TCN News
Maharashtra based party Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA), led by Mr. Prakash Ambedkar has signed up with OurDemocracy.in, a digital campaigns organization – to build capacity for their party ahead of the polls.
After their first attempt during the 2019 General Elections, VBA is now looking to expand their base across Maharashtra in the upcoming Assembly Elections and is training their staff to deal with the challenges ahead.
our democracy held a three-day Bootcamp with the party to help build in-house capacity in streams like communications, grassroots mobilization, data management, and fundraising.
Speaking on Behalf of VBA, Sujat Ambedkar said, “We had been running a social media campaign and a war-room since Lok Sabha and had a general idea about these things, but the Bootcamp has taught us a lot of new & actually deeper things about data, building narratives & then changing perspectives. Also training on Crowdfunding and how simple things can change the look and reach of Campaigns.”
Disha Pinky Shaikh – Spokesperson of VBA who attended the workshops said, “Most important learning for us was a merger of digital and ground campaigns and how one can be interdependent on the other. Also, we realized how new strategies and exercises can become building blocks of a campaign.”
Anand Mangnale, Co-founder, OurDemocracy.in while explaining the mandate of OurDemocracy said:”The idea behind our democracy is to bring clean money into politics through transparent online crowdfunding & with these capacity building initiatives, we are trying to help smaller political parties understand how campaigns are being built and the new trends in political campaigning. We hope to do more such boot camps with parties and organizations that are committed to social justice & promoting Democratic Values.”
The Bootcamp brought together experts in the field of Political campaigning including OurDemocracy co-founder Bilal Zaidi and Shivam Shankar Singh, author of the bestseller How to win an Indian Election and former data analyst with BJP.
Our democracy is an award-winning campaign and crowdfunding organization that has been making democratic interventions since 2017.
It has helped candidates like Kanhaiya Kumar, Atishi, Jignesh Mevani among others and political parties such as the CPM, AAP, BSP, CPI, CPIML, Congress, RJD and others to raise clean, transparent funds for their campaigns.