In the run up to next month's General Election our client ONE launched their ONE VOTE 2010 campaign. ONE is a campaign and advocacy organisation with more than 2 million members committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.
Back in 2008, ONE ran an unprecedented campaign in the US, which both President Obama and Senator McCain supported, along with much of the Senate and Congress. ONE Vote 08 helped make a real difference in US development policy and digital played a significant role in that success. For this year's UK election, ONE contacted us at Enable about repeating that success over here and galvanising public support to push global development issues on the political agenda. As their manifesto states:
"Regardless of who wins this spring’s election, we want to be sure the British government continues the UK’s tradition of global leadership on international development."
With that in mind we worked together to create a campaign site that would achieve two key objectives:
1) To create a space where the political parties could go 'On the Record' with their plans for tackling extreme poverty and
2) To build a tool that meant that users could highlight the single global issue that was most important to them, i.e. debt cancellation or preventable diseases.
For the latter we built 'The Big Issue' (not to be confused with the flagship homelessness magazine) which allows users to select the issue most pertinent to them, then see their choice highlighted in a user-generated tag cloud and highlighted in a real-time news ticker which runs across the whole site. Once they've submitted their choice they are encouraged to join the ONE community on Facebook where they can engage in other global campaign actions.
David Cole, Online Manager at ONE, says ‘Great progress has already been made in the fight against extreme poverty, but enormous challenges still remain. ONE Vote 2010 is about ensuring that our votes have as much impact as possible. And then to make that impact really count. Online and social media will play a key role in getting this message out, and showing that the election really does matter for the millions of people around the world who are living in extreme poverty.’
This campaign project cuts across multiple audiences, being aimed both at policy makers and key government influencers, as well as at a much broader audience of activists and the general electorate. The challenge was to balance tone and function to meet these disparate requirements, so as not to exclude any one group from engagement with the campaign messaging.
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