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Articles

7 steps to great communications

Today we got called out for sensationalist opinion pieces, which is partially true, we’re excitable creatures here at ViveEcosse. Where we aim to platform as many diverse voices across the independence movement as we can. 

However, it’s a good point, we’ve been a little mental recently due to the carnage in the news. So tonight, it’s a little bit softer, we’re going to do a piece on something we’ve discussed endlessly – how to make good campaigning messages. It’s not thrilling but we’re going to make the guide. 

First up, you need to have a rather good policy or campaign in mind, running absolute drivel, or copying a national campaign and adding your local area name doesn’t generally work. This needs to be an important topic for your locale. 

Secondly, write it up in full, have a full explanation and briefing document for the whole plan, exhaustively written out to its full extent. Share this with your campaign team and ask them specifically, poke holes, find questions, play dumb and work out the oddities. 

Thirdly, take your massive campaign document and summarise it, as 100 words, then as 50 words, then as one sentence, and finally as a three/four word ‘sting’. This is where we take a policy and make it a soundbite. The closer to natural language or common phrases it is, the better it will do. 

Fourthly, it’s time to format that large document, give it a nice set of headings, give it a front cover, including an upfront summary, and your three short versions of it, on the first page. 

Fifthly, create a video – around 2 minutes, explaining what this campaign is, what it aims to do, and what the ‘call to action’ is – such as what you want the viewer to do. 

Sixthly, you need to make some square images for social media, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You use these as your promotional tools. 

Lastly, you need to find some ‘first followers’, these people will like/share/support your work. They will comment and break the initial ice that stops others from interacting with it. 

You may notice something, at ViveEcosse we try to follow this format with almost every post! 

First, we write our draft, then we cross-check each other’s work, we then format it properly, we take that article and add a short title, plus add some tags as our short sting on topic, we jazz it up for social media with a link and an image for every article in our house style (you’ll have seen our images on social media – vibrant purple). We then talk about the articles we cover on our podcast to ensure we have a full circle of content. We post the images to social media with links back, before posting to our Signal group of supporters to ask them to assist with the sharing (there’s a link at the bottom of the page to join). 

While we do this for our blog, we wanted to share the 7 key steps to making a successful campaign or shareable item. This piece needs your critical opinions as it will feature in a nicer format in our upcoming book and magazine. 

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Articles Vive Updates

November was impressive

Taking a brief moment to pause and look back at November’s figures for the site, where we finally got round to giving it the full attention it rightly deserves, and the output it generates.

The purpose of ViveEcosse is to give a blogging platform relating to Scottish Independence to those who don’t really blog but have a voice or a topic they want to talk about. We hope first time contributors will jump back in and regularly contribute but sometimes it is a ‘message in a bottle’. Thank you to this months contributors.

While I’m in Paris on holiday, in a city and culture of holding government to account, with strong preservation of political and speech freedoms – it seems apt to share how successful November has been.

On the ‘Voices for Independence’ most popular list, we managed to crack into the top 10, placing 8th on the list for the last four weeks:

https://www.voices.scot/

We also are sharing our internal stats, which have slightly different ways of recording, so we’re going to go with our server level ones. One set for our secure site (the vast majority come in this way) and our non secure site (older devices, some vpns) – we attempt to push all to the secure.

Secure Site
Non secure site

WordPress throws them all together for us.

WP Statistics

Thanks for joining us folks! More great content in December.

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Podcasts

Podcast: Hello and Welcome

https://youtu.be/eu4r1ZNgsKw

Podcast available on Amazon Music, Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Anchor

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Articles Podcasts

We do podcasting now

Upon reviewing the success of our first year as a blog for people who don’t blog, it was time to see what else we could stretch to! So the team at ViveEcosse decided to join the podcast movement.

We set out to have great audio and avoid that tinny sound you get when someone uses tools that aren’t best suited to podcasting, as an added bonus we have video with it.

Each podcast is available for free on Amazon Music, Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, YouTube and via the anchor.fm site which is where it’s hosted.

You can find all the links:

Amazon: https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/e6dcadcc-8a60-4427-9e5b-2cc8fed4333d/vive-ecosse-podcast
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vive-ecosse-podcast/id1656622425
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2FPTnugaZjt6AiKDXLO3XB
Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9kMGVjOGY0NC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw
YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UC_LUfIM3wjiEBlIjKiIFBJQ
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/vive-ecosse

Give us as much feedback as you can, it’s a first attempt, we’d love to know how it went!

Categories
Vive Updates

A wild Thistle appears

In an increasingly digital world, where are the affordable tools to help build strong political parties? If democracy depends on choice and representation – why are there almost no tools on the shelf to help establish parties?

Each party requires a plethora of tools to try and build its campaign engine – many cost eye watering amounts individually but are required to build party machines that win.

If you’re a new party – there genuinely isn’t much available. If you have low income or subscription value – there potentially is nothing.

ViveEcosse is about trying to kick forward progress in Scottish Politics. We’ve already created the open-source-esque Indy X, and we’re supporting many other groups bring their own events to life.

Our second project? Owing to the technical backgrounds of two ViveEcosse founders, is to create Thistle.

Thistle is a Scottish Political Party management and campaign engine.

The Vive Ecosse Team is developing Thistle due to the lack of serious alternatives able to fit the requirement of a modern Scottish Political Party. 

That all sounds kind of technical, so here’s a brief idea of what it does.

  • Party Management: Membership (multiple levels), Supporters (multiple levels), Gamification, Email, Support Desk
  • Party Policy: Policy submission, Policy curation, Policy development , Policy Index
  • Party Discipline: Reporting, Cautions, Warnings, Suspension, Exclusion, Expulsion, Appeals, Member handbook
  • Party Internal Elections: Term Management, Candidate biography, Vote Capture, Results & Reporting
  • VoterID: Support + Opposition Tracking, Questions, Canvassing, Data Capture, Data reporting, Self Identification, Targeting
  • Get Out The Vote: Reporting, Feedback 
  • Electoral Tracking: Poll Tracking, Party Candidate Tracking, Opposition Candidate Tracking 
  • Campaign Team Management: Todo lists, Contact lists, Chat, Notes, HQ Updates, Teams
  • Press Release Management: PR drafting / proofing, PR Tracking, PR crisis management, Document repository
  • Fundraising: Crowdfunding, Donations, Funding drives, Ticketed events, Lottery, 50:50 clubs

We previously built the Party Policy and Campaign Team Management modules for another purpose, but due to never being used, we have them ready to go for our initial release.

Next week we hope to bring the development roadmap out and have some stuff to showcase. Thistle has its own page. If you’re interested in following along into the details.

If you have any ideas that aren’t mentioned above – that you think ought to be in the system – pop them in the comments and lets see what we can make among ourselves.