ElectionMall is a Washington, D.C.-based company that combines Internet technologies with political public relations. In business since 1999, about 100 of its experts in five nations provide information technology services for politicians, including the successful Internet campaign of U.S. President Barack Obama last year.
On Sept. 28, before the start of presidential race in Ukraine, ElectionMall opened its office in Kyiv. Yulia Kurbaka, the company’s project manager in the nation, told the Kyiv Post how Internet technologies can help win elections.
KP: Why did you enter Ukrainian market now?
YK: After Kyiv, we reopened our office in Brussels and now are launching two more offices, in the Philippines and Malaysia. Why? Because the [economic] crisis is one thing and politics is another. As long as the Internet and Internet technologies develop, our products will always be in demand. In Ukraine, one election will go after another: presidential, parliamentary, local and maybe a referendum. Another reason [why ElectionMall is spreading] is the success of Barack Obama, of his Internet campaign. He made a kind of revolution in the political technologies. Now many [strategists have] started dividing the political campaign into offline and online campaigns, and developed two different strategies for them.
KP: What is ElectionMall’s strategic view for Ukraine and the region?
YK: The political market in Russia is completely different. Elections do not exist, in fact. That’s why the question ‘why not in Russia?’ hasn’t even been discussed. Among all [Commonwealth of Independent States], Ukraine is the most democratic and free. Presidential elections are not our main aim … now we set our sights more on parliamentary and local elections. Several members of parliament have recently ordered development of their personal websites. A website for a politician is not a luxury anymore. It’s as essential as a tie or a mobile phone.
KP: Have you found clients yet among recent presidential candidates in Ukraine?
YK: We are proud that five out of the 18 presidential candidates are our clients. For some candidates we manage their main resource [the website]. For others we provide services, for example, e-mail blasts or software for collecting databases. In contrast to political technologists who can work only with one candidate or with one camp, we work with all camps. We have clients that are main competitors to each other and they know about it. It is possible as we offer a purely technical product which can be compared to Microsoft Word. Everybody has Word on the computer but it depends on the headquarters what they write in it. We give a product and it depends on politicians how they will use it.
KP: What was ElectionMall’s input in Obama’s campaign?
YK: ElectionMall led the Internet part of Obama’s campaign in several states. We didn’t lead his online campaign on the national level. Apart from Obama, ElectionMall worked with many governors and senators. During the last presidential campaign in the U.S., we worked with both Democrats and Republicans.
KP: What technologies worked in Obama’s Internet campaign?
YK: Obama had official profiles on all popular social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, where voters could discuss recent news and hot topics about their candidate. He also had his own network called MyBarackObama. His main achievement was collecting databases of voters that allowed him to know his electorate almost face to face. Obama’s camp first sent breaking news to people from its databases and only then gave it to the press. The voter felt their importance. Obama worked with search engines so that users doing searches through Google could find official information about Obama and topics related to him…through his website he raised a half-billion dollars. It was this revolutionary idea that helped him to raise voter turnout on Election Day. If an individual gives money, he or she will come and vote.
KP: Do Ukrainian candidates use these Obama technologies?
YK: Only Sergiy Tigipko and Inna Bohoslovska have official profiles on all social networks and work actively with them. Yulia Tymoshenko has only LiveJournal and YouTube. Victor Yushchenko is officially registered on YouTube and has rather strong videos. Victor Yanukovych has no official network profiles at all. Tymoshenko made her own network VirYu (Ukrainian for Believe). Yanukovych has a kind of network. Yushchenko works most of all with databases, and sends messages regularly. All top candidates have the option “join us” on their websites, but it’s another issue how they work with these databases. Candidates actually do not work with search engines and nobody raises money through the Internet because it is not allowed by Ukrainian legislation during the official campaign. Arseniy Yatseniuk and Anatoliy Hrytsenko tried to do this before the campaign started officially. Yatseniuk didn’t reveal how much he raised, while followers of Hrytsenko donated Hr 2.5 million.
KP: Whose online campaign is the most effective?
YK: I like very much how Tigipko does it. He is a leader in the Internet. The problem is that [the rest of] our candidates understand that Obama made a revolution and they have to do something similar, but don’t know how. It’s strange that some candidates such as Mykhailo Brodskiy, Vasyl Protyvsikh and Serhiy Ratushnyak, do not have personal websites at all. Yuriy Kostenko, Lyudmyla Suprun and Oleh Riabokon have rather weak websites. Petro Symonenko and Oleksandr Moroz do not have personal websites; they have only the web pages of their parties. Volodymyr Lytvyn’s website presents him as a scientist of the National Academy of Sciences, not as a presidential candidate.
KP: Is there anyone who will repeat Obama’s success in Ukraine?
YK: It is already clear now that nobody will. Politicians have not understood advantages of Internet technologies yet.
KP: What is the cost of a full Internet campaign in Ukraine?
YK: It varies from 10 to hundreds of thousands of dollars. We stick to standards that for national elections it should be one dollar per Internet user. In Ukraine, we have 12 million Internet users and only eight million active users, so a good and professional online campaign should cost from $8 to $12 million dollars. So far, we don’t have such orders. The Internet penetration rate is not high in Ukraine. But as the Internet audience is growing, technologies are updating and – luckily or not – elections in Ukraine are a permanent process.
Oksana Faryna can be reached at [email protected].
