· Creates a subscriber
base of 600+ young urban voters in just a week’s time
· For the first time,
voters can question, drum up support or even campaign for deserving candidates
amidst their social media community
New Delhi, India, November 12, 2013: In a bid to mobilise thousands of young urban voters
towards exercising their voting rights, entrepreneur Vikram Nalagampalli
launches Voterite.com, India’s first platform that opens a two-way
communication between voter and candidate. Voterite.com rides on the
exponential rise of social media habits of the young urban voter (18-35 years),
who is typically apathetic towards voting. The platform effectively captures
concerns and dialogues between the voter and candidate, while helping
candidates and their campaigners to drum up support amidst this discerning
target audience. Quite simply, Voterite.com enables the voter and the candidate
to discover each other, and engage in meaningful conversations.
Spurred by the fact that the margin for an electoral win is
sometimes as small as 5000 votes, and armed with research data that reveals
that over 220 MP constituencies can be influenced by social media users, Vikram
realised that the answer to the voting apathy is an online platform that allows
users to communicate, post and share their opinions via social media. Not only
can users question and evaluate claims by candidates and their campaigners, but
they can create and launch their own social media campaigns for candidates they
believe must be elected. Voterite empowers the user to campaign for deserving
candidates in any constituency across the country. Such a campaigner can
solicit support, get updates on new supporters and map the effect of his
campaign. Given the upcoming national elections in 2014, Voterite is well
poised to become a barometer of the urban, young voter, while serving as a key
component in any campaigner’s toolkit.
The advent of social media to influence ‘friends’ and motivate
them to get interested and act upon a cause is well proved and documented world
over. There are 150 million social media users in India alone. Recent successes
of mobilising public opinion via Facebook and Twitter in India (the
anti-corruption movement being one) as well as the rising social media presence
of candidates indicate that social media can possible influence a large section
of urban youth like no other platform can. This is why Voterite is a product of
its times, and is essential in increasingly complex electoral age.
Talking about Voterite, Mr. Vikram Nalagampalli, said, “Quite
honestly, a large mass of voters – especially the upwardly mobile, urban young
voter – does not pay much attention to campaigns during election times. Why,
many of them don’t even vote. To get them to care, engage and participate, we
have to speak their language. Only then can real change – the sort of change
that the recent anti-corruption movement sought – can happen. This is possible
by engaging them on social media and creating an online peer-to-peer platform
that is available to them 24/7. This is why Voterite was created.”
About Vikram
Nalagampalli:
Vikram Nalagampalli is an entrepreneur and a returning NRI with
over 15 years of leadership experience in enabling change leveraging technology
in Corporate America. Genesis of Voterite began with Vikram’s recent
journey back to his home country and when he had to go through a hard
realization of various facts that every citizen is rightfully entitled
for. Vikram decided to leverage his expertise in enabling change using
technology and this time to fix the broken parts of our democracy and figured
out a way to not only empower citizens but also provide a means for citizens to
collectively make a difference in their neighbourhood or constituency within
days and not months or years.
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