TeaParty11.com - Dec 16th Money Bomb - Ron Paul Tea Party

I agree, but as we saw with Black This Out, providing an incentive and a way to guage promotion progress (Leader Board & Personal Pledge Count) motivates people even more to promote.

Absolutely. Just saying though, people like to believe that a month is a lot of time, when it really isn't.
 
Just noticed the website was updated. I believe though that the pledge field and text should be moved above the video so that it's the first thing you see when you visit the website.

Agreed.

This kinda fails at brand recognition. The fact that this isn't immediately known as being a Ron Paul website is bad marketing.

I believe three things need to be at the top. One should be the Ron Paul logo as if it is burned into the paper with words "Moneybomb" and "December 16th, 2011" just underneath that. Second, the pledge field and text. The third is the Facebook, Twitter, etc field. The reason I say this is that two things should be apparent on this website: 1. This this is a Ron Paul moneybomb website. 2. What exactly you want and what they should do.

More overall criticism. You really limited yourselves on space by trying to get everything to fit on a scroll of paper, so things need prioritized that aren't. I don't really like the Boston Tea Party artwork. It is taking up too much of the limited space. I would rather see more iconography: The Gadsden flag for example is good for obvious Tea Party brand recognition.

I actually liked the quill from the last one. I would like to see it come back, but on the far right, not covering the date, half on the page, half off the page.

On the field where the Twitter, Facebook, etc is, should be bold words: "Spread the Word"

"The Revolution Continues!" should be underneath the pledge and "Spread the Word", but before the video.
 
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I'm in the middle of building the promotion thread. For BTO and 11/11/11 I included a large list of Facebook pages to promote on. Should I go through Facebook and find a bunch of Tea Party pages and create a separate list to promote? After all, if this is about bringing the Tea Party back in line with Ron Paul, we'll want to be reaching out to these groups as well with our promotion.
 
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I'm in the middle of building the promotion thread. For BTO and 11/11/11 I included a large list of Facebook pages to promote on. Should I go through Facebook and find a bunch of Tea Party pages and add create a separate list to promote? After all, if this is about bringing the Tea Party back in line with Ron Paul, we'll want to be reaching out to these groups as well with our promotion.
Thanks for what you are doing. Putting some of the main Tea Party pages in there I think would be good.
 
Uh there is a problem with the event.

The date is Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:00am until Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 11:30pm

Shouldn't that be December 16 12:00 am until December 16 11:59 pm?
 
Uh there is a problem with the event.

The date is Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:00am until Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 11:30pm

Shouldn't that be December 16 12:00 am until December 16 11:59 pm?

Well the time was set like that because it allowed us to continue to send out messages to attendees even after the event was over. I'm one of the admins for the event and it seems that we've already lost our messaging capability since we've passed 5,000 invites. It might be best to just fix the timing back to Dec 16th so it doesn't confuse anyone. I'll let Nathaniel or Dusman change it back though since they created it.
 
Well the time was set like that because it allowed us to continue to send out messages to attendees even after the event was over. I'm one of the admins for the event and it seems that we've already lost our messaging capability since we've passed 5,000 invites. It might be best to just fix the timing back to Dec 16th so it doesn't confuse anyone. I'll let Nathaniel or Dusman change it back though since they created it.

For some reason, the event time is no longer editable, can you take a look Sentinel?
 
Hi guys. Looks like there is some hot discussion! That is good!

I wanted to explain the reasoning behind the design/brand implementation.

It's a bit of a play on the psyche for your general Tea Party member. I approached this design from the mindset of NOT being a Ron Paul supporter and so not having Ron Paul's name or pledge feature appear above the fold is purely intentional. First impressions are everything. We want the general Tea Party person to hit the web site and be attracted to the theme and get the immediate impression "this is a really nice looking Tea Party web site and I want to see more!"

90% of users are going to scroll down past the top-third, and when they do, their first real call to action is going to be to watch the video. However, once it comes into view they are going to also be exposed to Ron Paul's name and pledging. This is the first "risk" factor for those who haven't considered Ron Paul at all. In fact, some will immediately leave once they see that. However, the call-to-action to watch the video is intended to counter that risk. There will be some who haven't considered Paul and watching that video should spark their interest. That is the objective of the above-the-fold strategy here. After that, everything is heavily geared toward both Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party people on the fence.

If you are approaching your observation as a Ron Paul supporter and not considering the above, I don't expect there to be a great satisfaction in this approach. However, the priority here is reclaiming Tea Party support, so that is what this design intends to engage most importantly. As Ron Paul supporters, we are more forgiving once we know that it is a Ron Paul web site, but that doesn't work the other way around, unfortunately.

I hope that clarifies the design approach. You will notice that there is a deviation from the BTO strategy, so I wanted to make sure everyone understands why.
 
Hi guys. Looks like there is some hot discussion! That is good!

I wanted to explain the reasoning behind the design/brand implementation.

It's a bit of a play on the psyche for your general Tea Party member. I approached this design from the mindset of NOT being a Ron Paul supporter and so not having Ron Paul's name or pledge feature appear above the fold is purely intentional. First impressions are everything. We want the general Tea Party person to hit the web site and be attracted to the theme and get the immediate impression "this is a really nice looking Tea Party web site and I want to see more!"

90% of users are going to scroll down past the top-third, and when they do, their first real call to action is going to be to watch the video. However, once it comes into view they are going to also be exposed to Ron Paul's name and pledging. This is the first "risk" factor for those who haven't considered Ron Paul at all. In fact, some will immediately leave once they see that. However, the call-to-action to watch the video is intended to counter that risk. There will be some who haven't considered Paul and watching that video should spark their interest. That is the objective of the above-the-fold strategy here. After that, everything is heavily geared toward both Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party people on the fence.

If you are approaching your observation as a Ron Paul supporter and not considering the above, I don't expect there to be a great satisfaction in this approach. However, the priority here is reclaiming Tea Party support, so that is what this design intends to engage most importantly. As Ron Paul supporters, we are more forgiving once we know that it is a Ron Paul web site, but that doesn't work the other way around, unfortunately.

I hope that clarifies the design approach. You will notice that there is a deviation from the BTO strategy, so I wanted to make sure everyone understands why.

On first post. For latest updates, see first post.

I tried earlier as well, but it's impossible to change the date for an event when there's more than 5000 invites :-)

http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=220263138001966

Oops!
 
Interior pages, widgets/banners, and some other neat features will be ready to go this weekend.

The pledge competition still needs some work on preventive measures against cheating. We also need to approach it slightly different if it's going to span over 3 weeks. The previous competition from BTO, we still need to announce the winners (it's been a headache going through all the pledges and disqualifying the cheaters). Also, the goal needs to shift from a "top 3 wins prizes" to a "reach x amount of pledges and win this prize" and multiple levels of that.

So for example:

Contenders who reach 50 pledges will win a t-shirt
Contenders who reach 100 pledges will win a 1/10oz. coin
Contenders who reach 250 pledges will win a 1oz. coin

The top 3 will win x prizes.

This will prevent people from not getting involved once we have people break out in huge leads, which dissolves the incentive to get involved in the competition if it is perceived impossible for them to win top 3.

We need to consider doing a chip-in to cover the potential costs of all of these prizes. If there are 500 people that reach 50/100/250 pledges.. we need to consider that possibility.
 
Ok Dusman, I understand your approach with this and I agree with it. Watching the video first will hopefully motivate Tea Party people to pledge or at least get them to do some more research without discounting Ron Paul immediately like they would if they saw his name as soon as they visited the website.

Also, I love the idea about providing prizes to everyone that reaches a certain level of promotion, though I think your current goals are too low. Everyone will hit them. I think the first goal should be at least 100 pledges.
 
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Hi guys. Looks like there is some hot discussion! That is good!

I wanted to explain the reasoning behind the design/brand implementation.

It's a bit of a play on the psyche for your general Tea Party member. I approached this design from the mindset of NOT being a Ron Paul supporter and so not having Ron Paul's name or pledge feature appear above the fold is purely intentional. First impressions are everything. We want the general Tea Party person to hit the web site and be attracted to the theme and get the immediate impression "this is a really nice looking Tea Party web site and I want to see more!"

90% of users are going to scroll down past the top-third, and when they do, their first real call to action is going to be to watch the video. However, once it comes into view they are going to also be exposed to Ron Paul's name and pledging. This is the first "risk" factor for those who haven't considered Ron Paul at all. In fact, some will immediately leave once they see that. However, the call-to-action to watch the video is intended to counter that risk. There will be some who haven't considered Paul and watching that video should spark their interest. That is the objective of the above-the-fold strategy here. After that, everything is heavily geared toward both Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party people on the fence.

If you are approaching your observation as a Ron Paul supporter and not considering the above, I don't expect there to be a great satisfaction in this approach. However, the priority here is reclaiming Tea Party support, so that is what this design intends to engage most importantly. As Ron Paul supporters, we are more forgiving once we know that it is a Ron Paul web site, but that doesn't work the other way around, unfortunately.

I hope that clarifies the design approach. You will notice that there is a deviation from the BTO strategy, so I wanted to make sure everyone understands why.

I am going to have to vehemently disagree. This would be fine if our primary goal was simply to recruit new Ron Paul supporters, but for what this is trying to accomplish first and foremost, it's just a very bad idea. The marketing strategy used is determined by what you are trying to market. Marketing Ron Paul to non-suppoters is completely different than marketing a moneybomb to Ron Paul supporters and if you try to do both, you are going to fail at both. If you try to do the former, you will fail at the latter.
 
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Ok Dusman, I understand your approach with this and I agree with it. Watching the video first will hopefully motivate Tea Party people to pledge or at least get them to do some more research without discounting Ron Paul immediately like they would if they saw his name as soon as they visited the website.

Also, I love the idea about providing prizes to everyone that reaches a certain level of promotion, though I think your current goals are too low. Everyone will hit them. I think the first goal should be at least 100 pledges. Also, I didn't realize there was cheating last go around. How exactly were people cheating?

There were some who were creating fake e-mail accounts and pledging from them. They are easy to identify when you cross reference the data. It's just cross-referencing is very time consuming and a headache to ensure the integrity of the pledges.
 
I am going to have to vehemently disagree. This would be fine if our primary goal was simply to recruit new Ron Paul supporters, but for what this is trying to accomplish first and foremost, it's just a very bad idea. The marketing strategy used is determined by what you are trying to market. Marketing Ron Paul to non-suppoters is completely different than marketing a moneybomb to Ron Paul supporters and if you try to do both, you are going to fail at both. If you try to do the former, you will fail at the latter.

Are you speaking of the problem we had with 11/11/11? We made the mistake of setting our theme around converting new members instead of firing up existing supporters and because of it, the money bomb fell flat. Are you saying here that our 1st priority should be focusing on gathering the pledges of existing supporters instead of convincing non-supporters to pledge? If this is what you mean then maybe you're right.

We have to ask ourselves what we're trying to do here. We're trying to raise money for Ron Paul. We can do this best through firing up "existing" supporters. This money bomb promotion itself won't nearly be enough to change the perception about the Tea Party. To do that, you would need the media to latch onto the result of Dec 16th and report it as the Tea Party raising money for Ron Paul. I don't think that's going to happen, especially after they've done so much to co-opt the movement.

All the promotion that results from this money bomb won't put a dent in the programming that the MSM has inflicted on people's perceptions of the Tea Party. I think our best bet would be to switch our focus back to obtaining pledges from existing supporters, and that would require moving the video lower and the pledge form higher. I reverse my position on this unless Dusman can come up with a better argument to counter it. Using the Tea Party theme should still bring in some new donors, but as I said, we'll bring in the most money by putting the attention on existing supporters.
 
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