On Saturday, for just the seventh time in Australian history, the country’s government changed hands, as Tony Abbott and the Liberal/National Coalition won a decisive victory over incumbent prime minister Kevin Rudd and the Australian Labor Party.

The Coalition’s victory was driven by a strong candidate in Tony Abbott, a unified team, and a highly disciplined organization that used technology in ways no Australian party has before.

Engage was brought in to redesign and rebuild the Party’s web platform ahead of the 2013 election. Our solution had to be scalable, handling massive amounts of traffic in the run up to the vote, and elegant, showcasing Tony Abbott and his team with striking design and visuals.

The new site recognized a unique reality of Australian politics: compulsory voting. Because every eligible adult is legally obligated to vote, the focus of campaign strategy shifts from mobilization to persuasion. As such, the site was designed to communicate the Liberal Party’s message and plan to the entire nation, rather than narrowcast to a small base of activists. We aimed to strike a positive and hopeful tone, underscoring the party’s advertising message, which was 70% positive in the final weeks.

And for the first time, the Liberals truly went mobile. A deliberate approach to responsive design meant that Australians could easily join Tony Abbott and the Liberal campaign anywhere, from their desktop, tablet, or mobile device.

A common thing you hear in international politics is that the same culture of low-dollar fundraising that exists in the United States can’t be found elsewhere. The new Liberal Party site helped confound these expectations. Whenever they were asked, Liberal Party supporters stepped up in ways that consistently surprised us.

 

Simple and elegant landing pages that optimized the conversion funnel and donation pages that were super-optimized for mobile meant that the Liberals blew through all of their online fundraising goals. The Daily Telegraph reported on one email which raised $82,000 in just 24 hours. (Multiply that number by 14 to get a sense of how such a message might perform in the U.S.)

We were particularly proud of the 3-step responsive donation form. More care went into designing this page than any other on the website.

And with Google Analytics’ Ecommerce Tracking, we could track and analyze the flow of donations in interesting new ways: by mobile device manufacturer, operating system, screen size, and much more. We’d like to share some of these results, which shed light on why this design may have worked so well for the Obama campaign in 2012 (and the Liberals in 2013), and why we may finally be cracking the problem of mobile donation conversion rates.

To start off, we compared conversion rates across devices, pitting the 3-step form against an index of mobile-responsive donation pages that employed a one-step process. The results were striking, with statistically significant lifts across all devices and operating systems:

This data certainly shows why we can’t stop at simple A/B tests. The future will be about segmented A/B tests tailored to different device categories and types of visitors. Two other clear takeaways: 1) If you’re not using three step on your donation forms, you’re missing out on mobile in a big way, and 2) Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics is your friend!

Not only did the site break records, significantly besting the Labor Party in traffic (according to its verified Quantcast profile), but it was deeply visual and social, two essential ingredients to success on the modern web.

Check out how visual each of the article pages were:

Each page of the site came packed with social context. An engagement score (summing up Twitter and Facebook sharing activity) signaled which articles were most popular across the social web. And users could share on Facebook without leaving the website, leveraging high traffic to the site in the final days to drive sharing on social.

Many lessons can be drawn from the Coalition victory, both online and off. After two tumultuous terms of Labor government, Australians were ready for change. Abbott put forward a strong, united, and competent team already well known for its performance in the government of John Howard. And the campaign was run under Federal Director Brian Loughnane was model for political parties worldwide, with a unified message and consistent branding from the top of the ticket to the local level.

With Australians frustrated at the direction of their country, the Liberals were ready, running a modern campaign that set social media records, becoming the first Australian political party to reach 100,000 Facebook fans, then 200,000. Abbott ended the campaign with 260,000 Facebook likes, to Rudd’s 128,000.

What the Liberals did in Australia in 2013 is a model for center-right parties worldwide, including right here in the United States.

Everyone involved in this groundbreaking digital effort deserves special thanks, including the Liberal Party’s Jonathan Hawkes, as well as our friends Alex Skatell, Pete Fullerton and the IMGE team embedded in Australia.

We encourage you to check out the full site, or browse through a selection of screengrabs below: