Keep the Sheep
A Western Australian advocacy campaign against the live sheep export ban, run out of one Australian platform.
In my experience, passion is not the issue with grassroots campaigns. The problem can often be you don't have any way to organise that passion.
What was at stake
A federal decision to end live sheep exports put rural jobs across Western Australia at risk. The people affected had no way to show government how many of them there were.
The Albanese government was going to decimate jobs in rural communities in WA. People in these communities were angry about this — they're going to lose their jobs, lose their livelihood, but they had no way to speak to government and demonstrate how many people this was going to affect.
Why they moved
The campaign moved its website and its technology across so the public site, the supporter list, the email sends, the donations and the SMS all sat in one place.
One of the things that I loved about Cobber is that it was Australian made for Australian campaigns. We swapped our website and our technology to Cobber because we wanted everything in one place. We wanted the website, we wanted to be able to send emails, we wanted to be able to collect donations, and we wanted to be able to text our supporters out of the one platform.
What the switch actually changed
Three things offshore platforms leave Australian campaigns without.
Australian mobile numbers, actually supported
Text your supporters from the same platform that holds their record, on Australian numbers.
With many of the offshore political tech companies, they don't support SMS for Australian markets. Cobber is the only platform in Australia for politics that allows you to do that.
Product screens are illustrative, not Keep the Sheep data.
Answers during an Australian working day
Australian-built, Sydney-hosted, and staffed on the same clock as the campaigns using it.
Unlike with another platform where you're dealing with an offshore company whose tech is only online overnight, you can now get responses on our time zone. That is a game changing thing for Australian campaigns.
Twenty people or five hundred
The same event record handles a volunteer gathering and a ticketed fundraiser.
Whether you're trying to organise a friendraiser to get more volunteers or you're organising a fundraiser where you might have 500 people, it's a flexible platform that allows you to do that.
See the same setup on your campaign.
A short walkthrough with the team that built it, on Australian hours.
What organised looks like
Supporters, volunteers, donations and events stopped living in separate tools.
We have been able to organise our supporters, have volunteers, have donations, and have it all in the one place where we can see everything that's going on with our campaign.
I've been involved in a lot of campaigns in almost every state and territory in Australia. Cobber is a platform that I've been waiting for — to bring in all the functions that help you run your campaign online and coordinate it in person, into one platform.
Peter Hosking
Managing Director, Campaign Surge
See Cobber in action.
Fifteen minutes with the Australian team that built it.