The New Fianna Fail Website is Live and Created by Blue State Digital

As a member of Blue State Digital is in town tonight, organised by blogging’s favourite Fianna Fail councillor, and Fianna Fail go about improving their outreach, today in advance of the Ard Fheis we get a new website from them.

Fianna Fail won’t confirm that the work for them was done by Blue State Digital – look at their fingerprints on it with the action points ‘register to vote’ and the hints of oncoming interactivity and multimedia however. Or, like I did, you can track their DNS records.

fiannafail.ie 1 MX
preference: 50
exchange: mx-backup.blacknight.ie
900s
fiannafail.ie 1 TXT v=spf1 ip4:62.77.179.98 ip4:62.77.179.97 mx:bluestatedigital.com ~all 900s

So there you have it, a clear statment of intent being sent to the masses arriving in city west as well as bloggers going along accredited.

That means a sizeable commitment to online spending by Fianna Fail organisation, the kind of commitment that needs support from the top levels. Labour have been doing great work, the Greens have too but now Fianna Fail are going to direct cash at the biggest organisation effort online seen so far. They will probably put major impetus on the whole process now. Gonna go have a look now – though there will no doubt be much more coming.

Update: Some of the features are a definite improvement – you can see the main concept of the site moves from static and holding to ‘action points’. The menu on the right hand side is dedicated to some of the action points that you can work on the web in a short space of time. For example the Fianna Fail register to vote website and two new forms to get involved.

The first is a new membership form and the second is to sign up to volunteer. The membership form and volunteer form are hardly groundbreaking but they also invite you to pass it on to friends – a very early sign of a desire to go viral and push email. They even installed the app to drill through your web-based email contacts for people to forward to (no harm to collect email addresses you know).

It isn’t surprising that there is no sign of fundraising in that toolbar, the law in this area makes it tricky for parties to move an operation online, though the argument that it is open to abuse hardly holds water in light of decade-long tribunals. The politics of it probably necessitated that fundraising be kept out of version 1.0 – be sure that second and third iterations are already on the way. No one wants to see Fianna Fail splash the cash on an exclusive online politica consultancy team and then use it to go begging for money while in government sanctioning levies and service cuts.

The media section looks like where they will be keeping their youtube and the twitterfeed is integrated to the front page under the nice portrait of Cowen. They are setting up an email list too so all your primary bases are covered. The question is, now what?

The aim in all this is action and accountability so look to see if they go targetting their emails and campaigns, targetting their vote machine and cumann at web overlap and wheeling out the big hitters in the party for web videos and online Q&As.

Update 2: The constituency data has all been transferred to the new site too. Took a gander around out of curiosity to Galway East. The pages have the links to their sitting TDs local news will be posted, so far no news. The layout for the TD page is handy but that gold font is really stretching good design principles – its difficult to read and I clicked it thinking it was a link.

Still feedback is mediated, no sign of a fianna fail blog although twitter is a sign of life – make sure you keep the feed clean of press releases though. Not really the twitter audience!