CampaignFoundations.com

Among coders, sales people have a certain reputation for lacking touch with reality. I'm sure they have unflattering things to say about us too.

I generally prefer to spend my energies delivering new reliable services to blowing smoke about the vaporware which distracts me most days. Every development project is vaporware until delivery. Until then its a nice sounding spec and a bug list of the work left till launch.

Even so, its hard to resist bragging about some of the latest work, or speculating on the implications their fruition might have on Green electoral campaigns and related cultural and community organizing.

At the Party's National Meeting in Raleigh-Durham, I offered a presentation called How IT Services Can Serve Your Campaign. A pdf of the slides I used for that presentation is linked from the article linked here.

At the end of that presentation I spoke about the impact which so-called cloud computing would have on our work. Cloud Computing involves renting computing capacity on an as-needed basis. It changes how we relate to computing capacity from seeing it as a large capital investment to being a utility, turn-it-on, use-what-you-need, turn-it-off commodity.

(1) We're close to being able to scale our voice message delivery capacity to meet the demands of any campaign.

Last year CampaignFoundations.com started adding telephony services to its offerings. So far, we've provided automated voice messaging on a few campaigns, offered our phone bank application to a couple of efforts and bid some other campaigns.

This home-based start-up has the capacity in house to deliver about 4k some voice mails a day. For a couple of jobs, I have added a server nearly doubling that to meet deadlines imposed by the campaign we served. We were limited by bandwidth considerations before we loaded the server processor or its memory. Even still, we've left numbers undialed.

Enter cloud computing, and the past week of development focused on building and replicating outcall server capacity, and suddenly I'm no longer worried about our ability to accept and deliver on as much volume outcalls as Green candidates may want to send our way for the final month of this campaign season. If we can help you see that Your Message is Delivered, at affordable rates and on time, don't hesitate to write or call.

(2) We're close to adding fax broadcast to our services

While still on staff with the Georgia Green Party I built and administered a fax server which we used regularly for distributing our media work. We published two and four releases a week by email and fax because that server and the application I wrote which drove it made the process of distributing a press release trivial.

I have long wanted to rebuild that capacity to serve our clients with CampaignFoundations.com. I know that there are Green Party volunteers whose skills, talents and energy is wasted feeding a fax machine when those tasks can be automated and their energies put to higher uses.

Our own Georgia Green Party has a new Press Secretary. And his prioritizing a fax service for the Party will soon pay dividends for CampaignFoundations.com clients across the country who have media operations of their own to serve. I'm experimenting with a couple of approaches and testing T.38 compatible SIP providers. I won't bore you with the intracies of the protocols. But I feel it in my blood that we will soon be ready to provide fax service for our clients. Perhaps even in time for GOTV the end of October (but, heh, no promises).

Yes, as I write this, this is still vaporware, but I feel like I got this one by the tail and hope to soon have something new to show for it. Stay tuned.

(3) Enhanced tools for your phone bank are on the way.

While most folks were enjoying the final days of Summer, I poured three weeks of work over a five week period into building a dialer application.

The way our current phone bank application works depends on your campaign volunteers overcoming the inertia to pick up the phone, spend their phone budget to make your phone calls. Even so, it has already proven a powerful tool for engaging volunteers from far outside of your district in the retail politics of phone canvassing those habitual voters who's support you need on election day.

About two weeks ago, with the kind support of OpenSourceMind, CampaignFoundations.com showed the first successful tests of a new dialer application which will dial the phone for the volunteers on your campaign, breeze past those busy and disconnected numbers and make sure your volunteers spend their time engaging voters, not dreading digit dialing. I have no data to speak of, but I will share that the products sold to provide these services in the commercial arena say that this sort of software will increase from 15 minutes to 40+ minutes an hour, the time their agents spend on the phone with sales prospects.

Exciting though the dialer itself may be, it is not much use without another week or three to integrate it with the phone bank application, so that your campaign volunteers see the data for the household the dialer connects them to. Using this tool will shift the costs for the phone time currently distributed among your volunteers to a per minute charge incurred by the campaign. Don't look for this until we get deeper into the 2010 election cycle.

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So here is where I stop being a salesman talking about the services yet to come, and as a systems administrator remind you that we already provide a variety of hosting and telephony services to leverage your work to organize in the political, electoral and cultural arenas so we can all offer the grandchildren a just and sustainable future. Call us about your current campaign, let us let you know how we can help.

-- Hugh Esco
http://CampaignFoundations.com