Your money in action

So I wanted to demonstrate some kind of tangible benefit from your unbelievably generous donations to the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser (which now has eight days left to run) over and above simply keeping the blog going until the referendum.  I didn't push the boat out too far, because obviously I'm going to have to be careful to make the money last.  In fact I barely nudged the boat at all!  But I did run a little experiment by placing a dirt cheap £18 ad on Facebook, just to test what would be possible over the coming months.  It publicises yesterday's post about the Tories taking an outright lead in a second GB-wide opinion poll, and its potential implications for the independence referendum.  This is what it looks like -

Other than a minimum age, the only targeting option I used was 'in Scotland'.  I didn't specifically try to reach people who are interested in politics, partly because that would mean preaching to the converted or the unconvertible, and partly because such people are likely to have friends with similar interests who are constantly sharing links about the referendum anyway.  I just wanted to reach random voters, including people who the indyref hashtag rarely finds its way to.  I seriously considered targeting women specifically, although I decided against it in the end because it would have meant reaching fewer people overall.  And with about 20% of the ad's expenditure still left to run, this is the number of people in Scotland it has reached so far  -

So by the time it has run its course it may well have been seen by up to 14,000 voters.  Not too shabby for £18.

Why did I choose that particular post to publicise?  As Mick Pork pointed out yesterday, it's all very well saying that a Tory lead in the GB-wide opinion polls will make people more likely to vote for independence, but that's not terribly helpful if most people don't follow the opinion polls and therefore don't actually know that the Tories have taken the lead.  So I thought it would be nice to do something practical about that problem.  By the time the ad has finished, approximately 1 in 300 of the voting age population of Scotland will have seen the words "Increase in support for independence expected as another new poll suggests the Tories are heading for victory in next year's UK general election".  Of course only a small percentage of people have followed the link through to this blog, but that doesn't matter as long as the basic message has got through to some extent.

Apart from illustrating a side-benefit of the fundraiser, this hopefully demonstrates how any blogger with a few pounds to spare can get a message through to undecided voters in a cost-effective manner.  But I think the trick is to contain the full essence of the message in the title - there's no point in relying on people clicking through to the blogpost itself, because in most cases that won't happen.  It's probably also best to make sure that the message is actually something that will make undecided voters stop and think, rather than just a random slagging off of Johann Lamont or Blair McDougall (however richly deserved that slagging off would undoubtedly be).

I'll have to do this reasonably sparingly, but I'll try to select the most useful looking posts, and promote them in the same way between now and the referendum.