Day one of the Ideas Campaign has drawn a huge response from the citizens of Ireland.

The campaign website met with an enormous response after its launch on RTÉ’s Prime Time last night, when more than 2,100 visited the site between the end of the programme and midnight.

Over 450 submit ideas

In less than 24 hours of the site’s launch (up to 6pm today) 453 people submitted ideas and one in five submitted more than one idea. Around half of those also sent messages of support and a further 189 also sent messages of support through the website contact form.

Campaign Director Aileen O’Toole received over 200 messages of support to her own email address and to her mobile phone and other members of the campaign team also received personal messages.

The Ideas Campaign has published a sample of the messages on the site today, which we believe gives a true sense of what the citizens of Ireland feel about the issues in this campaign.

Campaign Director Aileen O’Toole gave a series on media interviews on RTÉ, the new station 4FM and on other media. The Internet community in Ireland are being especially supportive, offering free advertising positions and prominent editorial support on from the time that the website went live. Activity on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter also grew throughout the day.

Twelve people, many of them unemployed, contacted us today offering their services for free. A number of companies also made contact offering free services.

Next steps

The Ideas Campaign has decided not to publish any ideas until next week. Aileen O’Toole explained: “This campaign has to be transparent and credible from the outset. We need time to review the ideas received and ensure that we do not raise any unrealistic expectations before they are put into the public domain.”

“We plan to work in a similar way as an editor of a reputable newspaper, like Geraldine Kennedy of the Irish Times, operates. She and her staff receive many ideas for stories each and every working day. But if those ideas were not properly assessed to match the excellent reputation that the Irish Times enjoys then the newspaper’s credibility would suffer. That is the standard we hope to emulate with The Ideas Campaign.”

“This is a grassroots, low-budget campaign. We expect to make mistakes and if we do I will be the first to admit it.”

Tags: campaign statistics, Ideas Campaign

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Ideas Campaign, News.