Many candidates running for Toronto city council will do anything to garner a following — often turning to social media as an aid. However, with anonymity so prevalent on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the discourse during election campaigns can turn volatile.
Running this year in Ward 4 — Parkdale-High Park, Siri Agrell decided she wanted to do better, creating what she believed to be a better — and more positive — online presence, without social media.
— Jeremy Honess
jeremy.honess@gmail.com / @JeremyHoness / Portfolio
A Groundbreaking Campaign
How Toronto council candidate Siri Agrell changed the game with her engaging online — but off social media — campaign.
Photo by Parviz Foto on Unsplash
Candidates running for Toronto city council often run a campaign based on their proposed policies and plans for their ward. However, this campaign style frequently falls short of actively engaging their constituency. Most candidates running for municipal office have a set agenda which rarely accommodates any kind of deviation.
The Ward 4 race in Toronto’s recent municipal election came down to three leading candidates: the incumbent, city councillor Gord Perks, Community Activist Chemi Lhamo and former journalist and advisor to Mayor John Tory, Siri Agrell. Each candidate ran different styles of campaigns, but Agrell’s charted an unconventional course.
Siri Agrell, though she ultimately lost, ran a campaign free from the standard cookie-cutter political campaign strategies. Agrell deleted all of her social media accounts and replaced them with an innovative, interactive website that recreated the experience of meeting her at the door.
“I tried to think about the information people want and the best way to get it. How do you replicate some of the, more impactful forms of communication online? So what is the new advertising? How do you replicate the experience at the door, where you actually get to really look people in the eye and level with them? How do you do that online?” said Agrell.
Her campaign website was a joint venture between Agrell and the Toronto-based internet marketing service Day Shift Digital, which provided Agrell with new digital tools to add to her website to enhance the user experience.
“We incorporated a couple of different digital tools. So I worked with a company called StoryTap, which is a female-founded Canadian technology company that allows you to answer questions via video and so we embedded that on the website. So people asked me questions and I‘d get a prompt and I could answer,” said Agrell.
Agrell explained that she wanted to run a campaign and a platform where she could engage with the community meaningful way. By design, her campaign and her website highlighted and addressed the issues both she and her constituency believed weren’t adequately being prioritized.
Toronto Star Journalist Ben Spurr said, “When I covered that race, I went to her campaign office, and I was actually pretty impressed that the, like, local level of detail they had of issues in the ward. I remember seeing that they had a big map on the wall of the campaign headquarters that had sticky notes [all] over and I think that it was saying that, in this neighbourhood traffic is the big issue in this neighbourhood, is that something else, it's high rents or something. And so she really seemed to have spoken to a lot of people, you know, tried to understand what their concerns were at, like a very micro level.”
Spurr ultimately believes that her lack of social media presence, however, didn’t really play a huge role in the impact of the results of the election.
“I don't know, ultimately, if that, you know, made much of a difference. I think that social media presence can have almost as like, distorting effect on what's happening in a campaign…So I don't know how decisive that was,” said Spurr.
Spurr also believes that though Agrell’s website was different and perhaps more engaging, it ultimately fell on deaf ears.
“I think in a municipal election where very few people vote, no matter how kind of exciting or different your website is, I think it is probably not going to swing it for you either way,” said Spurr.
Agrell ultimately believes that her campaign was hindered by a lack of early outreach and support for her campaign. Her campaign had a following that wasn’t big enough to sustain a campaign with no additional aids like social media. But Agrell doesn’t regret removing herself from social media.
“I think a failure on my part to enumerate the cost of the status quo — I think that there's a lack of understanding in the ward about the true impacts of the approach of the incumbent,” said Agrell.
Agrell doesn’t believe, however, that her campaign strategy was a failure.
“In terms of the social media piece, I hear this [message] with people all the time — actually reconsidering how we talk to people and how we engage and how we regulate things at least on the local level. There are different ways to motivate it and I think we have to try and push for that.”
🎧 Listen to the Humber Views podcast episode at the top of this issue to learn more about Agrell’s strategy
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Jeremy Honess is a student journalist currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Journalism degree program at Humber College. Currently, he is interested in covering political issues at the municipal level. In addition to his vested interest in municipal politics, Jeremy is also interested in the automotive industry and keeps tabs on the latest automotive trends.
Siri Agrell for Ward 4: Campaigning With a Twist — and Without Social Media