No Post for You (Part 5)

No Post for You (Part 4)

No Post for You (Part 3)

No Post for You (Part 2)

No Post for You...

It's the money, stupid

This summer I've been doing an independent study on how the Internet and technology can be used to improve volunteer coordination in political campaigns. Not surprisingly, conducting research in this area has been a little difficult, since most of the articles I've read focused on the power of the Internet in terms of fundraising.

I've been lucky enough to conduct interviews with volunteer coordinators from several of the national campaigns though, and have found their comments on this topic to be quite interesting. Most of the books and articles I had read said that the major prerequisite for a strong online campaign was having a strong basic campaign message. Basically, have your ducks in a row before you attempt to try something new and innovative.

However, when I asked this question in one of my interviews, I got a surprising, yet quite understandable answer. Money. The person I was interviewing commented that most campaigns would love to do things like equip all of their canvassers with PDAs, but they simply don't have the funds. "Sometimes it's hard enough finding money to feed volunteers pizza," he stated.

I think sometimes when we're talking about all the wonderful possibilities that our out there for the world of technology and politics, sometimes we forget even the most basic things, like how difficult it can be to do some of these creative things just because of lack of funds. None of the articles nor books that I had read addressed this obvious limitation.

I suppose the silver lining to this anecdote is that technology becomes less expensive as it starts to become more prevalent, so hopefully in the future we'll reach a point where all campaigns will be able to creatively use technology without worrying too much about the associated costs.