What A Good Website Can Do

Expanding on yesterday's post on the need for DECs to have a website, today's post will discuss a few things that a good website can do.

Let People Know You Exist: If you include your website on your press releases, logos, and on most of your materials - this will drive traffic. As word spreads, your website will become the first impression many people have of your DEC.

Voting Absentee: GOTV strategies are slowly losing relevance to GITV (Getting IN the Vote) strategies to get votes in the bank before election day in the form of absentee and early votes. A webform can do the trick of increasing absentee turnout nicely. Just have the results of the website emailed to your Supervisor of Elections. You'll obviously need to coordinate with your county SoE to see whether they allow requests to be emailed, and if they do, what is the correct email address to send the information. We did this in Marion County in 2006, and we had several dozen folks request their absentee ballots this way (including yours truly.)

Recruiting Volunteers: Having a webform for volunteers is another great resource to have. Make sure you get all the relevant contact information (particularly their email address), their interests, times they can work, and any special skills they have. Have the webform email results to your volunteer coordinator or the appropriate party official for quick personal follow up.

Contributions: The ability to contribute online is a quick and easy way for the party to get the resources it needs. However, a slight warning: I've generally found that older folks, including those who surf the web often, don't trust giving online (fearing ID theft and the like.) Giving online is also very impersonal and distant - there isn't the instant "Thank You!" from a fellow warm body. So don't be surprised if your contributions page doesn't make you rich overnight. There are several ways to accept contributions online. The two most used I've seen is PayPal and Click and Pledge. If you're using the Drupal package, the somewhat complicated CiviCRM package is the best way to start accepting contributions.

Build A Strong Mailing List: A good mailing list will allow you to regularly communicate with your support base and keep them informed, drive traffic to your website, and organize more efficiently. With the Drupal package, in order to have an account to do much of anything, you have to give your email address. If you're not using the Drupal package, you can use what we use here at Reform Florida's DECs: Bravenet. I've also seen feedblitz used. I'm sure there are plenty others.

This is a good list of things a great website can help DECs do. There are others, but these are the core benefits.

Update: I should add I will be more than willing to help build or reconstruct your DEC's website. I'll work out a workable price.

Websites for DECs

No matter how small the county - every DEC should have an effective web presence. This is one area where many DECs fall short. Websites are viewed as an amenity rather than an essential. These vital pieces of infrastructure will only become more important as time goes on. This is because more and more people are using the Internet as a means of getting their information, staying informed, shopping, meeting people, and having fun.

DECs have to evolve with the times. Good websites can yield significant results for DECs in terms of volunteer recruitment, contributions, network development, and keeping your supporters well informed and up to date.

What stops many DECs from building a website is the potential complexity and cost. This is only true to some degree. If you're familiar with navigating the web, and using Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel (possibly Access) - then you can probably maintain a website.

Building one isn't that complex, either. The only real technical knowledge you may need is a bit of knowledge of HTML, and possibly (though not likely) in CSS. You can learn all the things you need to know and more about HTML and CSS here.

You can certainly build a website purely on HTML and CSS, but that would take a lot of time. There are several packages out there which can do most of the work for you - you just have to fill in the spaces. The package I recommend is Drupal. With this book on Drupal, installing and configuring is easy, easy, easy.

This is what we're doing with the Marion DEC website, which should be released at the end of the summer. I'll talk more about things you can do with a good DEC website later today.