Crowdsourcing a Campiagn

For the past four years Doritos has hosted Crash the Super Bowl, a contest for consumer generated ad’s. Doritos gets thousands of ad's and picks six finalists.  The top three are picked by the public.  The top three get aired during the Super Bowl.

There is potential of winning up to $5million prize money if the ad scores in the top three spots the Ad Meter and additional advertising meters. The cost of the incentive is well worth it. As Rudy Wilson, vice president of Frito Lay highlights in a press release announcing the finalists.

“Time and time again our fans have proven they have the creativity and talent to match up against the best in the advertising business, and we couldn’t be more thrilled for this year’s Crash the Super Bowl winners.”

These commercials could not be conceived in an advertising agency, they are expressions of the relationship the consumer has with the product, and it works. The Crash the SuperBowl campaign generated more than one billion media impressions and over $35 million in ad equivalency with roughly one half of the impressions coming from non-traditional media outlets.

Business trends of crowdsourcing are very exciting for the world of politics. Crowdsourcing is a way to tap into the collective intelligence of people. It allows you to get the involvement of your target audience and create buy in through their participation. There are some great business models like www.threadless.com are worth exploring. The basic idea of “threadless” is that customers vote on the T shirt design they feel should be produced. The incentive of seeing your shirt be mass produced and sold, promotes the designer to get people involved in the website so they will vote for their design.

This concept is easily translatable for a political campaign that has a base of support to involved. Do it right and it will lead to an authentic way to resource aspects of your campaign and the added value of deepening relationships with your potential voters and people in their networks who have the potential of being a voter at least, and at most an active supporter of your campaign. Saying you are committed to voters does not go far enough in ensuring they are included. Here are some steps to including more voters in a more meaningful way.

Try this:
Have your base help create your message:
Having a contest around posters, t-shirts and commercials for your campaign could give you a lot of creative content and promotion for your campaign. Offering the winner a chance to see their product mass-produced and organizing a high profile PR campaign event to unveil the winner should enough incentive your community will need to create authentic messages.

Having worked on a lot of local campaigns that do not have the money of Doritos or the excitement of a presidential election I caution you to keep your perspective. Smaller campaigns want to evaluate how this could be applied.  The most important questions to ask yourself are 1) do we have a community that will want to get involved in the contest 2) Do we have the means to reach them and 3) is our prize enough to motivate.  Do not organize a contest for making commercials if you're community or your campaign do not have resources to develop and distribute a commercial.

A poster contest is a great one, you can get kids, families and local artists involved and your campaign should be able to produce and distribute them... if not you got bigger problems in your campaign than excitement.

Being a champion not a rock star candidate

There is only one way to counter the effects of organized money… organized people.   The true keeper of this country’s democracy is its people whether they decide to participate in the vote or not.   The ability to raise money is still considered the number one factor in being able to win an election, but recently we have seen campaigns backed by informal citizen groups show the potential of a people powered campaign. If you have actual relationships with people in your district you can create a campaign that is fueled by sweat and shoe leather rather than money and consultants.  A people powered campaign may not look as slick as a well funded campaign.  But being authentic and inclusive of your district will pay in creating a viable campaign.

Developing a people powered campaign is not as easy as you may think.  No matter how good you think you message is or how good you look in a suit people are tired of “politics” and leery of wasting time on a candidate who will not be accountable.  In order to get your supporters to take time to support your campaign, offer diverse points of entry into your campaign that are easy to sign up for and do.  Allow space for a community of volunteers to emerge to support the needs of the campaign. 

Winning a campaign with a movement requires more than a tactical or message shift; it requires a philosophical shift in placing how you win a campaign in the hands of the people.  I hope to offer both tactical models campaigns can adopt to harness the power of a movement and win a campaign.

Create a voter-centered campaign, not a candidate campaign:

Shifting elements of your field campaign structure to be more fluid will allow the input of your supports to be tapped.   Finding ways to decentralize your campaign allows your campaign to grow additional legs to help move it forward. Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, author of Starfish and Spider, a great book on decentralized structures explains the benefits like this “ A decentralized organization stands on five legs.  As with the starfish it can loose a leg or two and still survive.  But when you have all legs working together it can really take off.”

I am not suggesting that you decentralize your campaign all together, although I believe that is where campaigns are evolving.  It is advantageous to begin to shift the traditional roles in a campaign to allow for a democratization of campaign leadership.   

Removing yourself as the motivational apex of the entire campaign will create space for voters to become surrogates for your campaign. From your communication methodology to campaign materials find ways for potential voters to participate in your campaign.

Riffing off of Brafman and Bekstrom “A champion is relentless in promoting a new idea…there is nothing subtle about a champion” and a catalyst is a person who initiates circles (member of the group) and then fades into the background” These suggested definitions of how to view the role of leadership inherently works with its membership. Don’t see the candidate and campaign managers as the head of your campaign, to the candidate being a champion of your policies and your manager being a catalyst of the campaign and field.

The question is can you be a champion and not a rock star?