Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

On Friday I shared a few opinions on the failing of Issue 2 in Southwestern City Schools. At the end of what some would call a small rant, I promised to share a few ideas on how groups of pro-voters could use new media tools to help rally the people who want to see the levy pass.

Citizens for South-Western City Schools Blog
A good blog site can act as an epicenter for all the communication techniques you choose to use.  Setting up your epicenter is critical.

First, you need a place to capture the people interested in your cause, and you can do this by building a list of subscribers over time. Most Blogs also allow you to track website analytics so you will know how may people are actually reading and regularly visiting your content.

There are multiple content management platforms out there, and Citizens for South-Western City Schools currently uses the popular open-source platform, WordPress.  Nice!  WordPress delivers best practices AND is fairly easy of use.  Savvy developers have donated their time and skills to build plugins, widgets and themes, that save the publisher tons of time and let them focus on creating the content.  According to my buddy Jake Stoops (an SEO Strategist and WordPress Blogger), here is a list of 10 Plugins Every WordPress Blog Should Utilize.

What About Other Content?
Wordpress also makes it easy to integrate other new media which will help keep the content on your blog fresh.  There’s lots of reasons why dynamic content is a good idea. For one, Search Engines love fresh content.  Crawlers from Google, Yahoo and MSN will pay more attention blogs that consistently have fresh keywords showing up in the copy.   Integrating a Twitter feed on your blog is an easy way to do this, as long as a human is updating Twitter regularly. Citizens for South-Western City Schools is doing this to some extent today.

Suggestion:  In addition to the profiles you are already pulling in, you might consider feeding in a saved search via RSS feed on a Twitter hash tag.  Why?  A branded hash tag (and example might be #SWCSchoolsLevy) will help to pull all of the tweets on using that specific hash tag into one common place.  Hash tags are an effective way to make a collective conversation visible to your blog readers.  You can also use Tweets to a hash tag to communicate regular status and informational updates right on the home page.  For more info on how you could use a hash tag, visit this post.  This one too.

The blog publisher (sorry, I would give you credit here but I have no idea who you are) might also consider pulling in a Flickr feed to display photos of any rally events, students and facility, and any other images that help to put human faces to the content.  The old adage that “pictures are worth a thousand words” applies here, especially when visitors see someone they know personally.

Does anyone in your community have video of a pro-vote rally, speakers or even town meetings?  WordPress makes it easy to upload that as well.  You might even go as far as interviewing senior students who are going to miss out on playing sports in the coming year.  I would bet they have something to say about the levy.  What about short interviews with teachers or administrators?  I would bet they have interesting front line perspectives as to why South-Western City Schools needs an operating budget.  Could you possibly show what it’s like in the classrooms and how schools are running on a skeleton crew?

(note: video is a POWERFUL tool, but be careful.  Make sure to check out the legalities of what you can and cannot post before you start uploading.  This is VERY important when you are dealing with kids and parents.  Make sure you have documented permission.)

Find More Advocate Bloggers
Collaborative Blogs are very effective in the corporate world, as long as you have people who can write passionately about their subject.  Have you considered who else might care about passing the levy in South-Western City Schools?  Who might people in your district rally behind that are focused on education?  Here’s just a few people that come to mind.  I can’t speak for them, but Twitter gives you the chance to reach out and start a conversation.  It would be a shame not to at least try.

• Jim Tressel
• Andrea Camburn
• E. Gordon Gee

That’s just scratching the surface on blogs.  Their are a whole set of other tools out there.  Do you have other ideas that could help give pro-voters on South Western City Schools a louder voice?  Please, help by sharing them here.