There has long been a need for a competitor to GetUp. I’ve been involved in at least two attempts which have gone nowhere. Now Cory Bernardi is giving it a go.

Good luck Cory, but the omens are not encouraging. For starters, you need to get some professionalism into your operation. Finding the site is a bit difficult. Didn’t show up in any Google searches (well it may have, but so far down I couldn’t be bothered finding it, which in the online world is the same thing).

And then registering www.conservative.org.au is not the smartest thing you can do when domain names like www.conservative.com.au and www.conservatives.com.au are owned by competing organisations. I almost signed-up for the Australian Conservative Party, before realising my mistake.

Plus, what’s with the name. I know Conservatives are sort of boring and reliable and reassuring, but can’t you come up with something a bit more exciting? This just doesn’t have the optics right. If you are going to run an insurgent organisation, it needs to have the feel of a revolution about it, not a museum.

And what does your organisation have to do with the Conservative Leadership Foundation? It’s good to to send out confirmation emails, but you want the sender’s name to be extremely closely identified with the organisation your contact thinks they’ve signed-up to.

Surveys are good. I like them. But I was hoping you’d be running some sort of campaign when I hit on your site. It almost looks like you’re waiting for me to tell you what I’m interested in so you can focus group your approach.

Getup didn’t get going by waiting around to find out what the audience wanted. It didn’t have to – it already knew. You’re not running a mainstream political party here where the aim is to get 50%+1 of the vote. What you’re after is a highly motivated niche.

And that niche is going to be pretty much like you. So talk to yourself, and that’s about all the market research you need to do in the first place.

These types of organisations are also transactional. You’ve been to MacDonald’s right? You don’t have to join MacDonald’s to get a burger, you just have to be interested in one of the burgers they have and be prepared to pay for it.

That’s all MacDonald’s asks of you. They don’t even care if you never buy a cappucino at McCafe. That’s just how you roll. They’ll make money out of whatever you do want to buy.

GetUp is like that. I might buy into their refugee campaigns, but not really give a toss about the Great Barrier Reef. They can wear that because plenty of other people are interested in the reef. They don’t need 100%. And they’ll take me on refugees.

So start a campaign. You’ve got nothing to sell on your website at the moment. As you run successful campaigns you’ll gather more and more people. They’ll sign-up on a campaign by campaign basis, and they’ll also tell you what they think you should be doing and soon you’ll have more campaigns than you can handle.

Just some quick advice Cory (and yes, I know, I’ve tried this twice and got nowhere, so I could be wrong) but scrub what you’re doing now, get a new funkier name, a unique URL, and hire a young turk or two who really get the Internet.

GetUp needs a rival, and I really hope you can do something. But what you’ve got isn’t it…yet.