Best email I've seen in a while

Very simply formatted, but a brilliantly told story from the Obama campaign.

Joe Biden email on healthcare

It's time for a no-fly zone

In 1984 a young aeronautical engineer called Al-Sadek Hamed Al-Shuwehdy,an opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, was hanged in a basketball stadium in Benghazi. As he hung from the rope dying, he was grabbed round his legs and dragged down until he stopped moving by a brutal young woman called Huda Ben Amer. Ben Amer was appointed Mayor of Benghazi, and went on to terrorise the people Benghazi for the decades since. She escaped the Benghazi uprising, and is waiting to return if the Libyan army retake control in the next few days.

Al-Sadek’s story matters, not just because of the horror of his death.

In the next few days Britain will have to decide whether to lead efforts to create a no-fly zone in Libya. No liberal can deny that the rebels are preferable to Gaddafi’s tyranny. But a few people are still questioning whether we have a right in international law to intervene if the UN Security Council refuses to authorise a no-fly zone.

In fact international law, as used in Kosovo, allows unilateral intervention if it is going to prevent an imminent humanitarian catastrophe. In Libya this week we can reasonably judge that there is an imminent humanitarian catastrophe. Thousands of people have already died - and with Gaddafi’s murderers like Huda Ben Amer waiting, we can be sure that thousands more will die if they win.

We need a no-fly zone as soon as possible - and as liberals we should be proud to support one.

Fundraising metrics

I've just done a fundraising campaign for my run up Tower 42 next week, and I've used it to do some basic analytics of how reach turns into donations.

My rough estimates, gleaned from bit.ly links and Mailchimp, are that the click rates for this campaign are:

· Mailchimp emails – 7%

· Ordinary emails – 4.9%

· Facebook – 0.3%

· Twitter – 0.25%

Mailchimp is unsurprisingly high – people have opted in to these emails, know me and the emails are well formatted and likely to actually get delivered into people’s inboxes because of Mailchimp’s reputation. Plus I actually tested them.

Ordinary emails I assume to be a bit lower mainly because there are some people in there who won’t have heard from me for a while, and who may have abandoned their email addresses or only check their secondary email occasionally.

The timing of the clicks on Bit.ly indicates that some people who received both a Mailchimp email and a Bit.ly email were prompted into action by the ordinary email, which came a few days later.

Facebook feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, but the figures may be slightly underestimated since I’ve put in a few non-tracked links to the site.

Twitter also looks like a low engagement channel from my colleague Josh’s metrics on the same campaign too. My instinct is that it’s quite hard to get much emotional engagement from a Tweet.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 5a - Local campaigns

Once you know what to say, what are easy ways to tell your audiences if you are running a local campaign?

1. Email newsletters

Local newspapers are slowly dying, and their quality has been falling for years, while council freesheets tend to be full of uniformly positive propaganda.

This leaves a large gap in the market for local news - both political and non-political. Here's an example of a basic newsletter for residents of the Crofton Park area of Lewisham.

A newsletter once or twice a month will strike the right balance of being fresh, but not too often.

2. Breaking news

Local news is rarely local enough for most people. So if you email people with breaking news, then they are usually very grateful.

Here's a good example that Tom Brake, MP for Carshalton & Wallington, did during the early 2010 snows.

3. Post it to your website

Email newsletters usually translate to good news items on websites, where they will continue to get a trickle of traffic for years afterwards.

4. Tweet the headlines

Tweet the headlines in your email out to your followers over a few days, linking to the email text on your website.

5. Publicise through your Facebook page

As with the Tweets simply split out each story from the email into a series of stories that you release over a few days (or weeks).

Hootsuite is a useful tool that allows you to schedule Tweets and Facebook updates simultaneously, so you can set up several weeks of tweeting and Facebook in one go.

6. Email supporters of a specific campaign

Quite a lot of people will only want updates on specific local campaigns you are running, but will happily receive an email newsletter than contains these updates. This can be a good way to encourage them to convert from being a supporter on a specific local issue to receiving your general email newsletters.

7. Publicise your news in offline materials

Reference and cross-promote your email newsletter in your leaflets, local visits and meetings. At worst you'll get credit for being hardworking, at best you'll get extra subscribers.

Tom Brake Snow email

Blue Rubicon's digital inspiration for January

And here it is - feel free to drop us a line if you want to find out more about any of it.

Slides - Jan 2011

Inside stats on a Sarah Palin viral sensation

My colleague on Blue Rubicon's digital team Karin Robinson also writes the excellent Obama London blog.

On Sunday night she found herself at the centre of a viral sensation when she spotted that Sarah Palin's Facebook page moderators were deleting anti-Palin comments, but not a comment that implied that it had been right to kill a 9 year old girl.

The post rapidly circulated on Twitter - from where the Huffington Post picked it up. It rapidly became the most re-tweeted item globally, generating over 400,000 views of her post in the following two days, and over 9,000 comments on Facebook, as well as extensive pick up in traditional media.

Karin's given a brief explanation of what happened on the Blue Rubicon website. But she's also kindly given me the Google Analytics for her blog in the last few days, which I've put below.

This is a good example of the value of building websites on platforms such as Blogger. Most hosting services would not be able to cope with such a huge surge of traffic, while, as far as I'm aware, Blogger didn't wobble once.

Karin Robinson Blue Rubicon Digital viral success

What would World War I blogs have read like?

My great-uncle has recently written up his father's letters, written while fighting in World War I in Iraq.

The interesting thing for me is quite how factual, dry and stiff-upper lip they are. After describing his injury and subsequent carriage to a hospital, he signs off, as if nothing terribly serious has happened.

My great uncle has added a note below the letter, describing what really happened:

My father doesn't mention the blood loss, pain, being left for dead among the dead, building a coffin of mud around him for protection and the rain filling this coffin with bloody water, twice falling off the stretcher, or the unsprung cart that transported his wounded body to the river Tigris.

I wonder how it would have been written if it was in 2011?