Another email drops into the inbox of The Voice from A Liberal Democrat Organiser Who Wishes To Remain Anonymous: “Another submission for you good chaps. I thought I’d actually try to be vaguely useful this time.” You can read the first post by Lib Dem Riso Monkey’s diary here; and the second post here.

“We need to think about implementing our e-campaign,” said one of our leading activists rather breathlessly. “It’s very important to capture the youth vote with a comprehensive online presence.”

It’s another Campaign Committee, and we’ve got to the stage where people are repeating phrases they’ve heard in Conference training sessions. This has been, for a while, one of the more frustrating parts of my job - we’ve got lots of committee members who like saying big, important things, but when it comes to attempts to unpack these important things into tasks, all of a sudden people clam up.

Recently, my efforts in this regard have been rebuffed with yet another piece of neomanagement jargon, “Let’s discuss this offline,” a phrase I regard as rather appropriate. Taken literally, it means putting off the discussion until we’re both dead.

However, on this evening it seems like we might actually be going somewhere. In order to further derogate from setting actual tasks, we’re appointing an e-Campaigns Officer, whose task it will be to oversee the e-Campaign.

As e-Campaign is an exciting new word, it’s immediately fought over by the younger and more ambitious activists in the room, before settling on one of our legions of activists who prefer managing processes to actually implementing anything. Before she even opens her mouth, I know that in my near future there will be a document containing many shiny bullet points, all of which will be detailing things that would be nice to have - but without getting into details about how we actually get them.

But far be it from me to point out the insanity of a generating a process document for an implementation team of one person. Flash forward a week, and I receive this wondrous example of working around the problem. And yes, the bullet points are shiny, as I expected. I add her to my list of people who can technically tell me what to do (this list is now beyond 30, and growing by the week), and wait to see if any work will be generated from this masterpiece of good intentions.

Another week passes, and I hear nothing. However, in the meantime I hear about the excellent work being conducted by Tom Brake’s staff. He has a list of over a thousand email addresses to whom he sends a topical email once a month, and invites comments on things such as upcoming parliamentary votes. He then writes back to respondees telling them the outcome of the vote and why he voted the way he did, regardless of whether they agreed with him or not. Such honesty is becoming in an MP, and people actually ask to get added to the list.

I decide that in the absence of anything substantive coming from the people ostensibly in charge of our e-Campaign, this is what we should do. A single, short (no more than three paragraphs of two sentences each) email once a month should attract interest and not annoy people enough to block us from contacting them. Plus, if it’s short, people might actually read it. That’s right, unnamed MEP, I’m looking at you. You know who you are.

So we do this. My intern creates a fancy HTML backdrop featuring my PPC, we knock together some text about the work she’s been doing, and I get a response rate of about 5%. Although this may not sound like much, consider exactly how many responses you’ll get to your average Focus Survey. And then consider that this was an afternoon’s work that involved no delivery.

One of the problems I suspect local parties have with getting e-campaigning off the ground is that no-one knows what it is. Seriously. Saying ‘E-Campaigning is campaigning online’ is a mere tautology and doesn’t actually mean anything. Simply having an online presence doesn’t mean anything; just having a Facebook profile doesn’t count as e-campaigning, unless you think that having a house counts as traditional campaigning. It’s inviting people to groups, forwarding links to relevant stories, or copying Nick Clegg’s approach of using your profile as a free focus group.

E-Campaigning is merely the collective term for techniques used to get messages across using the new medium, and was invented so that people like Mark Pack could have a job description. It’s not something you delegate to the chap who does the website. It’s something the entire campaign committee does as part of the campaign, not something separate, or off to one side. We are all e-Campaign officers now.

Of course, this is Lib Dem Voice, so everyone here knows this. But the message needs to be spread, because I’m about to try to convince the Council Leader that despite the success of my PPC’s monthly email, the good burghers of our area don’t want to find three pages of Council achievements in their inboxes every week. Wish me luck.

Related posts:

1. Riso Monkey diary… A day in the life of a Lib Dem organiser
2. Riso Monkey diary… Listening to EARS
3. Campaign for Gender Balance Awards: best Lib Dem blog?
4. Lib Dem MPs flock to Facebook
5. Lib Dem TV Guide