Your Vote is Your Voice from Melanie Goux on Vimeo.

Current DWC President, Lucy Hargrett Draper, is the primary benefactor of The Lucy Hargrett Draper Center & Archives for the Study of the Rights of Women in History & Law at UGA. Sixteen years ago, she gifted a 5,000 piece collection of rare books & materials to UGA, documenting the struggle for women’s rights in the US & UK. The collection will be available online for scholarly research in August 2012.

We began by exploring the idea of utilizing historic materials as the centerpiece of the rebrand, but ultimately opted for a lighter, fresher look. The organization is multi-generational, but is placing a renewed emphasis on attracting younger women through the use of social and online media. This cyber fueled activism is beginning to be referred to as the fourth wave of feminism.

The project brief was was wide open, with the only stipulation being that the traditional colors of women’s rights (violet and green), be incorporated. Together with Democratic blues, we chose a bright multicolor palette of three hues and six values. The circular theme was a natural choice both for the tie-in with the Democratic brand and as the traditional symbol of women.

Sample masthead images for website:

Alternate Brand Samples:

Similar to open source products are off-the-shelf services such as MailChimp or Piryx. For a reasonable fee, powerful applications can serve your campaign. Expensive, proprietary packages and predatory vendors are a thing of the past. With open source social media and web tools, you control your message 24/7, not a webmaster or a 9 to 5 vendor.

In the 24 hour political environment, your campaign communication needs to turn on a dime. The best approach is to make use of free or cost effective, user-friendly, open source tools that allow control from any computer with a web browser.

All open source software is not created equal. That’s why we recommend only the most established and secure publishing platforms and third party vendors. For websites, our current favorite is the WordPress platform. For email, Atlanta based MailChimp.com offers a user-friendly and powerful application. For online donation processing, Pirxy is robust and flexible. And of course no campaign would be complete without facebook and twitter.

More recently, you may have heard the term open source used in a different context. It has come to mean any workflow that makes use of provided tools. For example, Obama campaign staffers consider the President’s campaign to be “open source”. In other words, they provide the tools which make it possible for campaign supporters and volunteers get to work.

For more information about the open source applications we recommend, see our Services page.

1) Do not send gigantic jpeg, gif, png or pdf files enclosed within emails.  If you must send an image file, 700 pixels wide is plenty big enough. For reference, the image at left is 150 pixels wide. If you have no idea what any of this means, it’s probably best to avoid this method completely.

2) Avoid the above mentioned method completely. For most users, “rasterized” or image files are very inflexible. They’re difficult to read on smart phones, difficult to share on blogs, twitter or facebook, and on iPhones specifically, there’s no way to grab the address to get a map or add the info to your calendar. For senders, there’s no way to link to maps, online contribution forms, facebook invites or anything else, unless you’re using a mass email app like MailChimp or Constant Contact. If you think people will actually print these things and pass them around, the last time I saw someone do that was in 1996. Instead, consider using a masthead image only and putting the event info in the body of the email. It may not look exactly the same on every device, but will be more accessible, and more likely to be shared.

3) Use an online invite service, of which there are at least 10 good ones, most free. I like: eventbrite, e-vite, pingg, punchbowl and just noticed ConstantContact has an invite option. Using an online service (with the exception of facebook), can offer important metrics for hosts. You can see exactly who opened the invite, who forwarded it, who you need to re-send to, and so on. Offering an online RSVP (instead of a phone number or email address) will encourage guests to commit, or at least gives them the option to commit. Many people will not RSVP, but those who do are more likely to show up. Finally, most of these services have nice looking templates to choose from. Your invite emails and RSVP page will have a consistent look and feel. Love it.

4) Include a link to make an online contribution. There’s just no excuse not to. All candidates should have some means of taking online contributions these days, unless you are an elected State Representative and the Legislature is in session. Some of the options are: ActBlue, Rally.org, Salsa, or even the old standby PayPal.  Most of those invited will not be able to attend an event, but might give online. For the love of God, do not make me dig my checkbook out of the drawer and have to scare up a stamp. What is postage now anyway? I think it went up again.

5) When sending to YOUR mailing list, send the email in your name (from your campaign email address) or risk ending up in the spam folder. Even if your spam filter isn’t set on stun, most people will open an email from a candidate or elected official they know over one from a stranger. There’s nothing worse than receiving an invite from someone you don’t know, who doesn’t seem to know you, or your relationship to the candidate. The more personal you can make an invitation, the better.

6) Don’t be afraid to have a invitation format already in place for your hosts to follow. Understand that everything that goes out with your name on it reflects positively or negatively on you. Most hosts will welcome the advice and whatever help you can offer to get them set up. It’s not necessary for hosts to turn over their entire email list to you. Simply send the invite as you would like it to appear to your host(s), and they can forward to their lists.