Designed for Campaigns

No matter which side of the USA/Canada border you live on, it's impossible to ignore the political campaigns in full swing. Regardless of your leanings, no doubt the campaigns with polished social media strategies are enjoying advantages. Indeed, this is the first election cycle which 'Web 2.0" tactics are mandatory rather than merely optional or an after-thought.

Because Google (and the other search engines) efficiently index mostly all the pages within a site, visitors can obviously enter a site via hundreds of different on ramps. While this means the visitor may easily find the information they seek, the organization's time-sensitive objectives might not receive enough attention.

To rise above the noise, the savvy campaigner needs to transmit their message in a method in which people will receive and react to it with a clear and easy call to action.

New Drupal tool

A new module developed by Raincity Studios' Makara Wang will help the many politico sites using Drupal to harness their Google-juice and funnel their visitors to a desired actionable task.

The module is called "Roadblock" - a term which usually denotes a unwanted traffic snarl, but in this case, the roadblock is designed to focus the visitor's participation and funnel them towards a specific action.

Real-life application

The first use of the module is at political organization COPE's "Take Back the Power" site. Regardless of the site entry point, the visitor is presented with a pre-determined landing page. In this case, a page about their current campaign to prevent the sell-off of public hydro-electric resources to private interests.

Lori Winstanley, COPE's Director of Strategic Campaigns explains the reason for using Roadblock to energize their campaign,

“With a limited amount of time to influence policymakers’ decisions on this important topic, we needed to focus the attention of all the site’s visitors and encourage them to contact the Premier’s office. Of course, then they can explore other content on the site but the Roadblock module helps us get the most important message out to all visitors without a big hassle.”

More

Learn more about the Roadblock module

Meet Production Developer Makara Wang, the module's developer

See all of Raincity Studios' Drupal contribtutions