The Wide Middle

Very early this morning I sent the following e-mail to the Utah State Republican Party Leadership. The e-mail voices my concerns over the State Party’s new policy of centralized delegate e-mail address and candidate messaging. The e-mail text appears below in italics:

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Dear Mr. Lockhart, 

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Kip Meacham, and I am the Republican Precinct Chair residing in Orem Precinct 27 (OR27). My purpose in writing you is to express my concerns with manner in which the State Republican Party is trying to increase candidate-to-delegate e-mail communications. While I laud the efforts of the Party, I believe the chosen approach will create serious freedom of speech, equal access, and privacy concerns you may not have foreseen in making your policy decisions.

By employing the e-mail management software from Constant Contact , the Party now has at its disposal lots of resources to manage e-mail communications including email templates, along with tools to build, manage and secure e-mail lists.

What it also now has is the ability to track and generate reports about the success/failure of e-mail delivery efforts, the number of e-mails opened by the delegates, etc.

So, while the software gives the delegates the following benefits:

1. It preserves the privacy of the e-mail address lists from the candidates.
2. It gives the delegates the option to “ opt out ” of receiving these e-mail communications.

It creates a whole new dimension of freedom of speech, equal access and privacy concerns for the delegates by:

1. Centralized distribution of messages through the Party. There are no direct e-mail communications from the candidates. Instead, the Party sees them first, lays the mail messages out for distribution, and has all control of the distribution.
2. An order of magnitude increase in delegate privacy compromise. The delegates’ privacy is compromised in that the Party can (by means of the Constant Contact software’s web analytics features) see which delegates are actually opening the messages, and if they’re forwarding them on.

For your review, I cite the following on what the Constant Contact Website says about the software’s e-mail tracking and reporting capabilities (text in [bold] italics):

Email Tracking and Reporting
Learn more about your contacts with eye-opening reports

Real-time email tracking and reporting lets you know how many emails were delivered, which addresses bounced, and why-within minutes of sending your email campaign. You also get reports on who opened your email, which links generated the most interest, and who clicked on each one. This valuable information will help you to determine your contacts’ interests, the best day and time to send your email campaigns and much more!

See who opened your email campaigns, and what they clicked on
• How many emails were sent and delivered
• What percentage of your contacts opened

See how your email list is growing and who is opting out
• How many contacts opted in or opted out
• How many contacts forwarded emails to a friend

Compare past email campaigns, get information on bounces, and more
• Identify emails that bounced
• Compare results from your three most recent campaigns

So, in a noteworthy effort to answer privacy concerns about e-mail address disclosure, the Party–not the candidates–will have all the information on how these e-mail communications were delivered, opened, and clicked on by the delegates.

By using e-mail management software, what the Party has done is increase the privacy exposure for the delegates as the Party will now know which delegates are opening these e-mails and how the delegates are using the e-mail messages–including knowledge of which e-mails the delegates are forwarding on to others.

If you consider the useful life of these e-mail addresses for a particular candidate versus the uses of the Party, I believe we have a much larger privacy concern by this centralized party control of the message flow–and the means for the Party to check up on the delegates’ e-mail reading habits. I know that’s not what I signed up for when I gave my e-mail address to the Party.

All this notwithstanding, there are alternatives to this approach that will enable the preservation freedom of speech and equal access for the candidates and the preservation of e-mail address privacy for the delegates without the potentials of analytics-based abuse by the Party (emphasis on the word potentials here). The possibility of impropriety is sufficient cause to reverse this policy.

I’m sure there are those in the County and State leadership who will see my raising of these concerns as obstructionist behavior or personal attacks. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not from the Party’s “lunatic fringe,” and I have no personal axe to grind.

My motives are simply these: I believe if the Republican Party is going to catch the fire and imagination of the upcoming generation, it must operate according to the rules of information flow in the twenty-first, Internet-based world we live in. Information must flow with complete transparency. The Party needs to understand the importance of this transparency to the next generation.

The old days of traditional public relations (which I have worked in professionally) and control of the message and messengers has long since past. The Internet took this from the public and private sectors years ago. If the Party continues to operate to this antiquated model, the Party will be perceived by the upcoming generation as oily, corrupt, back-room dealers, and it will die from a lack of new blood from today’s youth destined to become tomorrow’s leaders.

In my professional opinion, this “centrally-controlled e-mail distribution policy” is an instantiation of the behavior driving the next generation away from-not towards-the Republican Party.

As a 20+ year high-tech sector marketing and public relations professional, I offer my assistance in helping the Party address these concerns.

Please feel free to contact me to discuss this using my contact information below; and in the spirit of transparency, please feel free to forward this e-mail message on to whomever you choose.

Sincerely,

Kip Meacham
OR27 Precinct Chair

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I am hoping for a response, and for the opportunity to help solve the problems I see with this approach.