Featur e The Inside Scoop on
obile applications are getting a pretty good shakedown on the global campaign trail this year in what feels like a dress re- hearsal for the U.S. Presidential election in 2012. The trend first started with Scott
Brown’s Massachusetts win and then surged through the British Election where the top four parties all came out with apps. Then surprisingly it popped up in the Co- lombian Presidential Election, and since then more U.S. candidates have started to release apps through the U.S. state primaries in the drive towards the November gen- eral election. Canadian politicians have lagged in this area, and I sus- pect this is mostly as a result of the Federal parties focusing on replenishing their war chests after fighting two general elections in close succession.
Ontario P.C. Leader, Tim
Hudak, a client of mine, is a notable exception and has established his mark by being the first political leader in Canada to leverage mobile apps as a way of communicat- ing with his constituents and supporters. My firm, Purple Forge (
www.purpleforge.com), has
built over 15 apps for politicians, political events and e- Democracy initiatives spanning 3 continents and 4 differ- ent elections this year alone. I’m going to share some of our award winning best practices and the key features and capabilities you should be expecting from an application and the value that it will bring to your campaign.
Avoid Web Optimization and Build an App As a baseline, almost all of the mobile solutions released broadcast information that can be found on the candi- dates website; namely news, press releases, YouTube videos, photos, donation pages and candidate biographies. This is table stakes, and is based on the overwhelming trend of people accessing the Internet more frequently on their mobile devices than on their PCs or laptops. And since mobile devices are now where folks are searching for in- formation, two schools of mobile design then become apparent. The first school are the web-centric designers, who believe they can simply “optimize” the website for mobile viewing across many platforms. The second school is based around application developers that design apps to
iPhone Apps for Campaigns What works, what doesn’t and why you need to do it. By John Craig
fit into the way people use devices. The web approach creates a cheap, multi-platform expe-
rience that is reminiscent of the early days of the web. Lots of black text on grey backgrounds with information cate- gorized and grouped according to function. It’s menu and label intensive, and user insensitive. Check out Robin Car- nahan’s mobile optimized web site (
www.robincarnahan. com) as an example. While informative, it’s also dull be- yond belief.
It may shock you that BlackBerry users don’t download many applications, given it is the dominant smartphone platform in North America with over 40% market share.
The application approach takes into account that the
device has a touch screen, or a joystick, or a track ball. De- signers know how big the screen size is, and fit data, video and graphics in a manner that is both pleasing and engag- ing. An example would be to have the buttons shaped to fit your finger for a touch screen. Application developers keep the user’s happiness as the first requirement, and by leveraging the native capabilities, deliver the most engross- ing experience leveraging all the functions of the device. Fast, efficient workflow is key. Web optimizers may argue that your optimized pres- ence might have better search engine optimization. Here, apps clearly have an advantage over mobile web pages as Apple published its complete iTunes application directory to the web. The second point is that most people down- load apps by searching the app store on the device (Source: Pew Internet Research). Case in point, type “iPhone Tim Hudak” in Google then “iPhone Robin Carnahan.” It’s clear whose app presence you’ll find to download first. There are shades of grey, and in some cases hybrid web/ app approaches can offer advantages to presenting certain
December 2010 | Campaigns & Elections 53
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