news
Sep
teabag go down under
We decided it was time to take a step closer to world domination and decided the best person to instigate the plan was our very own resident kiwi Mark.
So with that Mark packed his bags and headed down under to open our Auckland office and handled our first New Zealand project ‘Every Vote Counts’, a high profile campaign to encourage expatriate New Zealanders into the polling booth, wherever they live.
Teabag designed and built the campaign’s website for Kea New Zealand, an independent, non-government, non-profit incorporated society dedicated to enabling overseas New Zealanders to vote in the 2008 General Election. Currently, an estimated half a million New Zealanders living overseas are eligible for the vote, but only 28,000 voted in the 2005 election.
With these numbers in mind, Teabag aimed to create a vibrant, easily negotiated site that would appeal to the broadest possible audience and encourage possible future voters of all ages. The site allows voters to enrol online and sign up for an electronic reminder to vote, while also enabling users to submit questions on politics and voting to a panel of experts. It provides a broad and clear overview of the country’s politics, offering handpicked articles from leading news sites plus comment and analysis written specifically for the ‘Every Vote Counts’ site to help voters make their mind up. In the run up to the elections, EVC will also be conducting a number of surveys via the site, with users encouraged to suggest survey topics on any issue they would like tackled. The website is already proving to be a huge success, with an average of 598 overseas voters enrolling online each day in the first 11 days of the campaign, compared to a daily average of 118 during the previous six weeks – an increase of over 300%.
The campaign and website have already attracted press coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Otago Daily Times, National Business Review and on radio station 2ZB in Wellington, providing an ideal launch pad for Teabag’s New Zealand office in Auckland.
“Teabag have been an excellent partner in helping us develop and deliver our campaign – providing clever and creative ideas for the design of our web presence and webtools plus incredibly fast and cost effective implementation,” commented Ivan Moss, CEO of Kea New Zealand. “Their constant clear communication gave us confidence all the way through that the project was on track and we were getting exactly what we needed.”
