making campaigning count...

Ecampaigning Review

e-action review and e-campaigning practices surveyJess Day

2010

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The eCampaigning Review aims to help digital campaigners in their work by providing publicly accessible, actionable benchmarks for online campaigning through three linked research projects:

• an analysis of anonymised emailing and action data• a comparison of public e-campaigning practices• a confidential survey of e-campaigning internal

practices

2010 e-campaigning review

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E-action review

• 81 online actions reviewed and scored

• 51 pre-election actions reviewed

• Looks at the details of individual e-actions

• Based on public information

• Subjective!

Practices survey

• 41 organisations, self selected

• Range of organisation sizes

• Looks at what doing and how

The research

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• Understand best performance• Pick up ideas• Spot gaps and weaknesses• Celebrate strengths• Inform budget and strategy decisions• Meaningful benchmarks, based on confidential

data• For more tailored insights – talk to FairSay

How can it help you?

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• Average campaign email list: 40k

• Average campaign total list: 84k

• Range more interesting: 27% have under 5k email campaigners

• More sophistication and personalisation

• Growth in use of social media

• Budgets and staffing holding steady

Campaigns email list size

12

10

7

6

2

4

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

<5k 6-10k 10-25k 25-50k 50-100k >100k

Practices - headlines

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Conversion12% use data about user preferences to inform action

requests to donors.17% use user data to inform donation requests (up from

5%)

Testing22% are split testing (up from 7% last year)Only 7% are not testing at all (down from 18%)

Sophistication

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Social media

• 68% using blogs to campaign

• 73% actively use a social network presence (up from 64% last year)

• 51% engage directly with supporters (38%)

Practices - social media

Which social networks

40

36

26

18

6

2 2 1

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

Facebook Twitter YouTube Flickr MySpace Habbo SecondLife

Ning

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Budgets• Average total budget 57k• 57% have held static, 30% increased

Staffing• Average total staffing 6.5• 32% had 1 or fewer campaign staff, over half had 1 or

fewer new media staff• 53% held static, 40% added new staff

Budgets and staffing

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• Elected representatives still most popular target• Government targets most popular• Email actions the most popular• Petitions slightly more popular than last year• Strongest: campaign aggregators (eg 38 degrees),

unions, environment and animal organisations• Weakest: health/medical, consumer and international

poverty organisations

E-action review – headlines

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• 78% of actions targeted Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs)

• 7% targeted voters directly

(Excessive?)anxiety about charity law• Only 13% of actions referred to party policy in message

text• Only 24% provided information about relevant party

policies

E-action review – election headlines

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Timeliness• Lots of references to the 'election just weeks away'• 63% had update on the site after 2 weeks• Ten actions were still live after 2 weeks!• Friends of the Earth – great nimble campaigning

Devolution• Over half the actions were on devolved issues (eg

health, education)• Only a third of those were handling it well

E-action review – election headlines