Naveen Patnaik, the Chief Minister of Odisha state and chief of the Biju Janta Dal, found himself in this position in 2009.  The Lok Sabha and Odisha State Assembly elections were scheduled to run at the same time, making campaigning more challenging. With the two campaigns running concurrently, political parties and politicians found themselves facing a tough battle of logistics. Apart from this, with so many aspirants in the fray, it became very difficult for parties and politicians to make their message stand out. As political observers very well know, voter fatigue is a real phenomenon, and faced by a bombardment of messages, many people just ‘tune out’. In this case, any party that can make its message heard loud and clear by the electorate stands to gain a major advantage. But as we’ve seen, most political parties fail to recognise the importance of clear and timely communication, and instead, prefer to rely upon traditional methods – like every one else!

However, Mr. Patnaik was well-aware of this issue during his party’s campaign. Realizing that conveying his message to the masses swiftly and efficiently could end up making a big difference to the final tally, he decided to utilize cloud telephony for ensuring his message stood out. He turned to Knowlarity co-founder and COO Pallav Pandey. An engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur,  Pallav is perhaps one of India’s first and best-known political consultants. That eas the time when Knowlarity’s Supercaller cloud dialling system was used in making sure Mr. Patnaik’s message stood out from the cacophony of a twin campaign.

Using Supercaller, Mr. Patnaik set up a system in which he could reach out to all his voters in the form of his recorded voice, adding personal touch. Then, these  were relayed to prospective voters automatically. Within a short span of a week, Naveen managed to reach out to over one lakh voters – an unprecedented feat of using technology to disseminate up-to-date information. And did this novel way of using cloud telephony work? Well, the BJD won 14 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats from Odisha, and 103 of the 147 state Assembly seats – an overwhelming success by any standard!