POLITICAL CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT
Matraa began its journey as a dedicated political campaign management agency and we only spread forward into other fields after establishing our success and dominance in the field. So far, undefeated on individual constituencies we have a continuously developing process that relies heavily on surveys and real-time data coupled with multi-platform simultaneous communication approach.
Gathering Grassroot Intelligence
We conduct grassroot surveys that are geographically homogenously spaced out, in order to get both a macro as well as micro view of issues within the campaign territory. A poll to evaluate the mood of the voter and their expectations from the candidate and contesting parties and impact of various local and global factors along with local leadership and support. This helps in coming out with several deliverables such as – Manifesto, Marketing Communication inputs, Candidate speech inputs. The process also helps us identify and document a list of local vote influencers along with he history of their political allegiance.
Ethnic Survey is another hot product of ours, where we map each voter in the list against their ethnic identity with more than 95% accuracy.
Crunching Numbers
The first step is to check up on historic voting data made available from Form-20. A retrospective analysis of booth-wise voting trends helps us categorize booths into weak, battleground and strong. Without this, we wouldn’t know where to start.
These in the light of the result of our survey helps us formulate the communication strategy for each region, demographic/ethnic group and ultimately in winning.
Social Media
Managing the official party or candidate social media properties along with the necessary paid promotions is the first and the most basic step of the job. Political social media management involves managing fan pages as well as multiple demographically interspersed accounts, in order to create a widespread impact.
Even with all of the above, we may not be able to say with certainty that our messaging has reached every corner of the constituency(ies) homogenously. It’s in fact more prudent if the messaging is not exactly homogenous. Our reach still has to be homogenous, for which we use Whatsapp to group together Karyakartas and supporters according to their booths, sectors/mandals, village panchayat etc.
Content is the king in political social media marketing and content marketing is hence the key. A lot of time negative stories travel faster than positive ones and we try to take care of the phenomena on both the ends. Videos travel faster than other content and have much greater potential in affecting the viewer emotionally, hence a lot of our content is around videos of a variety of nature.
An often-necessary condition for having verified social media account is having a website or a Wikipedia page in the name of the individual or party. We help in creating and maintaining both.
Karyakarta Allignment
We set up a dedicated call-centre, supplied with local talents (to overcome language barriers), managed by one of our own. These callers verify the Karyakarta database for forced entries and errors, record Karyakarta feedback, take a complete stock of vacancies and finally suggesting replacements wherever necessary.
As a quality measure we cross-check most of our acquired ground intelligence with our Karyakartas in our second round of interaction. It doesn’t only help us be sure of the intelligence we are banking upon, but helps us build a rapport with the organization’s Karyakartas who accept that we are either listening carefully or already know our stuff. Getting their respect goes a long way in getting their cooperation.
Print Ads
At Matraa, we understand that most print ads are simply turned over by our readers and hence there is nowhere to go and nothing to achieve with this exercise unless we are capable of being innovative with our design and engaging with our content.
War-room
A war-room, as the name suggests, can be seen on the day of the voting, managing voter commute to tracking poll percentage across booths. The war-room also keeps us on foot regarding keeping all our favourable booths as peaceful and undisturbed as possible. It certainly makes good use of the complete call-centre as well as all the social media assets set up by the team over the period of the campaign, so that we have every possible resource (that the Election Commission permits) to ourselves.