Tell HN: Seeking Cofounder for Twilio-based Startup
impactdialing.com
impactdialing.com
I think political campaigning is ripe for cool startups. I have an idea that I've dubbed "Pressure", which would be sort of a hierarchical, goal-setting and -rewarding online campaign management tool.
Basic premise: any sort of campaign, to be successful, must bring pressure on a variety of fronts - in traditional media by way of letters to the editor, calls to talk shows, etc.; online through blog posts, social media engagement, and email; by applying pressure to elected officials with phone calls, emails, and snail mail letters, and so on.
So, you would start a campaign by setting a variety of goals for these ways of applying pressure: number of letters to political representatives, size of social media presence, etc. Then you delegate these goals to top lieutenants, so that one person becomes solely responsible for social media presence - the social media division if you will. They can further delegate others, e.g. setting some other person as responsible for number of Twitter followers in the social media division.
To make things interesting, the site could either automatically, or via control by "upper management", promote people to higher levels if they have demonstrated exceptional ability in the goals they were originally assigned. Goal progress would be visible, creating a competitive, game-like aspect to the application.
Anyway, perhaps not the best idea. But the point is, I think that the field of political campaign management software could really use a shakeup.
Good luck!
I agree. Except I think that you could do this just as effectively all the way down to the city councilor level, and you could also use it for any virtually any campaign - including ones for social justice, for changing governmental policy, etc. That's a lot of campaigns. Tie it in with innovative technology for integrating with social media, Twilio-powered telephony, etc., and you could have a winning application.
We're all about empowering grassroots movements and helping grassroots movements be more effective via exactly the methods you mention - competition and fun for the supporters. The "pressure" concept you mention is exactly like our "Personal Impact" analytics we keep that tracks (in a hierarchical fashion, even!) your actions and the actions of those that have recruited to help the movement, and that score is available for all to see similar to an XBox gamer score.
We also have a huge library of actions like the ones you mentioned - social media actions like updating your status or outreach actions like phonebanking and walking that all tie back in to our Platform.
And finally we have the organization piece you hit on - traditionally political campaigns and non-profits organize around geographic lines and then find the most active volunteers in those regions and that's exactly what we help our users do.
I'd love to talk to you more about your ideas for "Pressure" since it seems like you've mulled it over quite a bit - and of course we're always looking to add smart, motivated people to our team :)