Politicians are talkative people. And particularly so during election times. Reading through this week’s Economist magazine I was struck by the news that Republican candidate Mitt Romney is using specialist Citizen Relationship Management software from salesforce.com in his campaign.
The software called ComMITT is credited by the Economist as being partly responsible for the impressive $20.6M of donations that he has collected so far from just 33,000 contributors. John McCain in comparison, managed to collect only $12.5M from 60,000 contributors. ComMitt treats campaign contributors as ‘customers’ and manages them using tried and tested CRM techniques during the run-up to the elections. Renee Boucher Ferguson’s Enterprise Apps blog describes the ComMITT software further. Salesforce is rumoured to be working on a commercial version of the software called CampaignForce, for use by politicians of all shapes and sizes.
That politicians have long used techniques from the world of branded mass communications should be no suprise. But the extension of campaigning into the world of individual communications is relatively new. We will have to wait and see whether ComMITT actually helps Romney in the elections.
What do you think? Is CRM for electioneering a step too far? Or is it a legitimate part of the political machine?
Post a comment and get the conversation going.
Graham Hill
Well, I believe that he is doing more with less- he is able to leverage the money that campaigns use’d to pay consultants to do all this stuff- and they did it quite sloppily I might add- with better metric retention and better follow up due to automation and programming…
Why shouldn’t he do it- its not underhanded nor is it giving him an unfair advantage that is not available to the other candidates… I’m not saying this because I am a Republican- but because I am progressive and believe that any candidate that embraces technology is good for our professions…