But this year we’re back, this time with a panel that we hope will prove helpful to geeks of both the design and techie varieties – both camps are in full force at SXSW’s Interactive conference, which is a pure, 24/7, all-out geekfest – who are looking to bring their values into their paid work, whether it’s by learning to work with clients in the nonprofit sector, creating apps that help mission-driven organizations work more effectively, or infusing some environmental or social-justice savvy into their workplaces. The panel’s called “Socially Conscious Geek: Makin’ Money While Doin’ Good”, and it takes place Saturday, March 13^th.

The topic was inspired by a topic our friend Noah Scalin (of Skull-A-Day and Another Limited Rebellion fame) spoke about at the 2009 HOW Conference. His focus was more on graphic design, since that’s his area of expertise, but when I asked him about riffing on his ideas for an interactive design audience, he shared his materials with me with typical generosity. (This is a guy who lives and breathes a DIY, share-and-share-alike mentality that a lot of designers could learn from. But that’s a topic for another day.)

This time I’ll be attending the conference solo, while Emira spends some time with her new baby; my co-facilitator for the session is Leif Utne, a friend and colleague who works for Zanby, a software company that specializes in supporting online social communities for change. Leif’s background includes a stint as the publisher of Worldchanging.org, and lots of experience building online communities; he’s also a journalist, activist and social entrepreneur.  Zanby is used to support The UpTake, a web video community that among other things was heavily involved in documenting the RNC and DNC prior to the 2008 election, and was also engaged in citizen vote monitoring during the election. He brings both amazing facilitation skills as well as a solid understanding of how businesses and nonprofits can work together in mutually beneficial ways.

We’ll be conducting our session in a highly interactive, inclusive format called a Core Conversation: Leif and I will be kick-starting the discussion and planting some seeds, but the idea is that whoever shows up will have a chance to step forward and contribute questions and ideas – so I’m really excited to see how it develops.

We’re hoping to address questions like:

• What is a socially conscious geek?
• How can I specialize in socially conscious work and earn a living wage?
• What are some of the unique opportunities and challenges of specializing in socially conscious work?
• What is the difference between non-profit and no-profit clients?
• How do I make the transition from corporate work to working with non-profit and/or mission-driven clients?
• What is the “triple bottom line” approach to business?
• What are some examples of alternative business models that are emerging among socially conscious geeks?
• How is socially conscious work different than “green” work?
• What are some examples of clients I might be able to work with as a socially conscious geek?
• How should I market myself to values-driven clients? Is it different from marketing to corporate clients?

Ultimately, though, the decisions about what we cover will rest with whoever shows up. So please help us spread the word – and if you’ll be at SXSW, we’d love to see you there!

The first is an iPhone application I discovered recently, called The Extraordinaries. The Extraordinaries is a micro-volunteering application that enables iPhone users like myself to spend a couple of minutes here and there (I use it when I’m waiting at bus stops, or standing in line at the sandwich shop) tagging images for art galleries and libraries. (The current list of organizations who are benefiting from the service includes the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as groups from New Zealand, France, Portugal, Australia and Holland.)

Tagging — which is all I’ve been able to do via the app so far — is actually only the tip of the iceberg. The Extraordinaries’ website lists the following possibilities for future development:

• Translating a nonprofit’s Website into a foreign language
• Recording the GPS location of potholes and city infrastructure issues for municipalities
• Identifying birds for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• Tagging images for the Smithsonian
• Transcribing ancient texts for ReCaptcha
• Reviewing congressional bills for hidden pork
• Fact checking for reporters

I’m really excited about where this could go. I encourage my fellow iPhone users to check it out — and if your organization could benefit from this kind of micro-volunteering, why not apply to be a pilot partner?

The second story I want to share may already be familiar to those of you in the classical music community, but for the rest of you: Did you know there’s an opera being composed on Twitter?

Yes, you read that right. So far there are 7 acts, and the entire libretto has been written in 140-character bursts by Twitter users. From what I can make out, the plot is rather serpentine, but holy heck is this a fun project! Talk about crowdsourcing your content! Anyone can tweet a line of the opera by using the hashtag #youropera, or sending their tweet to @youropera.

The whole thing is a project of the Royal Opera House in London, rather a grande dame of the classical scene, known as a fancy-pants venue for ballet & opera. The Twitter opera is part of their Deloitte Ignite series, a 3-day festival that’s a smidge more avant-garde than the Opera House’s usual fare — but still, I have to give them props for going out on a limb. A Twitter opera might seem a risky venture for far smaller, edgier companies, and I applaud the ROH for stepping up and giving it a shot.

And you know, even if your company isn’t ready to let your Twitter followers write your next show, you can always follow the example of Next to Normal, the Broadway musical whose rise to success seems to have been at least partially fuelled by its clever use of Twitter.

What’s next? All I know is that the arts community is sure to keep uncovering innovative ways to use social media to create, connect and inspire. More news as it happens…

My focus tends to skew towards music, and classical music in particular, so you’ll definitely notice that bias here. I’ve also tried to limit the list to groups who are twittering actively, and conversing rather than simply broadcasting one-way announcements.

• Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC*: Rachel Lowry at the Chan is doing a fantastic job of highlighting all kinds of interesting arts news, as well as sharing information about their upcoming events.
• Many of the big performing arts groups in town are making good use of Twitter, including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and The Arts Club. But the leader of the pack may be Ling Chan at Vancouver Opera, who has been doing a bang-up job of extending the opera company’s reach beyond the usual classical-music suspects. The opera’s Twitter feed features fun & interesting opera news, as well as exclusive offers for Vancouver Opera fans. In related social media news, the organization has been reaching out to bloggers as well, through their innovative Blogger Night at the Opera.
• World-renowned men’s choir Chor Leoni* has a great feed, which I believed is managed by arts marketer extraordinaire Bruce Hoffman. My favourite recent tweet from them pointed to a video of Bobby McFerrin leading the World Science Festival audience through a fascinating musical exercise.
  
• Pacific Cinematheque offers a delightful twist on the self-promotional announcement: each time they mention a film they’re screening, they include a quote from the script. (A recent example: “‘You’re wearing the wrong shade of lipstick, Mister.’ THE BLUE DAHLIA 9:20pm”.)
• Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, the CBC’s weekly opera show hosted by Bill Richardson (one of my all-time favourite Vancouverites), is relatively new to Twitter, but already making a splash with their contests to summarize opera plots in 140 characters.
• musica intima*, the a cappella (and conductorless) vocal ensemble with whom I used to sing, has a lively Twitter feed (though it seems to be on summer hiatus) written by two staff members and one of the group’s twelve singers. I particularly enjoyed the updates they posted while the group was on tour.
• The Dance Centre’s Twitter feed covers all things dance-related. I love that they write about everything from serious dance news to the latest episode of So You Think You Can Dance.
• For a couple of great examples of how festivals (whose “seasons” are short-lived by nature), check out the Vancouver Folk Fest, Vancouver Jazz Fest, and DOXA feeds.
• Pacific Baroque Orchestra is another Twitter newbie, but they’re posting actively about baroque & classical-era music and joining in the conversation.
• Finally, one of my favourite Twitter feeds comes from the Vancouver Public Library. They keep me up to date on everything from special collections I may not have heard about, to author readings, to branch closures. And they’re fun and funny.

Who have I missed? I’d love to hear of other examples. Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

(* = Raised Eyebrow clients)

We spend a lot of time talking about the beef of email marketing: perfectly clean copy, clear calls-to-action, highly scannable designs, solid coding, and the right offer. But there’s more to a great burger than a great patty.

A recent Crate & Barrel email included in our Email Design Look Book provides the answer to the missing ingredient. The May 1 email promoted knives with a minimalistic design that used silhouette photography of the knives and simple blocks of product information. The design is nice and clean, but what makes it exceptional is the ribbon of lettuce used as the bottom border of the primary message block. Smith-Harmon designer Ellen Bolotin, who brought the email to our attention, says that “the lettuce on the bottom just makes me laugh.”

That’s what so many emails are missing — a little, cool crunch-a-little lettuce. Most emails are all business, all beef. While effective, there’s something a little boring and joyless about them.

Many people view their inboxes as stressful places, so delivering a little unexpected delight is well worth the effort — and likely to make opening your email feel less like a chore.

I couldn’t agree more. I spend a lot of my time reading emails, tweets, Facebook status messages, website copy, and fundraising letters — and the ones I remember definitely include content that is not strictly necessary, but that adds enormous flavour, personality and charm. When you take an all-business approach to copywriting (and design, for that matter), you miss an opportunity to connect with your community through humour, delight, and serendipity.

Here are just a few of my personal favourite lettuce-delivery vehicles online:

• John Richards, the morning DJ at KEXP.org (the Seattle-based radio station that keeps me at least somewhat in the loop, musically), sends out a daily email to his listeners with his playlist, upcoming live shows in the Seattle area, and several extras ranging from a Link of the Day to a news story filed under the heading, “The End is Near”. (Here’s a recent entry in the latter category: “Andrew Mizsak, clean your room! Father calls cops on adult son, member of the Bedford school board, for refusing his chores.”)
• BC Business magazine has made an intriguing shift in the past year or two, and here’s one sign of why I care much more about them than ever before: Digital editor John Buchner kicks off the publication’s Twitter feed every morning with a daily haiku. Like this one: “June’s last slanted sun / And sharp air, she breathes, and her / heels click on the road. [Good Monday morning.]“
• Years ago, SF Gate columnist Mark Morford crafted a daily email newsletter called “The Morning Fix,” which was a favourite of mine. It included a rotating series of delightful diversions, such as the daily Mullet Haiku (contributed by readers) and a word-of-the-day feature that was notable mostly for its hysterically funny usage examples, most of which were send-ups of then-VPOTUS Dick Cheney.
• BUST magazine used to have a fun feature in their e-newsletters — sadly, it’s gone now — called “Shebonics”, where they’d insert a quote from a famous woman, usually on the subject of feminism or female empowerment. (Sample: “I used to think Hollywood was a very disorganized place run by very evil people. Now I think it’s a really disorganized place run by a lot of evil people and a few really great ones who somehow found their way in there. I still would never live there.” Sarah Polley in Interview)

Quirky, personal, funny, or just odd — so long as it’s not competing with the “beef” part of your message (or perhaps “protein” would be more inclusive?), I recommend spicing up your writing with an extra or two. In a medium that struggles to avoid being impersonal, your copywriting is one of the things that can really help you stand out from the crowd and connect with your readers at a gut, emotional level. It seems to me the key is to give yourself permission to share something unusual about yourself; obviously it needs to be something you’re comfortable sharing, but you need to push past the inner voice telling you that nobody cares (or that people will think you’re weird), and remember that your quirks just make you more lovable. And don’t we all just want to be loved?

• Search Engine Journal’s post includes a comparison table that is handy dandy. I would point out, however, that while it is true you can “message all members” with both as they say, there is a notable difference between messaging your Page’s fans vs. your Group members. With the former, the message goes out in the form of an “update” which can be easily ignored by users (if I’m any indication, they can in fact be routinely ignored). The latter, offers direct inbox sending options, though only for groups under 1,200 members (or perhaps 5,000 I’ve found conflicting info on that number).
• Advergirl’s post lists out the pros and cons of each, playing champion and devil’s advocate for both options.

The summary seems to be that for a long standing, more engaged approach with a community you want a Page, not a Group, but check out the comparisons and decide for yourself.

(As a side note, you can turn an existing Facebook Group into a Page, but you need to be the admin contact for the original group, and you need to contact Facebook directly to do it. No sense of what the ETA on turn around time for that is).

• We’ll lose control of our messaging.
• We’ll lose control of our content.
• We’ll get too much negative / problematic feedback.
• There’s no way to measure the results we’ll get.
• We can’t afford to allocate budget, time, and/or staff resources to this stuff.

I’m planning to write a series of blog posts addressing these fears one by one, but I want to start with the first one: the fear that by opening your organization up with Web 2.0 tools, your message will become diluted or distorted. This fear reflects an assumption that many of us in the communications & marketing industries (at least, those of us over the age of 25) grew up with — namely, that your message is something you can control in a top-down, across-the-board fashion.

Now, I like a set of good branding guidelines as well as the next designer, but one of the things that made me fall in love with the web was its remix culture. This is a medium where everyone has a voice, and wants to use it — where the paradox of our deeply human desire to simultaneously experience both a sense of perfect uniqueness and of belonging to a community is playing out in some very interesting ways.

Let’s take, for example, the personal blog. Someone carves out a space to talk about whatever subjects strike their fancy, and posts written, photographic, audio, or video content to a website, in a journal format. It is of course technically possible to write a blog that contains no links to other websites, or even that is closed to the public — but that’s the exception rather than the rule, and most blogs balance personal expression with community-building, via links within posts, blogrolls, and so on. Bloggers reference the stuff that inspires them, linking to other blogs, websites, books, you name it. And in doing so, they create a sort of hybrid web space that is both entirely personal, and which connects them up to the various people, organizations, and sites with which they feel an affinity.

Bloggers may be writing about your organization already. (Let’s hope so!) And if they are, you can be sure that there is already conversation out there in the world that you have lost control over. But the question you should be asking yourself is not, “How can we gain control of our messaging?” but rather, “How can we participate in this conversation?”

Slide by David Wilcox

[Above slide from David Wilcox's excellent blog post "We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either".]

There’s a pretty deep shift in terms of frameworks there, especially for organizations with roots that reach back before the Web as we know it was born. So how to we explain the concept to those fearful of change?

Here’s one idea. Something clicked for me when I saw this fabulous line from a slidecast from Steve Bridger:

As supporters increasingly want to mix giving their time, money, activism & influence… the time has come for charities to re-structure to reflect this.

The key word for me in that sentence is “influence.” Time, money & activism are the contributions the nonprofit sector has relied upon, historically. Influence, though, is new territory. There are debates raging everywhere about how to measure it, for starters. And there’s still a lot of resistance among organizations to opening up to multidimensional conversation with constituents, rather than communicating via the broadcast-media approach they’ve used for decades (distributing newsletters, sending direct mail, and so on).

There is, of course, a wide range of things nonprofits can work on to allow supporters to assert their influence more easily. One that Bridger touches upon is facilitating conversations that are scalable — for example, if your organization is mounting a campaign, spend some time crafting messages that can be passed on to the recipient’s network and still make sense when they’re coming from an intermediary — and explain to your supporters how spreading the word will help. Avaaz does a great job of this; they even include a dynamic calculator on all their petitions that tells prospective signers how many signatures have been provided so far, and how many remain to reach the target number.

Help people meet their individual needs through your work. People like to feel special, and they also like to feel part of something bigger than themselves; help them experience both by giving them ways to contribute their unique voices to your campaign. If it’s a letter-writing campaign, give them point-form notes and invite them to write their own emails; or follow the example of some of the big health charities and allow people to create their own fundraising web pages they can send around to their networks.

The risk, yes, is that you lose control over your message. But that control has been eroding for decades, anyway. So let’s focus on the opportunity, which Bridger sums up succinctly as follows:

Real engagements = when people do things for the cause you didn’t ask them to do.

Related links:

• We Are Media wiki entry for Dealing with Resistance
• Top 5 Fears About Social Media (and the 5 “counter-fears”)
• David Wilcox: “We can’t do that – and they mustn’t do it either”

To summarize Matt’s post, if you haven’t already headed over there to read it, he describes a recent purchase he made and how he came across the company he ultimately bought from. Matt was looking to upgrade the swingset in his backyard, his path to purchase went something like this: follow friend on Twitter > one day that friend happens to tweet about the Obama’s buying new swingset for Whitehouse > Matt, because he’s currently interested in swingsets, checks out friend’s blog post that contains more details about the swingset, including a link to the manufacturer of said soon to be presidential swingset > website for swingset vendor is particularly well designed and easy to use > Matt buys swingset.

Matt’s conclusion for this is that, well I’ll just quote him here:

“there are thousands of people all over twitter and blogs that think throwing thousands of dollars at people that describe themselves as a “marketing guru” is the way to increase their company sales. I’m here to say I think that may very well be a waste of money, time, and energy.”

He goes on to conclude the article with the following:

“So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.”

And I agree. Wholeheartedly. But does that mean I think you shouldn’t participate in Social Media as a marketing pursuit be it for a company, a non-profit, a campaign or what have you? No. I do think however — and I’m really not alone in this — that you should see your participation in Social Media — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — as a way to extend your reach, build your community and engage in conversation with customers. And, as you do that — and do it well — you will find that you start getting good Earned Social Media and it will pay off in droves in sales, participation, supporters etc. That means not using Social Media to just let people know directly about your products, sales, fundraising campaigns etc. In fact, you should probably limit how much of that you do through Social Media channels altogether as it detracts from the community building side of things.

I’ve been advocating for clients to get earned online media for many a year now. I think it is by far one of the most effective online strategies to boost sales/supporters/donations etc. and lucky for you it is pretty easy to get. Easier to get than earned media offline anyway, as the barrier to entry is really low. A review on a blog, or an interview with a blogger is a great entry point to earned online media. Obviously, depending on the reach of the blogger or an online magazine, the impact will vary widely, but much like offline earned media it tends to be the kind of thing that builds and grows overtime. With Social Media you’re looking for the same thing. People retweeting a useful resource you post online, or perhaps even better people tweeting links directly to a blog post you’ve written on a company or organizational blog, or another page on your website will help drive pre-qualified (already interested) traffic to your website. As Matt’s scenario displays, that one pre-qualified lead — he was already particularly interested in swingsets — will be far more valuable than thousands of curious folks who just happen to click on a link from your Twitter feed.

The final piece from Matt’s blog post that I want to point to — and I’m aware I’ve got a huge bias here — is a comment he makes about the vendor having “a great website” which, combined with a local lot where he could test out the playground in person, ultimately helped to seal the deal. If when he followed that link he hadn’t been able to quickly and easily get the info that he wanted, he probably would have clicked away and this story would never have been written. When you’re investing in Social Media — be it dollars or simply the valuable time of staff used to tweet and updating Facebook — you are ulitmately investing in driving traffic to your website. If your website isn’t in top form, you may want to spend those Social Media marketing resources on fixing things up at your primary online communications point first.

Don’t be tricked into thinking that members demand certain features and functionality. Members aren’t really interested in the technology behind a community – they are far more interested in the people and human activity taking place there.

I’ve been compiling notes from the various conferences I’ve been at over the last few weeks and plan to post them up here, many centre around the common thread that the technologies available to us today are ultimately there to support larger visions, they are not in and of themselves the final prize. Whether that translates into pouring resources into supporting people over new technology, or using social media to support and enhance campaigns but not as a campaign itself, the technology can’t be the leader in the equation however shiny and cool it may be.

If so, I recommend you check out Net Tuesday’s free event next Tuesday (details are posted on both Meetup and Facebook — choose your poison). Here are the details:

Mini Social Media Camp for Nonprofits & Other Do Gooders!
When: Tuesday, April 28, 5:30-8:00 PM
Where: Workspace – #400 – 21 Water St, Vancouver, BC

Topics may include:

• How can my organization use Facebook to be more awesome? Should I use Pages or Groups?
• How can I use Twitter to find new supporters?
• How can I use free analytics tools to measure my success?
• How can my NGO use free Google adwords?

You’ll get a chance to pick three topics; each topic will be discussed in a 30-minute breakout group. I’ll be leading sessions on Twitter!

Please spread the word to friends and colleagues; I know there are a lot of people in the nonprofit sector who can benefit from this stuff!

Let’s start with the latter and work our way backwards…

Collecting and Mining the Data

Okay, the fundraisers and marketers out there will instantly grasp the value of a good database, but for the rest of you who are wondering what the heck is so interesting about crunching data, here are a couple of examples of things the Obama campaign was able to do because of its database:

• The campaign had instant access to over 10 million people via email. (Sidebar from the Washington Post story that reported that number: “The list is considered so valuable that the Obama camp briefly offered it as collateral during a cash-flow crunch late in the campaign.”) The Nation puts the list’s size (which they estimate at 11 million) in context: “It enables direct communication at a remarkable scale. The next President can instantly address 16 percent of his national supporters, based on the popular vote. To put it another way, the list dwarfs the audience of all the nightly cable news shows combined.”
• Volunteers who signed up to do phone canvassing could easily access lists of potential supporters, or non-voters, in their area by signing up to my.BarackObama.com, Obama’s social networking site, and entering their zip code. As a result the commitment threshold for volunteers was very low — they could sign up to make a half-hour’s worth of phone calls to neighbours if that’s all the time they could afford.
• On election day, one of the key tasks volunteers perform is to contact supporters (in this case, registered Democrats), both by phone and in person, to get out the vote. In the past, these volunteers would be provided with a full list of supporters, and they had no idea who had already voted; this time out, the Obama campaign tasked their poll checkers with a new responsibility: As one volunteer describes it, “We took the real-time results of who actually showed up at the polls and fed it back to the campaign so that they could adjust their GOTV [Get Out The Vote] calls and canvassing as the day wore on. Every time someone came in to vote, their names were entered into a computer system and their names disappeared or escaped, Houdini-like, from the call and walk lists.” The project was dubbed “Project Houdini,” and one can only imagine how much more efficient volunteers’ efforts were as a result.

So that’s what a good database can help you do. But the key to establishing a useful database is to set up the infrastructure well ahead of time, so that when the time comes to start adding names and profiles, you’ve got a framework that will stand up to rigorous road testing.

When it comes to political organizing, most parties and candidates start out with a pre-existing database of some kind, and often it’s a Frankenstein-like beast that’s been cobbled together over a series of elections. It’s critical to preserve the data that already exists, but usually that data is in need of a serious clean-up, and the database structure itself (from determining what data gets collected, to the kinds of queries that can be run on it) is typically a good candidate for a makeover. But more often than not, in the high-pressure, fast-paced campaign environment, data cleanup and database restructuring are tossed by the wayside.

Not so for Obama’s campaign database:

Howard Dean’s DNC brought the party in the 21st century. Under his direction, the party was able to create what the Republican Party already had — a single national voter file interface. The DNC struck data-sharing agreements with state parties, got everything uniform (more or less.) It spent tens of millions of dollars in 2005 and 2006 building this, much to the consternation of the incoming chief of staff (Rahm Emanuel) of the man who benefited the most from that money (Barack Obama.)
[Emphasis mine.]

Here’s what stopped me dead in my tracks when I read that: The work was done BEFORE election campaigning began. Someone with a vision (maybe Dean himself, given the groundbreaking nature of his 2004 online campaign, but more probably a group of people) made their database a priority during the post-election lull, when probably very few people were actually using the data — and when in fact, very few people were even thinking about it. That’s some solid long-term planning.

See this blog post from The Atlantic (from whence the above quote comes) for more details on the Obama campaign’s back-end setup; the breakdown is fascinating for those of us who gasp at the monumental task of organizing the amount of data the Obama campaign had at its disposal. And there’s another interesting piece about the daunting database cleanup process here.

Staffing Up

Let’s talk about staff resources for a moment. When our clients ask us about the costs of various technologies — whether we’re talking about video, podcasting, Facebook groups, or Twitter feeds — they frequently overlook the ongoing cost of the staff resources they will require to produce and deliver content through these various channels. The Obama website, email marketing, and associated social media channels were very well-managed; so what did they cost, staff-wise? We don’t have a dollar figure, but we can tell you that the Obama campaign employed 95 staff for its internet campaign.

So who was behind the campaign?

Answer #1: Some of the most brilliant and experienced minds available.

Blue State Digital, a company founded by veterans of the Howard Dean campaign (and which has honed its chops on a ton of Democratic political campaigns), provided the major back-end framework for the website, and two of the company’s co-founders key staff*, Macon Phillips and Joe Rospars, left Blue State to work full-time on the Obama campaign. (* Corrected @ 11:46 am, 1 Dec 08 – Rospars was indeed a co-founder but Phillips was not.)

The Obama website’s social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com (AKA MyBO), was set up under the guidance of no less than Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook.

That’s just a start to the list of great minds who came together for this project; there’s a full list of key Obama staffers here for those interested in more details. Some fun stuff there for the real political geeks — you can start seeing the strands that connect various people and campaigns. (It’s also here that I discovered the name of Obama’s chief speechwriter, who by the way turned 27 this year.)

Answer #2: An absolutely killer volunteer base. Obama’s volunteers were well-organized both on- and off-line, but let’s stay focused on the online effort here. Volunteers were given an enormous amount of leeway to self-organize on Obama’s campaign, which is consistent with the President-Elect’s repeated claim throughout the campaign that the campaign was not about him, but rather about the people who were electing him.

Have a look at this article at CIOZone (actually page 3 of an in-depth and well-researched 6-page article) describing the self-organizing tools Obama’s website provided to supporters; it indicates that during the primaries, staff support for volunteers was minimal for states where Hillary Clinton was expected to win, and furthermore, “in places like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Oregon, whose primaries might not have mattered as much if the race had been decided quickly, volunteers who found each other through the Web site organized their own freelance pro-Obama efforts long before the first campaign staffer came to town.”

In other words, a great deal of trust was placed in volunteer organizers, who held events, made phone calls, knocked on doors, raised money, all in the name of the Obama campaign and with minimal oversight from staff. The CIOZone article linked above goes into some depth about the relationship between staff and volunteers; I’m impressed (and a little suprised) by how few problems the campaign seems to have had with their volunteer base, given the size of the group they were working with. I would have expected more kooks in the mix, to be perfectly honest, but it sounds like they didn’t require much policing.

One description of the volunteer-management system goes like this:

[T]he system works like a pyramid, with state officials given access to a lot of functionality, and growing numbers of people below them, down to the volunteer level, allowed fewer and fewer functions, depending on what they need and how well they are known or trusted. The Obama system learns as it goes along, allowing volunteers to feed information gleaned from their work back into the database via their web browsers. Campaign staffers at the local, state, and national levels can see which volunteers do the most work and get the best results, making the organization more efficient over time. Nationwide, MyBarackObama.com has more than 1 million individual user accounts and has been used to promote over 75,000 campaign events.

If that’s accurate, then it sounds like the Obama team struck an appropriate balance between monitoring and managing their community, and allowing supporters enough leeway to do their own thing without too much interference from above.

Strategy First, Then Execution

A solid database is an essential campaign tool; great staffing is another. But tools are only tools — without a smart strategy, they can only get you so far. The Obama campaign seems to me (from an admittedly outside perspective) to have had a brilliant and highly consistent strategy from start to finish — and that strategy continues even beyond election day.

Here’s my off-the-cuff, incomplete summary of that strategy: Create an inclusive, forward-thinking movement that embodies hope and positive change. Empower self-starters and problem-solvers to effect that change. Set up mechanisms that allow supporters to connect (to each other and to the campaign), contribute their ideas, and elect Barack Obama.

That strategy informed decisions across the board, from the messaging that came through in speeches, interviews and debates, through policy statements, graphic design, and the selection of online tools. It was also consistently carried through in all online campaigning. Emails sent to supporters carried through the messages of hope, change, and the need for entrepreneurial ideas and hands-on election support. The website drove a million people to sign up for my.BarackObama.com and help elect the president they believed in. And perhaps most importantly, supporters were invited to make the campaign their own — to reach out to their neighbours, throw a fundraising party, post a note on their Facebook or MySpace profile, whatever the action that fit best with their personality, strengths, and social network.

Beyond the election, we’ve seen the launch of Change.gov, which promises to carry through the election campaign strategy into the transition period (and possibly beyond, though there are questions flying about how the election database can make its way to the White House without becoming the property of the U.S. government in perpetuity). There’s talk of how the White House site may evolve when the President-Elect becomes the President, but much remains to be seen there. We do know that some of the key staff members from the campaign have been hired on as part of the transition team.

One of the big questions that is on the minds of a lot of people right now is how the grassroots movement that helped elect Obama will interact with him as President. There’s an interesting piece here on that subject; here’s an excerpt:

[Organizing guru Marshall] Ganz makes three really important points: The first is that we’ve never had a president enter office with an organizing social movement attached to him, and there’s no precedent for thinking about how the participants in that movement have a voice in his presidency. The second is that this movement isn’t going away, and the critical question isn’t “who’s going to get the list” but how will this movement govern itself. The third, which is somewhat of an open secret, is that there is a group of organizers meeting in Chicago right now trying to figure this out, and Ganz believes that their deliberations should be more open. “I think it’s important to create the public space for this kind of discussion,” he told me.

I could go on and on about this campaign and its lessons, but I think I’ll stop there for now. If you have thoughts to share, please leave them in the comments — I’d love to hear them.