Marketing

Note: For info on demographic trends increasing demand for Digital Citizen, review “Why DigiCiti?” section.

The target market for gaining initial users is academics and students, interest groups and organizers, political advisers and politicians, and news media leaders. The first step is to recruit activist promoters who will spread the word, and lead by example, in using the site. Promoting efforts will start with gaining support of university professors across the nation and getting them to endorse the product and have them use it for social sciences course activities such as class debates, quizzes, polls, or participation in the learning section or news media. The tools for creating group debates and networks will be ideal for supplemental activities in classes. These students will have created accounts and have been introduced to the achievements opportunities of the honor badge system and all the other features of the site. They will be one of the key catalysts for spreading the word to the general public.

Interest groups and political organizers struggle to gain influence, many of them creating their own social networking profiles and mass email campaigns only to be ignored facing difficulty reaching people who care about the initiatives they promote. Digital Citizen’s interest group profiles are searchable by issue category making it easier for citizens to connect with organizations, and vice versa. Interest groups will find the site to be a great tool for organizing/promoting events using the calendar systems and spreading general information via debates and site activity drawing users to their cause. They will certainly champion use of the site.
Political advisers will be contacted and informed of the site and encouraged to advise their client politicians to create profiles, and participate on the site, joining the movement toward online democratization of power. Politicians who lead in this movement will be champions of a new wave in technologically enhanced democratic activity. Their active use of the profiles will highlight them as transparent leaders, and their participation in debates as well as “open-source legislating” will inspire users to join and set precedent for a more interactive relationship between elected officials and their constituents.

News media organizations have been turning more and more towards social media to gather information and to report it to the public through social network channels. Digital Citizen creates an ideal social networking environment for political news reporting to a concerned and active audience. News media organizations can embrace the changes to the democratization of information sharing and become respected sources of info within a new medium officially designed for political deliberation. Followers of the news media will be enticed to participate in features of Digital Citizen when they have more interactive tools with which to access and take part in their news.

Funding

Ideally the site will operate as a non-profit organization and avoid any potential conflict of interest issues that one might assume if it received funding from interest groups or individuals with political agendas that could be furthered by manipulation of the site.  Crowd sourced funding through resources such as Kickstarter may also be used for funding purposes. The project will also pursue grants for a portion of its funding.  If the site simply cannot function or sufficiently expand due to lack of financial support from donors, it will have several options for generating revenue, such as selling virtual customization features for the DigiCiti Builder game [Gavin Newsom (2013) referenced a Playspan 2011 report on profits from virtual products sold in games showing its success as a business model], utilizing advertising revenue, or exploring the possibility of accepting capital from investors without strings attached. Government funding of this project is also a possibility. The founder has met several elected officials and will work with more of them for possible government support. Partnerships with other bipartisan organizations who share a similar mission will also prove helpful in funding.

Partnerships

There are numerous organizations who share the core mission of increasing transparency and civic engagement in politics. Many of the features of the Digital Citizen project are inspired by their work and partnership with them may help to unify the efforts of such organizations to create the comprehensive set of tools that will be offered. To name a few of the potential partners, C-SPAN (who the founder has worked for), the Sunlight Foundation, Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org), Code for America, numerous potential academic associations such as the UC Berkeley Cal Alumni Association, all major news organizations, and possibly the state and federal government. Members of congress and political leaders would also be effective partners to endorse and champion the cause of the Digital Citizen mission.

Partnerships could simply be endorsements or perhaps joint efforts to provide online content. For example, C-SPAN has an incredible video library and video feed access to current events in Congress and the White House that would tie in with activity on digiciti.org. The Sunlight Foundation does an amazing job of collecting and sharing info on members of congress and legislative activity. Use of their API (Application Programming Interface) may help tremendously with creating politician profiles and more. Partnerships of varying types may help Digital Citizen to provide the various features of the site. Organizations with specialized content offerings could potentially enhance the content of Digital Citizen but it is certainly possible, and perhaps desirable in some cases, that many of the site features be created and maintained independently by Digital Citizen.

Talent Acquisition & Organizational Structure

The Digital Citizen project is so large it will require a sizeable organization comprised of highly skilled designers, programmers, researchers, and more. Since many features of the site are complex enough to employ a team of developers and site maintenance workers on their own, it is likely that the structure of digiciti.org employees will be divided into departments by feature. To clarify, there would be separate departments for the Debate, Petition, Open-Source Legislation, and Statistics sections of the site. However, much of what these departments will do is going to depend on effective cooperation with one another. For example, the databases that each feature uses will need to be designed in such a way that all the different features of the site can be integrated and query info from one another’s databases. Much of the database and programming infrastructure will need to be created with this need for future flexibility in mind, and the departments will have to cooperate effectively to produce and maintain such a complex database. Each department will need a liaison that helps them all stay connected and cooperative.

In addition to the departments for development and maintenance of the site features, there will need to be a security team. The security of private information for users will require well maintained encryption and any manipulations of the site must be prevented with thorough security. The project will also need ongoing legal advice and monitoring so it will need a legal team. The security and legal teams may initially be limited to contracted services but once Digital Citizen reaches full scale within the US, and ideally expands around the globe, it will require these teams to scale up as well.