Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Open Government in Action

Monday, May 10th, 2010

city-hall

Precision Polling was proud to sponsor the Open APIs for Government at San Francisco City Hall on Friday. Respected thought leaders like Mitch Kapor (our old boss at Xmarks), Tim O’Reilly, and Craig Newmark urged a mixed audience of government officials, entrepreneurs, and reporters to think “open” with their data. Twilio organized the event, and are now running a developer contest around Open APIs.

Drawing many lessons from the Open Source movement, the Open APIs movement encourages anyone with a body of potentially useful information to simply make it available, even if it’s not immediately clear what to do with it. Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts have shown time and time again an amazing ability to stitch together these various data sources in novel ways for the public good. This has included transit data, crime, potholes, broken streetlights, garbage, vandalism, and so on.

While Precision Polling isn’t a data source per se, we operate in the same spirit of democratizing access to actionable information. Our low cost structure and no setup fees make it possible for local governments, school districts, government agencies, and other similar public organizations to poll their constituents and make data-driven decisions. This is the other side of the Government 2.0 coin: improving the communication between government and its constituents through technology, and we’re proud to play a part in it.

At our booth during the event, we were delighted to run into a number of interesting folks from local government, non-profits, and public agencies who wanted to actively incorporate public opinion polling into their other data efforts. We’ll be sharing success in this space in the coming months, but in the meantime, let us know if you’re interested in learning more about how we can help!

Posted in Events, Government 2.0 | No Comments »

Partying and Polling with Publicola

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Publicola LogoSeattle is a hotbed for new media experiments, and Publicola is no different. It’s a politically focused blog run by former editors of The Stranger, has attracted a series of investors, and in just a year is read by everyone in Washington politics.

Last year we sponsored a poll that Publicola did for the Seattle Mayor’s race. It got so much coverage in other local media, and such a large surge in traffic to Publicola, that they decided to start running polls on a regular basis. So last night, at Publicola’s 1 year anniversary party at the Crocodile (with some great bands), we jointly announced plans to feature polls once or twice a month on Publicola’s website. A respected local polling firm, EMC Research, will help design and analyze results, and yours truly will be the engine that powers it all.

We love helping new media find cost effective tools to be able to compete with the big guys. The local TV stations can afford to purchase surveys from SurveyUSA, but until we arrived on the scene, innovative blogs like Publicola had no retort. Now they can participate too, and readers benefit from better reporting all around. We’re just happy to make it easy and affordable for anyone to gather data from the phone.

Posted in Announcement, Dial-in Surveys, Events, New Media, Politics | No Comments »

Powering good causes

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Two very cool things happened yesterday: first we moved into our new offices in a historic building in downtown Seattle; and second, all the two dozen non-profits that live in our building threw a massive annual open house party spanning 14 floors with hundreds of people!

It’s clear that we’re housed in a building that has a great sense of community and purpose, and we wanted to give back to the festivities. With no time to throw our own little party, we instead decided to sponsor a contest to give away $200 to the one cause that got the most votes. But how to collect those votes in a huge party with lots of people?

Vance Contest Poster

That’s were Precision Polling came in. In less than 10 minutes we designed and recorded a survey that people could dial into to vote for their favorite org. We also created a poster to advertise the contest (see below), and gave it to the non-profits to post at their parties (they loved it).

As the evening went by, people dialed in to cast their votes. We could see who was leading in real-time from our iPhones, and at the end of the night could instantly announce the winner: GroundWire, a non-profit that helps other non-profits use technology to reach their goals. Congrats guys!

If you’re setting up a contest, or organizing an event where you want live participation, think about using Precision Polling. It takes minutes to setup, and at 10 cents a minute, it would take 100 calls for you to get charged just $10.

Posted in Contests, Dial-in Surveys, Events, Non-profits | No Comments »