7 News Election Alerts is Text & Picture Message service which ran during the 2010 Federal Election to compliment the coverage of Your Call 2010 on Channel 7. The system provided Picture Message results to consumers and allowed them to control their subscription via a series of simple Text Message commands.
Brief
The system needed to leverage the existing Telstra COSI platform, providing subscribers with almost instant data results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as well as the predictions from the Channel 7 Election Analysis System. The service also needed to handle high volumes of outgoing Picture Messages and process incoming Text Message commands for an opt-in subscription service to consumers.
Specific requirements included:
- Allow users to register for individual election seats and request live updates via a series SMS commands.
- Provide flexibility to allow users to set message cut off times and cancel requested alerts.
- Create dynamic images from LIVE election results for delivery via MMS.
- Provide statistics for MMS sent, SMS sent and total seat subscribers.
- Allow the creation and delivery of messages to individual seat subscribers or globally to all subscribers.
- Automatically process the Australian Electoral Commission election result and prediction feeds to provide live results to subscribers.
Solution
A meeting with Channel 7 and Telstra defined the requirements for the new system and Raw Ideas designed a SMS Subscription and MMS Delivery Service to fill these requirements. The new system featured:
- An easy to use message creation form that pulled live data into the body of the message and dynamically generated the MMS image based on election results.
- User-requested automatic MMS update responses.
- Integration into Telstra’s existing COSI platform.
- Reporting tools providing automatic live reporting based on total subscribers, subscribers to individual seats, messages sent to individual seats and individual campaign statistics.
- Automated XML parsers to pull the election result feeds from the Australian Electoral Commission and supply data to the message system.
The system ran for the election week, allowing users to subscribe in the lead up to the election and receive messages throughout the night providing them with individualised information about their selected electorate.