Joe Vaughn for Congress

Client Spotlight

Joe Vaughn for Congress is the political campaign for Joe Vaughn, independent candidate for Nebraska’s second district seat in the United States House of Representatives. He runs against Republican incumbent Lee Terry. His platform includes reforms on several issues including, education, term limits, government spending, and military deployment.

The Project:

The Design

When Joe informed me of his plans to run for Congress, and that his campaign needed a website to kick off fundraising, I knew that time and budget would be the key concerns. Additionally, they requested I implement a contributions page using CiviCRM, an open-source constituent relationship management system. It goes without saying, they would also need to leverage social networks as much as possible.

…and more.

After Joe’s original logo designer fell through I offered to do his logo design as well. Everyone was enthusiastic about my first submission, so I was able to push through with the graphic design of the site itself that had been delayed until a logo was available, as I consider the logo to be a cornerstone for font and color choices throughout the site.

Challenges

I was able to quickly progress through the early design phases thanks to the use of the Twenty Till Noon WordPress theme, that provided me with a tested platform-independent layout and easy to customize styles. However, CiviCRM does not currently work with the WordPress content management system, so I had to choose between Joomla and Drupal. I chose Drupal because in my previous experience it has been easier to administrate; I decided this would be a plus for both myself and my client. The challenge was then to implement a design in Drupal that was cohesive to the WordPress design and to quickly learn a constituent relationship management system I had no experience with; running inside a content management system I had limited experience with.

Simplicity
In the interest of time and budget constraints I had developed a design on the WordPress portion of the site that rested mainly on a custom color palette based on the logo, background image and little else. This paid dividends on the Drupal side when I was able to just make some minor changes to the default theme’s styles to make it cohesive with the design of the WordPress pages.

This meant the only real challenge left was going to be the content management itself. With some perseverance and the help of the CiviCRM community. I was able to quickly surmount the small but numerous quirks that were inherent in the process of making things compatible with the client’s web host and setting up the groundwork on the CiviCRM back end that allows the organization to collect contributions in a way consistent with the law and that allowed them to integrate with their PayPal payment portal.

Triumphs

With the help of my custom ShareThis script, standard Twitter Profile and Facebook Like-box widgets, and Brian Freytag’s Social Media Buttons plugin the site has been actively shared and discussed socially since it’s launch.

Testimonial:

I love the logo … I am very excited.

[The site] looks wonderful. - Seth Manzel, Campaign Manager – Joe Vaughn for Congress

Success!

joevaughnforcongress is currently campaigning for contributions, followers, and likes via the following in addition to their new website: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube!