As we near the conclusion of our somewhat extended soft launch period we wanted to reach out to everyone that has registered at the site or signed up as a volunteer. If that seems like spam please do go ahead and take yourself off the list by hitting unsubscribe. VoteGlobal is a not for profit and apolitical site that’s all about democracy and choice so we certainly don’t want to be in anyone’s face
Where we are up to
VoteGlobal has been in soft launch while we test the system and get the bugs out. While there are many features we now know we would like to add we at least do know that the basic site functionality works and our polling engine is quite rugged thanks to great work by Chris Jones and we know that people can find their way around and react to the navigation well thanks to all the efforts of Andy Davies who has been the driving force behind turning the vision into reality. We have only had one outage of our service at Amazon though that was problematic in that it was hard to get help from them in finding out what was wrong.
To date we have promoted the site to friends and family only and we have experimented with various social media. We have done a little bit with Facebook and do update our page there with new polls and we did some successful experiments with minor advertising on Facebook too. Mostly however we got wrapped up in running a Twitter feed which was something we experimented with and found we got good traction in bringing people to vote. Currently we have about 3200 followers across our various Twitter accounts which is not earth shattering but a good start given the modest outreach. There are a few hundred members and we have processed about 14,000 votes.
What comes next?
We are now entering a period in which we want to expand our activity and support a tilt at some serious fund raising. The plan is to approach a number of Foundations that are active in the democracy and political space and seek funding to enable us to grow into a mainstream site and realize our vision. We aim to raise enough funding that we can afford to complete all the feature development of the existing site and develop an iphone and other mobile apps but in particular we want to be able to beef up our content. To this end we are keen to hire a paid full time Editor in Chief who can really build out the depth of the site. We have an excellent candidate in mind and there are some great people out there. Over time we see funding the editorial process as a key function so that ultimately whilst we always draw from a strong array of volunteers we also have core full time editors covering each major region and language and specialists in different media channels. We also need to fund some straightforward marketing and buy advertising to promote hot polls.
Over the next 90 days we would like to draw on the generosity of our members to devote time as volunteers so that we can ramp up the activity at VoteGlobal and better demonstrate to potential funders just what a properly funded VoteGlobal could achieve. We are also going to start a press outreach campaign. So to this end we are very keen to get more help with content creation (not just in English) and editing along with people to help manage and edit our twitter streams and develop out our other social media strategies.
PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN – even a few hours here and there will make a big difference. Please email me if you are prepared to volunteer at mjgale@voteglobal.com
Thank you
