I know I’ve been radio silent for the last few weeks and I have a good reason.
My largest client, the California Association of REALTORS® (C.A.R.), is involved in an effort to keep Congress from taxing mortgages to pay for highways. That’s the short explanation. The longer one is that U.S. Senate passed a long-term transportation funding bill several weeks ago. Buried in that bill is .1% yearly tax on conforming mortgages (those backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) for any loan that originates in a five year time period. The goal is to persuade the House not to include this funding mechanism in its own version of the highway bill.
So I’ve designed a mobilization campaign aimed at both California REALTORS® and at consumers from across the country. The fun part is that I’m getting to try out some new technologies and strategies in our consumer-focused campaign. I just love to play with fun new toys!
One cool new service I’m trying out is ViddyAd. It’s an online tool you can use to create video ads using a library of video clips and graphics. It’s free to use but you need to pay $199 to license the clips, photographs or art and to upload sound to finalize the video. You can check them out here at www.viddyad.com. Thank you to my colleague Rick Laezman for providing the great voice-over. Here’s the video.
On our consumer website (www.nomortgagetax.org), we are trying out PopVox which allows consumers to send their own message to Congress. Since it’s a widget (essentially an embedded tool), people don’t have to leave our site to send the message and I like it because it’s not meant to force people to use a pre-written message. Instead they can fully personalize it. This makes the messages more effective. (In some future post, I’ll expound on the research done on various forms of communicating with legislators). You can try it out by going to our website and clicking on the “Take Action” tab.
These are just a few of the cool toys I’m getting to play with. I’ll blog about some of the others later. It’s still too early to fully assess the effectiveness of these tools, so stay tuned for future updates…
And check out www.nomortgagetax.org to see the website we developed.
P.S. Special shout outs to Alex Creel, Sr. VP of Government Affairs at C.A.R., who wanted to see his name in lights and to my dad Dan Erlin, who is apparently my most faithful reader. Thanks Dad!