From the conference site:
"Marketers and activists alike have taken notice of the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Jascha will discuss the tools and techniques used by the presidential campaign's record breaking online efforts. In addition to telling the inside story of the campaign's online engagement efforts, he will also discuss how these strategies and tools can be applied to a variety of other sectors beyond politics."
Speaker - Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital
The important thing is recognizing that all clients have a bigger issue they're trying to get around.
How do you incorporate those actions around the world into the web site
We have a platform of tools we use, centered around a CRM tool
Early 2007 through present
More than 1B emails to 13 million addresses
>1m sms subscribers
200,000 offline events planned via the web - NOT official campaign events
35,000 local volunteer groups
14.5M YouTube viewing hours - Does NOT include Wil.I.Am - Cost for this viewing time would have probably cost $40-50 million
$770,000,000 35% Offline / 65% Online
Campaign was able to shift from state to state, they were able to already see who had started grass-roots groups and then parachute professionals into the
How did they do it
"Marketers and activists alike have taken notice of the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Jascha will discuss the tools and techniques used by the presidential campaign's record breaking online efforts. In addition to telling the inside story of the campaign's online engagement efforts, he will also discuss how these strategies and tools can be applied to a variety of other sectors beyond politics."
Speaker - Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital
The important thing is recognizing that all clients have a bigger issue they're trying to get around.
How do you incorporate those actions around the world into the web site
We have a platform of tools we use, centered around a CRM tool
Early 2007 through present
More than 1B emails to 13 million addresses
>1m sms subscribers
200,000 offline events planned via the web - NOT official campaign events
35,000 local volunteer groups
14.5M YouTube viewing hours - Does NOT include Wil.I.Am - Cost for this viewing time would have probably cost $40-50 million
$770,000,000 35% Offline / 65% Online
Campaign was able to shift from state to state, they were able to already see who had started grass-roots groups and then parachute professionals into the
How did they do it
ADVERTISEMENT
1. Drive Action
You got to get people to do stuff, we used email as the driver. But you don't want to do what McCain did early. Dense text. You either have to read it or give up. It was disrespectful of people's time. They learned through the campaign
Driving action doesn't end with email. What do they do when they get to your web site. We gave people a plethora of opportunities to contribute to the campaign. (Calls, donate, door-to-door). We really lowered the barrier to entry for taking actions
People spend a lot of time on Facebook "tending the garden" of their social space. However, we didn't want people naval gazing. We reoriented it toward the actions that matter, and showed what you've done for the campaign. The social features were geared around getting your friends to do these things.
Match the action to the medium - Sometimes people are chasing their tail. Often organizations will try to shoehorn what they have into a new app. It rarely works because people rarely use Facebook as an alternative to their browser. We took advantage of Facebook Connect to enable people to post their actions into their news feed. That was an appropriate use of the medium.
iPhone application - The app too the address book sorted people by the area code they were in and prioritized by the most likely state to be critical in the election.
2. Be Authentic
Don't send press releases in an email. It's very impersonal. ** We always encourage people to send email from an actual person - There are real people with a real perspective **
One of his favorites was a copy of an Al Franken hand-written postcard.
Video briefing of David Plouffe - It's low-fi, nerdy, detailed ... Going behind the scenes was what made this successful. They got this window into where the money's going.
Google, ironically, also does this well. Whenever they launch a new product, you always see a person ... "There's no doubt this is not a paid actor." ... it helps cuts through the clutter.
3. Create Ownership
Turn your users into your advocates. Tell the story of the people who are donating. Some have very powerful stories, and get them to say this is why it matters and get them to reach out to their networks. Getting people to pass from passive to advocate is absolutely critical. If you don't get them to do that, you're not going to have the viral success you're looking for.
Traditional grassroots matching defeats the feeling of ownership. Instead, they matched existing donors to non-donors. People were given a form and the ability to send a message saying why they supported Obama. We'd find other who matched the donation, charge the credit cards, and then send the messages from each one back and to communicate with each other. This kind of person to person wasn't about one person writing a big check. It was many many $25 checks working together.
A great example is TiVo - basically a Linux box, and they encouraged people who were hacking and doing interesting things with their products. They'd send a product manager to forums to encourage them, or show engineers talking about upcoming projects. They created a sense of ownership among the hacker community. They were treating them with respect. A whole decorum evolved where people decided you can do whatever you want, but don't steal service. This type of thing is very counter-intuitive for most corporation
- Invite people to weigh in. vote. participate. dispute. argue. be heard.
- Collect user content and reflect back the good stuff
- Solicit ideas from the community ... and actually use them
"People don't need necessarily to see their idea, the just need to see that the community is being listened to. Dell has done a good idea with this."
- Connect people with each other
4. Be Relevant
Any guesses who was the leading fundraiser for Obama? Sarah Palin. Her RNC speech, within 2 hours of her speech, an email in favor of community organizing etc. went to their email network. "You can help ensure that BO will be the next president of the united states by contributing." Raised 11 million within 24 hours. It underscores the importance of moving quickly. Sometimes you have got to ship it as quickly as you can ... there are opportunities that are fleeting.
5. Create a Strong, Open Brand
- Have polished invites
- They centralized the branding design by the new media team. It meant there was tremendous consistency of design, including the campaign plane.
Open Brand - They made all of their high-quality branding assets available to the community for download. People started projecting the logo onto barns and people would trace it and paint it.
Bicycle wheel logo
Shepherd Ferry created iconic art - It was a tremendous asset to the campaign. They didn't recruit Ferry, but after they did start to recruit graphic artists to help raise funds and exposure
6. Measure Everything
"There's often a very low bar to start using data."
- Email
- Online advertising
- Engagement
- Fundraising
- Persuasion
- Election Activities
Send test mails with different subject lines to smaller groups. Takes a couple hours. The ROI totally justifies it
Obama sent five different emails with different content and give always before deciding the car magnet was the most popular
You got to get people to do stuff, we used email as the driver. But you don't want to do what McCain did early. Dense text. You either have to read it or give up. It was disrespectful of people's time. They learned through the campaign
Driving action doesn't end with email. What do they do when they get to your web site. We gave people a plethora of opportunities to contribute to the campaign. (Calls, donate, door-to-door). We really lowered the barrier to entry for taking actions
People spend a lot of time on Facebook "tending the garden" of their social space. However, we didn't want people naval gazing. We reoriented it toward the actions that matter, and showed what you've done for the campaign. The social features were geared around getting your friends to do these things.
Match the action to the medium - Sometimes people are chasing their tail. Often organizations will try to shoehorn what they have into a new app. It rarely works because people rarely use Facebook as an alternative to their browser. We took advantage of Facebook Connect to enable people to post their actions into their news feed. That was an appropriate use of the medium.
iPhone application - The app too the address book sorted people by the area code they were in and prioritized by the most likely state to be critical in the election.
2. Be Authentic
Don't send press releases in an email. It's very impersonal. ** We always encourage people to send email from an actual person - There are real people with a real perspective **
One of his favorites was a copy of an Al Franken hand-written postcard.
Video briefing of David Plouffe - It's low-fi, nerdy, detailed ... Going behind the scenes was what made this successful. They got this window into where the money's going.
Google, ironically, also does this well. Whenever they launch a new product, you always see a person ... "There's no doubt this is not a paid actor." ... it helps cuts through the clutter.
3. Create Ownership
Turn your users into your advocates. Tell the story of the people who are donating. Some have very powerful stories, and get them to say this is why it matters and get them to reach out to their networks. Getting people to pass from passive to advocate is absolutely critical. If you don't get them to do that, you're not going to have the viral success you're looking for.
Traditional grassroots matching defeats the feeling of ownership. Instead, they matched existing donors to non-donors. People were given a form and the ability to send a message saying why they supported Obama. We'd find other who matched the donation, charge the credit cards, and then send the messages from each one back and to communicate with each other. This kind of person to person wasn't about one person writing a big check. It was many many $25 checks working together.
A great example is TiVo - basically a Linux box, and they encouraged people who were hacking and doing interesting things with their products. They'd send a product manager to forums to encourage them, or show engineers talking about upcoming projects. They created a sense of ownership among the hacker community. They were treating them with respect. A whole decorum evolved where people decided you can do whatever you want, but don't steal service. This type of thing is very counter-intuitive for most corporation
- Invite people to weigh in. vote. participate. dispute. argue. be heard.
- Collect user content and reflect back the good stuff
- Solicit ideas from the community ... and actually use them
"People don't need necessarily to see their idea, the just need to see that the community is being listened to. Dell has done a good idea with this."
- Connect people with each other
4. Be Relevant
Any guesses who was the leading fundraiser for Obama? Sarah Palin. Her RNC speech, within 2 hours of her speech, an email in favor of community organizing etc. went to their email network. "You can help ensure that BO will be the next president of the united states by contributing." Raised 11 million within 24 hours. It underscores the importance of moving quickly. Sometimes you have got to ship it as quickly as you can ... there are opportunities that are fleeting.
5. Create a Strong, Open Brand
- Have polished invites
- They centralized the branding design by the new media team. It meant there was tremendous consistency of design, including the campaign plane.
Open Brand - They made all of their high-quality branding assets available to the community for download. People started projecting the logo onto barns and people would trace it and paint it.
Bicycle wheel logo
Shepherd Ferry created iconic art - It was a tremendous asset to the campaign. They didn't recruit Ferry, but after they did start to recruit graphic artists to help raise funds and exposure
6. Measure Everything
"There's often a very low bar to start using data."
- Online advertising
- Engagement
- Fundraising
- Persuasion
- Election Activities
Send test mails with different subject lines to smaller groups. Takes a couple hours. The ROI totally justifies it
Obama sent five different emails with different content and give always before deciding the car magnet was the most popular
