{"id":1578,"date":"2007-11-21T23:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-22T04:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1578"},"modified":"2007-11-21T23:14:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-22T04:14:00","slug":"the-data-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=1578","title":{"rendered":"The Data Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those who missed it last night, The National\u2019s report <\/a>on how political parties use personal data should be mandatory watching for anyone in the Liberal Party\u2019s head office. Despite some talk of renewal during the leadership race last year, it\u2019s abundantly clear that the party is still eons behind the Tories structurally and it puts us at a huge disadvantage going into the next election. So far this year, the CPC have raised <\/a>over 12 million dollars, versus 2.6 million for the Liberals\u2026and the NDP. When you can\u2019t even beat the NDP, something is terribly wrong.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just fundraising \u2013 the CPC are going to start the next campaign with more identified voters and sign locations than us, and they\u2019re going to start the next campaign with their massive fear factory. And, between now and then, they\u2019ll keep softening the Liberal support up with their hokey, but effective, attack ads. Let\u2019s face it \u2013 despite some communication weaknesses, Dion hasn\u2019t actually had an awful first year as leader but the perception that he\u2019s a weak leader has set in, mainly due to the Tory ads.<\/p>\n

So what needs to be done? Well, rather than cry about the massive Conservative database of voters as being an infringement of privacy, get your own. The CBC piece <\/a>featured the Liberal Manage Elect program but the problem with that system is that the data gets flushed after every campaign (at least in Alberta it does\u2026it is possible that the party is more organized in Quebec<\/strike> Ontario). To the best of my knowledge, there\u2019s no central database with donations history, voting patterns, volunteer records, and demographic data that could help the party tailor messaging directly to voters.<\/p>\n

On the fundraising side, the LPC needs to take a close look at what those people named Barrack, Hillary, and Howard have done in the states and they should just bite the bullet and hire someone who knows what they\u2019re doing to take over fundraising for the party. Get volunteers or hire people to phone every party member asking for a donation. Go through the list of party and leadership donors from last year and make sure they donate again this year, and next year, and the one after that (hell, if you keep good enough records, you\u2019ll be able to hit up the Volpe kids legally in a few years). The LPC needs to get Liberals into the habit of donating to the party \u2013 and it needs to bluntly tell people that Stephen Harper is going to be Prime Minister for a long time unless average Liberals cut the yearly cheques to the party. Even the ALP have a fairly large direct deposit list for donations to the party but I\u2019ve never seen anything like that for the federal party (again, Ontario may have it, but it just shows how the party needs to centralize more since there\u2019s a ton of money to be milked from Alberta, if not votes).<\/p>\n

Another good idea I heard from someone a lot smarter than I am is to structure field worker pay on an incentive system. If you\u2019re going to hire party staff, why not make a couple hundred fundraising phone calls part of their job description, with a large chunk of their salary being determined on how much they can raise? Ideally, you\u2019d also include incentives for membership renewals and other firm benchmarks that help grow the party.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is there\u2019s a lot of work to be done. There needs to be a comprehensive plan in place to build a database of comparable size and detail as the Tories\u2019 and to get the LPC to the point where they\u2019re raising at least half as much money as the Conservatives every year. At this point, the party\u2019s financial and structural health is a lot more important than some of the policy and strategy debates no doubt going on inside of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those who missed it last night, The National\u2019s report on how political parties use personal data should be mandatory watching for anyone in the Liberal Party\u2019s head office. Despite some talk of renewal during the leadership race last year, it\u2019s abundantly clear that the party is still eons behind the Tories structurally and it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}