other nice sites and you can find my compliments and crticisms of specific site here. But Shirley and Cathy illustrate what I, as a surfing voter, really want.

The first and most important thing is the home page. Many surfers won't get past your home page. Experienced surfers are easy to annoy with bad home pages. Every web designer can easily do a great front page but many don't. Here is what I want for the first page:

Candidate's name and picture.
Office.
Election and runoff dates.
The campaign's address, phone number, and e-mail.
The candidate's address, phone number, and e-mail.
A way to sign up for e-mail alerts and a clear explanation of e-mail alerts. (Shirley calls them "E-mail update" and does it best with a form right at the top of the page. Cathy has a menu item called, "eUpdate" which is not quite as clear.) Services that manage e-mail address are inexpensive and you can set them up in minutes.
Form/Web mail that allows surfers to send mail even if they are not at their regular PC.
Straightforward navigation to the rest of the site.
Fast loading.

The second most important thing is e-mail. The campaign staff must respond promptly to e-mail. Few things can irritate more: You have a great site, the e-mail address is prominent, the surfer sends you some mail and gets a delayed, or worse, no response.

What about elegant and beautiful design? To surfers, elegance and beauty is the ability to find the information they want. Aesthetics are secondary but never hurt. Spend your time and money on information and navigation. If you have money left over, add beauty.

Let's close by mentioning online contributions, using your credit card to send money to the campaign. Some surfers will do it and some won't. Please make it easy for your willing online donors. There are many inexpensive web services that will enable these. You don't have to be a web guru to make it happen.

To wrap this up, even your volunteer teen-age webmaster can build a useful campaign website. Buy subscribing to credit card and mailing list services an inexpensive site can function like the big ones.

The web as the glue for the staff and online supporters

As a surfing voter, I've established that I would rarely visit a campaign website. There just isn't time, there is rarely anything new on the site, and if there is something new, I'd have to visit the site to find out. That's discouraging but it misses the point. By far the number one use of the web is e-mail.

You can take advantage of e-mail even if you don't have a website. In fact you'll do better with e-mail and no website, than you'll do with a website and no e-mail. Hold on now, I'm about to make a brash statement: The prime purpose of your website might be to collect the e-mail addresses of surfing voters by allowing them to sign up for email alerts.

Take it as a fact that, by far, most folks who are online just do e-mail. The never surf. Your site is wasted on them but your e-mails aren't. So use every opportunity to collect e-mail addresses.

But this section is about the "glue" isn't it? Glue, Part 1 - Send e-mail to staff and supporters to keep them informed and to let them know you are thinking about them.

Here are some email alert stats from August 9, through November 8. The e-mail is still coming because of the runoffs.

25 E-mails form the Woolard campaign.
26 E-mails from the Franklin campaign
6 E-mails from the William Perry campaign
1 E-mails from Jannie Gerds campaign 1
0 E-mails from the Michael Bond campaign. He had a list but sent no mail

Glue, Part 2 - Your campaign staff and supporters are the most frequent visitors to your site. Your fans will return to the site for moral support, to get your verbatim on the issues, check the schedule, and admire your picture. Make sure your site supports your supporters. If you don't accomplish that, you'll have a hard time with other surfing voters.

Did the web make difference?

Short answer: I don't know and I'm not sure that I'll find out.

More on this later.

Using the web after the election

I expect to be disappointed here but I think the web has more value to constituents and supporters after the election than during the campaign. Win or lose, use your website and your e-mail addresses to keep your supporters and constituents in the know. I, for one, would appreciate it.

Have a look at all the websites in the "Reference: Websites for office holders that affect Atlanta" column of the election site. With the exception of the Secretary of State's site, they are all dead.

You can find mailing and emailing addresses, a picture, maybe a little philosophy and these are all good things. But frankly, they don't give me anything that help me become a more informed citizen.

Use your site as an archive of issues, votes, accomplishments, good news and recognitions. Answer your constituent's questions on the web. Send e-mails to tell folks about important events and issues.

What if I was doing a campaign website?

I was afraid you were going to ask, so here goes. First, I would take my own advice: I'd pick a campaign site that that I like and other folks seem to like and tell my web designer to do one "just like that." OK?

But, there is something I miss in all of the campaign websites: Interaction with surfing voters. A conversation, if you will, between candidate and constituent. None of the sites capture the essence of the non-web part of the campaign: The voter asks questions, the candidate answers and goes on the record.

Campaign sites are one-way streets. They present issues, platforms, events and news "down" to the surfer. As the sites are now, if you want to know a candidate's position, one visit to the site is enough. If you want to understand a specific position, 100 visits is probably not enough.

So, I would add an "Ask the candidate" feature. The surfing voter would pose questions by e-mail or mail form. "What are you going to do about those potholes?" "What's that smell near Piedmont Park." Can we really afford to separate our sewage."

Once a week the candidate picks the best questions, publishes the answers on the web and sends an e-mail alert that says, "Y'all have asked some great questions this week, come see my answers."

That would be nice.