Nanthida, Worldacquire‘s Director of Marketing Strategy, led an innovative case study for digital political campaign management at the 2019 Thailand Election – a particularly complex setting.
Uniting strategic experience with digital technology, Da helped a young parliamentary candidate for Bangkok become one of the top choices of his electorate.
Thailand has been under a military regime since 2014 and its long-awaited election on March 24th was subject to strict rules. Political parties had very little time to plan. Budgets were limited and many processes lacked clarity as reported by the media (as of today, the election results have not been confirmed).
Furthermore, access to the electoral roll, the list of registered voters and their addresses, was made very difficult. Teams had to collect data from scratch and district maps were inaccurate.
Despite these roadblocks, Da and her MP candidate Supraipon designed a transparent, fact-rich and data-driven electoral campaign on a very low budget:
Using a cloud-based mobile application called Mela, they managed to collect data about the constituency, analyze its issues, refine the district map, locate its voters and coordinate their canvassing team members as well as all other field operations.
Featuring Google APIs, location tracking and fieldwork management solutions, the Mela app also allowed them to capture and record sentiment data of the different voters which could help understand their party and policy preferences, and, as a consequence, tailor the political message delivered to each of them.
The same features were used to mark unsafe areas to prevent the team from crossing into hostile and potentially violent territory.
Although the election results will be confirmed only on May 9th, this young team won a considerable amount of votes in just 30 days and is expected to reach sixth out of almost 40 candidates – an important achievement considering that Supraipon is new to politics and ran with a very low budget.
One small step for a young politician, one giant leap for democracy.
Read story on Mela’s website
Read story on The News Lens (Chinese)
