Wide Eye has spent the 2018 political cycle working much as we often do: supporting great candidates with top-notch creative services. But with Trump in the White House, this cycle is wholly unique and nothing is business-as-usual — especially in digital politics.
The “blue wave” that everyone is talking about is going to take a ton of hard work and shouldn’t be taken for granted. It will only happen if the energy and passion many currently feel is harnessed and turned into substantive action. Good old-fashioned door-knocking, phone-banking, and helping folks get to the polls is gonna make the difference, but for many Americans it’s not always clear how to take that first step to get involved.
For that reason, Wide Eye has partnered with MobilizeAmerica. Mobilize is a software platform for aggregating events for progressive organizations and campaigns and syncs that data with voter files. It’s a welcome breath of fresh air for many digital organizers who in the past have struggled with multiple platforms and an awkward user experience. We’ve been describing MobilizeAmerica to our own clients as “ActBlue for events” — meaning it has standardized event data and management in much the same way ActBlue has done for online fundraising.
To dramatically enhance the experience of finding and engaging with volunteer opportunities, Wide Eye’s development team lead by Director of Technology Drew Tipson built a new searchable map layer on top of MobilizeAmerica’s standard implementation. We then partnered with the Texas Democrats for our first pilot of the new web app. The end product is a highly usable and interactive experience for finding events in Texas. The feature allows people to search volunteer opportunities closest to them, find local offices, and even submit their own events.
Since launching the new event map in July, the Texas Democrats have added 4,957 different volunteer shifts and are receiving substantially increased engagement.
One of the best decisions we made this cycle was to integrate Mobilize America with our Wide Eye website. We have 254 counties and over 1,000 different campaigns in Texas. We used to spend hours every week finding and adding events to our website so Texas Democrats could find a way to get involved in their community. Our Wide Eye integration with MobilizeAmerica streamlined our events process and saved us hours of time every week. We no longer need to track down events because Wide Eye’s integration automatically adds MobilizeAmerica events to the beautiful map tool — and we still have the ability for campaigns and county parties being able to add events from other sources. Plus, our events page looks absolutely amazing. Very thankful for the Wide Eye team and their vision.
— Brittany Switzer, Texas Democrats Digital Director
The map itself is built as a standalone React application (actually a variant, called Preact), leveraging Google’s styled maps. We use Wordpress to synchronize with, cache, and then let a client manage their own Mobilize API feed of events as well as include any other custom data, such as offices or other points-of-interest.
We’re thrilled to see massive amounts of enthusiasm and engagement across the country and are eager to continue helping organizations leverage that enthusiasm into action in 2018 and beyond.
Contact us at hello@wideeycreative.com to learn more.
