You see it with almost every digital campaign – an action directed to government in which you are asked to “email your MP”.

These are usually campaigns initiated by political lobby groups, where many people are asked to write to one or more pollies about an issue. The letters may range from those actually composed by the writer, through to form letters and signed postcards.

Form letters and postcards use pre-generated content that in many instances you can edit, but generally you don’t.

The reason for this is it’s much quicker and easier to enter your details, click send and then be done. You can feel like you’ve taken part and made a stand, but for less time and effort – it’s the lazy-man’s activism.

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Two not-for-profit campaigns have caught my attention this week and I wanted to take a minute to highlight what makes them so great.

WSPA’s “Dollars for Collars”

The idea
Donate to support action against dog cruelty in targeted countries.

The execution
Simple but stunning imagery with a clear call to action:
“Love dogs? Help save one. Buy a collar”.

Why it works
There are some great concepts at work to pull this together. For a start, the entry-level donation is brilliant. $10 per collar, buy as few or as many as you like. I am a strong advocate of not setting your entry level too high, as it can be off-putting. By allowing people to buy multiple collars, they can very simply tweak their donation and will probably be more likely to give $20 than $15 if you let them decide on their own.

Then there is the imagery…seriously. The eyes have it.

Instant gratification
When delivering a campaign to rally support or donations, you are selling a “feel-good” factor. There’s no tangible element that people are receiving for their time or money, so you want to find another way to give them instant satisfaction and pride for what they have done.

The WSPA campaign uses a visualisation of the collar to do this. When purchasing your collar, you can add your name, colour, suburb and photo to the collar at the bottom. This gives you an instant confirmation that you have made a contribution.

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Google is unquestionably the biggest player on the internet, yet the “search giant” has never quite cracked the lucrative social market. After the failure of Google Buzz, they are making another attempt with the launch of Google+.

At the moment, Google+ looks like a bleak version of Facebook, causing a lot of speculation and online chatter about whether or not Google can take on the social network.

For a moment though, I want to consider Google+ not as a potential Facebook killer, but rather a LinkedIn killer.

One of my initial thoughts before using Google+ was that if it integrated in nicely with the services I already use (Gmail, docs, calendar) then there’s a chance I would use it, but if I had to log into yet another social service, it probably wouldn’t happen.

That is one of the things that stops me from using LinkedIn very often. I have my profile, my resume, my professional contacts and occasionally chime into group discussion. However with a small network, I have little incentive to log in on there regularly and don’t have the need to share with that particular network often. It’s a great resource, but it is a little on the clunky side.

Google on the other hand, is something I can’t live without at work. Search aside, I run Gmail for my personal account and work is run off Google Apps. I share documents with Google Docs and all of my calendars and contacts are synced with Google. Using ‘Circles’ (the Google+ grouping of contacts), I can now also set up work contacts and split up my PR networks from my Digital networks – sharing different information with each.

Suddenly, Google+ is looking very appealing.

Do I want to replicate all of my Facebook info over there? Nope. Do I necessarily want to worry about splitting everything up and double posting while people migrate? Not at all. At this stage, I much prefer Facebook but could happily walk away from LinkedIn if I could have easy access to my professional networks along with my documents and appointments. LinkedIn has a great audience but has always failed to impress me as a platform. I’ll be watching with keen interest to see how this plays out!

One more note on how this competes with Facebook – I think web comic xkcd has summed it up nicely; “on one hand, you’ll never convince your parents to switch. On the other hands, you’ll never convince your parents to switch!”.

First published on The Drum: 24/05/2011

Tony Abbott’s attempts to turn the nation’s richest households into welfare victims has resulted in a self-inflicted political wedge that turns the Coalition’s creed of self-sufficiency onto its own support base.

It was the sideshow of budget week, reporters scouring the nation for hard-working Aussie families, victims of Labor’s decision to finally begin winding back the system of universal direct cash payments that became a feature of the Howard years.

Manufacturing outrage at the moves to cap payments to families on incomes of under $150,000 was always a big ask; after all a constituency of 15 per cent – concentrated at levels far above the threshold – is hardly a mass movement.

As results from this week’s Essential Report show, the measures had the majority support of not just Labor and Green voters, but also Coalition voters and families earning above the threshold.

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First published on The Drum: 17/05/2011

The compelling narrative emerging from the Canberra Press Gallery is that Labor is dead, Gillard is a dud leader and the whole show should put itself out of its misery and hand power to the Coalition.

It’s a message reinforced with the release of each major opinion poll; take this week ‘Budget falls flat’, ‘Gillard on the nose’, ‘More troubles with boatpeople’.

The problem is that polls and analysis are completely different beasts and if you judge the national debate purely on the numbers, there is a very different story – a government weighed down by a major reform, stabilising in key areas.

1. Preferred Party

The Coalition has an election-winning lead, but it is two years out from the election. The polling numbers have been stable since the announcement of the carbon tax – proof that Labor requires a long game if it is to win the next election.

This week’s Essential Report actually picks up a minor bounce to Labor, exaggerated by some rounding issues, but like the other polls, Labor is behind but not miles behind.

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First published on The Drum: 10/05/2011

Today’s budget will pit Treasurer Wayne Swan against an increasingly grumpy elephant in the corner, with growing concerns about cost of living pressures beginning to colour people’s broader outlook on politics.

Since the Global Financial Crisis, Essential has been picking up a growing determination by people to rein in their spending and increase savings; but at the same time grocery prices, housing prices, fuel prices and the cost of water and power have all been rising.

The result has been an almost emotional response for many voters – “we are trying to do the right thing with our household economy, but we are being frustrated by forces beyond our control”. The following responses complied as part of the Channel Ten Essential Lifestyle Index, illustrate the point.

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Household budget frustrates
Publish Date: 9th May 2011 7:26 PM
Duration: 5:47

The rising cost of everyday items infuriates Australians, a 6.30 survey finds.

Watch it here

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First published on The Drum: 03/05/2011

The vindication of Lindsay Tanner’s thesis that the Canberra Press Gallery has turned politics into a celebrity blood sport may be the fact that his key argument is being largely ignored.

Behind the war stories, Tanner’s thrust is that the trivialisation of politics is a natural function of a media industry fighting for its very survival under the pressure of technological change, increased competition and dwindling audiences.

With so much focus on our twin domains of media and politics we couldn’t resist using this week’s Essential Report to test some of these propositions.

First, we tested people’s level of interest in politics, finding that while older Australians are highly engaged, younger people increasingly are not.

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First published on The Drum: 25/04/2011

Pollsters are regularly accused of treating politics like a sporting contest, so given there is no fresh data over Easter it’s time to indulge our inner footy fantasy.

Easter is bit like quarter time in a big game, the key contests are developing, both sides are giving us glimpses of their respective strengths and weaknesses while individual performances are coming under the microscope.

And if you look at the Two-Party Preferred scoreboard Tony Rabbit’s Blues are well ahead of Real Julia’s Reds after a scrappy start to a quarter that was ultimately dominated by one critical play.

The Scoreboard (2PP)

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First published on The Drum: 19/04/2011

The most intractable global conflict in the past 100 years, the struggle of the Israeli and Palestinian people to co-exist, confounds rather than polarises the Australian public.

With a bitter public debate playing out between conservative commentators and sections of the Australian Greens, this week’s Essential Report finds that when given the options of black or white, the general public opt for grey.

As we did recently with attitudes to Muslims, we asked the questions to understand, rather than inflame the issue. What we found was an electorate that is not picking sides and is prepared to admit the issue is too complex for simple solutions.

Q. What, in your view, is the single biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East?

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