Blog: Campaign

Well Written, Unique Emails Stand Out in Crowded Inboxes

I’m still deciding which candidate to support in the primaries. This means I get a lot of email every day from the several candidates I’m following. I don’t pour over every message that hits my inbox. Usually I delete most without a thought and only read the ones that really catch my eye, which doesn’t happen all that often. Today I was excited to get an email that not only caught my eye but also kept my attention. 

There were two reasons this particular message worked – it was a clever idea and it was incredibly well written. The message itself was essentially just an email forward. Senator Chris Dodd forwarded me an update he got from his online director on how his online campaign is doing in comparison to the other campaigns. (Disclaimer: We designed the Senator’s first presidential website at the end of last year and helped with online strategy but haven’t worked with his team recently.)

The mass email forward has been done before by candidates and advocacy groups, but this one surpassed other efforts I’ve seen. Its personal tone and great writing throughout made me scroll down to read the entire email chain – and happy that I did. The email even made me want to donate so Dodd can beat John Edwards’ fundraising goal, and I like both candidates.

Kudos to the Dodd team for sending out a superb email – I think you’ll see a good boost to your fundraising numbers from it. I’d love to see some smaller organizations try to replicate this message for their causes. The returns will easily transfer to many issues, and sending supporters an honest and unique email like this will make a good impact when it’s well done.

Read the message and pay special attention to the tone and writing style throughout it – that’s what really sets this apart and makes the message work.

Module Lets You Upload Photos to Your Site and Flickr at the Same Time

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could upload as many images as you’d like to your site without worrying about your bandwidth? Or even better, if you could automatically share the images you upload to your site with an image sharing service like Flickr, and then have these photos displayed on your website but hosted on Flickr? 

That’s exactly what we did last week for the Stand Up Speak Out campaign. Using Drupal and the Flickr API, I created a small Drupal module called Flickrup that does this – all you have to do is enable it and configure it. It helped us easily display photos from many of the thousands of events that took place around the world on their individual event webpages. Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s what the module can do:

• Upload images to your Flickr account and link them to specific content
• Automatically display images along with your website content
• Define a global tag for all your uploaded images
• Define tags per content types, which lets you automatically tag images using node parameters and location data if its available (for example, you can tag all images with 'yoursitename' event[nid] country)
• Add additional custom tags for each upload

Here’s how it works:

• Uses phpFlickr for Flickr integration and automatic uploading 
• Uploads images first to your server and then to Flickr, and gives you the option of removing local files after they've been sent to Flickr
• Automatically tags your pictures for your specific content on your website, which allows appropriate images to be retrieved and displayed on the appropriate pages (this is optional)

And it works! Thousands of photographs were uploaded last week during the Stand Up Speak Out campaign.

Below I’ll walk you through using the Flickrup module step by step.

Two Widgets We Used to Show Off Photos on StandAgainstPoverty.org

At the height of the UN Millennium Campaign's Stand Up Speak Out campaign last week, a ton of photos were uploaded to StandAgainstPoverty.org in just one day. So many in fact, that at least one photo from the campaign’s account made it into the photos featured on Flickr under “everyone’s photos.” That’s hard to do and shows the fast rate people were uploading photos through the Flickrup module that Jose built (more on that later in the week).

With so many photos being uploaded and with so many of these photos containing important metadata like the location where the photos were taken, we really wanted to display the photos in an organized way that took advantage of all available data. So we started brainstorming. 

Flickr.com lets you make a Flickr map of your photos, but photos can only be mapped if they've been geotagged using a special machine tag that includes latitude and longitude of where the picture was taken.  This is limiting, and unless you do the geocoding yourself (which can be a little hairy but not too bad), you need a way to geocode the pictures when pulling them back out of Flickr. With such a fast paced campaign like this one, we wanted to use a more straightforward approach. 

That’s when Trippermap came in. Trippermap is a flash widget that gets around the need to tag your photos with latitude and longitude. If there are other location tags on a photo like the name of a country, city, and state or a country and state/province, then Trippermap uses this information to geocode the photo itself and place it on a flash map that you can then embed in your site.  Check out this one from the Stand Up Speak Out campaign:

Stand Up Speak Out Campaign Breaks It’s Own World Record

I’d like to send a big congratulations over to the UN Millennium Campaign and especially to everyone who worked on and participated in the Stand Up Speak Out campaign. A whopping 38.8 million people in 110 different countries took action yesterday and Wednesday to show their support to end poverty! Not only did they break their own Guinness World Record for the number of people to stand up to demand action on poverty, but they surpassed the record by 15 million people. 

As people were taking action around the world, they were also organizing events and posting updates online at StandAgainstPoverty.org, a Drupal website we worked on with Jason Wojciechowski and his team at the UN Millennium Campaign. The website turned into a great showcase of the success of the events taking place around the world. In total, people posted information about 5,579 different events they were hosting. 

They posted even more photos – more than 6,300 photos of events were uploaded to the campaign’s Flickr account as of 2:00 pm today. Most of these photos were uploaded through the Flickup module, a module we developed and installed on the site to let people upload photos to a node in Drupal and at the same time tag photos with an associated ID. This let us pull photos that are on Flickr back to StandAgainstPoverty.org and display them there. We decided to show them off in this slideshow. 

A huge benefit to using this module was that all of the photos are hosted on Flickr, and not on the server of the site itself. This was a big help to us in this campaign since we expected a lot of traffic. With the photos coming off of Flickr.com itself this meant less load on the website server. This, along with Drupal’s scalability (like caching and CSS file aggregation), made it easy for us to keep the website running smoothly when it was attracting a ton of visitors.

Again, congratulations on such a successful campaign! It’s really amazing to see so many people taking action to show their support of ending poverty.