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personalised persuasion - the start of a new era in online politics?
In my post 3 days ago, giving an overview of the potential
for using powers of persuasion on party political web sites, I
identified a number of persuasive best-practices from other types of Internet
applications. I'd have to admit that I did so with a certain sense of
foreboding because, having studied their web sites in some detail by that time,
I knew they weren't using any of these best practices at all well (see my
previous post on powers of persuasion: making a
convincing case). Well, 3 days is a long time in politics! The
publication of the Labour party manifesto yesterday takes political persuasion
to an entirely new level of sophistication and one that might, in the long run,
transform the role of online channels in political campaigning.
Labour announced their manifesto
online with a link to See Labour's personal promises to you .
Clicking this link takes you to a form in which you describe your personal
circumstances: name, email address, postcode, age, gender, children's ages,
home ownership and employment status. (see footnote, below, on
their requirement that you provide your email address). So I provide my
details ...
... and they tell me ...
I then go back to the form and get rid of the kids ...
And then I found an interesting example of just how
fine-grain the personalisation is. I now have pre-school age kids and
I get a new paragraph Your children with the best start (highlighting
added by me).
I go back to the form and change my gender to female - everything else is kept
the same.
If I'm a father I want to know about the hard cash but if I'm a mother I want to
know about Sure Start Children's Centres, according to Labour! Although some
people might question the logic of who gets told what (including Cathy, my
wife, who was far more interested in being told about Tax credits than me) this
service really does personalise the content of the Labour Party manifesto. And
it does so to a remarkable level of granularity; changing specific sentences to
try to match personal circumstances.
So, why is this so significant? Firstly there is a rapid decline in the strength
and stability of voters' identification with single political parties: the
proportion of UK first time voters declaring themselves strongly partisan to
one party has halved since 1970 (see
The Dynamics of Party Identification, from HD Clarke, A Smith, D Sanders, MC
Stewart & P Whiteley 2004, Political Choice in Britain, Oxford University
Press). This paper concludes that "voters use current information about
the performance of parties and their leaders in sensible, albeit rough and
ready, ways as guides to political action" (p 213). In other words,
voters are much more open to persuasion than they used to be. Secondly,
however, fragmentation of the media and information overload is making it
increasingly difficult to gain people's attention for long enough to even try
to persuade them - especially with messages designed to appeal to the widest
possible audience.
The interactivity offered by the Internet is unique in enabling political
parties to tailor their messages to the particular circumstances of their
voter. This simple personalisation form for Labour's manifesto provides nearly
2000 different ways of seeing its content - in theory at least (8 age groups x
2 genders x 5 children categories x 4 categories of home ownership x 6
employment categories). This makes political messages more interesting, more
meaningful and hence potentially much more persuasive to voters. As discussed
in an earlier post (see the political importance of
online channels) the Internet played an important role in influence the
outcome of the 2004 Elections in the USA. It is too early to tell if it will
have a similar influence on the 2005 Election in the UK - but innovations such
as this will guarantee that it becomes a key battleground for future
elections.
Footnote: Why does Labour require your email address
in order to personalise the content of their manifesto?
When I first discovered this personalisation service, I assumed that an email
address was needed to email me my personalised manifesto. It was a bit of a
surprise, therefore, to see it there in front of me on the next web page. At
the foot of the form that requests your email address is a link to the
Labour Party's full Privacy statement. As of the time of writing, this
describes their use of e-mail addresses for subscribers to their e-mail
newsletter but has no information at all about email addresses submitted to
personalise their manifesto. This is significant ommission from their privacy
policy, especially when it is a required field, without which the form will not
submit!
External links: the
Conservative party website;
the Labour party website;
the Liberal Democrats website