(Political web sites need an effective content management system)
If you are going to stay in office, then everyone has to share your political vision
Image Credit: Paul Watson
What is your political vision? Perhaps more importantly, do your staff and the people who voted for you know what your political vision is? If not, then you’ve got some work to do in order to get the word out. Getting everyone to understand what your political vision is can be the first step in ensuring that you have their support and their buy-in. Now we’ve just got to find a way for you to get the word out about what your political vision is. We’ll worry about your political strategy after we get this all worked out.
Why Is A Political Vision So Important?
A political vision is important because it provides you with a way to effectively communicate where you stand on the issues in a succinct way to both staff and voters. Instead of having to sit down with each person that you encounter and explain how your thinking works, your political vision will generally answer 80% of their questions about where you stand on the issues. You can use your precious time to deal with the more complicated issues.
When you are creating your political vision, you’ll want to make sure to include your entire staff in the process. You’ll need their help to explore the problems, understand the changes that voters are seeking, and then to craft a political vision that will support these issues.
Once created, your political vision can be used to stimulate ideas within your team about what possible actions you can takeon the issues. It will also help your team to stay focused and motivated during the entire time that you are in office. By taking the time to create a political vision, you will have helped to create ways to monitor your office’s activities, as well as providing you with ways to adjust the implementation of your policies if needed.
How Can You Create And Communicate Your Political Vision
If I’ve been able to convince you that a political vision is something that you need., then now we need to take a look at just exactly how you can go about both creating and then communicating your political vision.
There are three steps to this process. The first step is for your team to discuss and decide what core problems your voters are going to want you to be tackling. What the team is going to have to do is to spend some time listing out all of the adverse effects that each problem is causing.
The next step is for each person on the team to take the time to imagine a world that no longer had each of these core problems. Disregard limitations imposed by resources such as time, money, and power. Take the time to describe how much better the world would be if this problem was gone.
Your third and final step is going to be to clearly communicate your political vision. Having invested so much time in creating it, you will now want to make sure that as many people as possible are going to be able to access it and understand it. One of the best ways to make this happen is to create a website using GSL Solution’s HillTop service. Using this dynamic content management system (CMS) will allow you to focus on your message and let the CMS worry about building and formatting the actual website.
Your HillTop based website will allow you to get your political vision out in front of your voters as quickly as possible -- no long setup times are required. Instead, you’ll be able to focus on your content and making sure that you have expressed your ideas as clearly as possible. The GSL Solution’s HillTop service allows easy editing of your political vision web site by multiple people at the same time. This means that keeping it up-to-date as things change will be easy to do.
What Does All Of This Mean For You
If you want to get voters to continue to support you (and reelect you), then you are going to have to take the time to make sure that you’ve clearly communicated your political vision. An added benefit of doing this well is that you’ll also be able to rally the support of your office staff even when things get tough.
In order to create an effective political vision, you are going to have to create a shared understanding of just exactly what problems you are going to be tackling. Next, you’ll need to make sure that everyone understands the steps that you’ll be taking in order to change these problems. Finally, you are going to have to create ways to keep people motivated while you are working on these problems.
The good news is that all of this can be done. However, clearly communicating your political vision is a critical component of accomplishing this. An effective web site implemented using GSL Solutions’ HillTop service can make this task much easier to do. HillTop will allow you to ignore the complexity of designing a sharp looking website and instead focus on creating the content that will help you to publicize your political vision. Take the time to investigate how you could use GSL Solutions’ HillTop service to get the word out about your political vision.
- Dr. Jim Anderson HillTop – Political Web Sites That Get The Vote!™
Question For You: How big do you think a political vision should be?
GSL Solutions’ HillTop service provides politicians with a way to get voters more involved with the political process. HillTop has been designed by politicians, for politicians in order to provide easy-to-use tools that make updating a political web site with current and topical information easy to do. The web site becomes a powerful communication tool between the politician and the voters. More information can be found at: www.HillTopCMS.com
Tags: political vision, problem, your vision changes sought, shared understanding, stay motivated, focussed, adjust the implementation, political web site, campaign, voters, reelected, issues