Rob and his colleagues face the enormous challenge of turning a blue state red. Or, at the very least, trying unbelievably hard on a very limited budget. To get ahead, Rob uses technology, creativity, and hard work to help get a Republican message out.
[Aside: For all (three or four) of you conservative graphic artists, make sure you check out and contribute to Rob's collaborative effort to create and give away free graphics, Keep that Faith.]
Tagga may be a great resource for your GOP state party or campaign. Tagga, a Canadian company based out of Vancouver (home of flickr), appears to be a great little tool with a lot of potential. Tagga enables you to establish text messaging accounts for free and you can create a personalized code. I just set up an account for the Massachusetts Republican Party and you can now text MassGOP to 82442 to join massGOPmobie. I will also set up a RSS feed to our blog, MassRoots, where people can get updates from the blog on the go.
You can send up to 80 characters to your subscribers for free, paying $0.20 a text will give you 120 characters per message.
Soon, you will be able to create polls where people can vote from their phones and newsletters where you an create text message newsletters. Granted, with Twitter you can update volunteers on their phones but this is a nice tool with a specific niche that people can understand immediately, there seems to be a learning curve with twitter and "tweets."
I hope to roll out the new MassGOP.com in a few days and this will be a nice addition to the site, I'm glad I found it. Speaking of which, I'm using the new and improved websat created by Cyrus at the RNC for the new MassGOP.com and it's been a great system - if you're with a state party, I highly recommend it.
A big part of my job as ED of the MassGOP is to focus on trainings and education. I want our limited activists to spend their limited time as wisely as possible. We have had good success with our private training blog, MassRootsAction, and have put all of our training materials online so that our troops can get trained on their time - on Saturday morning in their pajamas with their coffee.
Below is a clip that I use in my keynote trainings out in the field and in our training center. Based on some disturbing reports of a few Republican Town Committee members telling one of our campaigns that "the campaign with the most yard signs, will win" I figured that I had to fight back the yard sign warriors. My answer was this video.
Before Rob Willington became executive director of the state Republican Party, activists and candidates who wanted to learn fund-raising, voter identification, and other tactics had to wait for a semiannual training session.
Now they can use the Internet to watch training videos, connect with Republicans across the state, and even access the "Voter Vault," a database of names, numbers, and addresses to use for mailing lists, phone calls, and door-to-door canvassing.
That's one of several changes made recently by Willington, a 29-year-old Reading resident who hopes technology can help rebuild the state Republican Party.
Willington, who began volunteering for Republicans in high school and became the state party's political director last year, has created a blog, worked the social-networking site Facebook to connect with young Republicans, and used his Mac laptop to create press releases for radio stations with ready-to-use audio clips, in addition to creating the online training site.
Read the full story and then share it with your state's Republican Party. Tell them to hire someone like Rob Willington ASAP. IMHO - he is the model of an effective, modern party official.
Keep up the good work Rob. It is a fight worth fighting.
