WHAT IS LOCALVOTE HQ?

LocalVoteHQ aims to allow any political candidate to easily create a modern campaign website.  We envision a national platform hosting information about every local political race on a local level.  We are a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization.

PROBLEM

Voters do not have sufficient access to information about their candidates in down ticket races.  In the 2008 election, we tried researching our local candidates and we couldn’t find much of anything.  Incumbents tend to have relatively poor sites, but challengers often have no sites at all.

We believe that the two most important factors standing in the way of every candidate developing a modern website are (1) cost and (2) technical/design knowledge and expertise.

SOLUTION

We are building a platform that will allow candidates to create modern websites with no significant cost or technical expertise required.   Just as Wordpress makes it possible for people to create modern online publications for free, we will make it possible for every candidate to create a modern website using templates and design layouts built on a publishing engine.

We will index sites built on our platform and they will be accessible by voters through our home page directory or through Google.  Our goal is to provide an API, which will let developers build additional tools on top of our platform using data from the campaign sites.

BUSINESS MODEL

While we are pursuing grants and other nonprofit funding opportunities, we believe that LocalVoteHQ will ultimately be a self-sustaining service.  For example, we could charge candidates to use the site based on a sliding scale, depending on their campaign budgets and monies raised.  This would ensure that candidates with little or no resources could use LocalVoteHQ for free, while wealthier campaigns could help to cover our operating expenses.

WHAT’S SPECIAL ABOUT LOCALVOTEHQ?

LocalVoteHQ will be the first platform built specifically to enable candidates to connect with voters as a public service.  Politics is all about communication, and the future of communication will run through the Internet and increasingly through mobile networks.  Our electoral politics system is way behind in its use of modern technology.  LocalVoteHQ believes we can do better.

MARKETING & SALES

We believe that public outreach and candidate outreach are both fundamentally important to the project.  As you would expect, campaigns with little resources are not going to need a whole lot of convincing to use our product.  But making campaigns aware that our product exists, will take work.  Thus, we are building a network around LocalVoteHQ that includes politicians, campaign staff, and others who are active in the political and public advocacy spaces.  When the product is ready, we will leverage this network to spread the word.

COMPETITION

Because we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan project, we hope to consider others in this space as potential partners and collaborators, rather than competition.  Currently, we’re not aware of any sites providing services at the level or the scope of LocalVoteHQ.  However, we need to do more research on this front.  We’ll update this section later.

TEAM

Michael Horn is the founder of LocalVoteHQ.  You can find more information about him at mikehorn.us.

We’re currently in the process of building a team and we will update this section when we finalize talks with potential team members.

KEY METRICS

To come.

NEXT STEPS

We’re interested in hearing from developers, designers, marketers and businesspeople who are interested in helping us raise the bar in how our candidates communicate with the voters.

We’re building a team and a community around LocalVoteHQ, and we invite you to become a part of it.  You can contact us at mike AT localvotehq DOT org.