Raised Eyebrow Blog

Unsurprisingly, we’re getting a lot of questions these days from our clients about how they can apply the online tools that helped Obama win the U.S. election. Typically clients come to us excited about one tool they thought Obama’s team used particularly well, whether that’s video, social media, email marketing, graphic design, or some other branch of the Obama web communications plan. But the tools are only a small part of the story; the real source of the Obama web campaign’s success, in my opinion, was its thorough, consistent strategy; its investment in a brilliant team of experienced staff; and the unprecedented breadth, depth and scope of its database.

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.

The title of this post comes from Nancy Scola, the creator of Twitter Vote Report which I blogged about last week. I just received an email from a reader, Simon Owens, who had the chance to interview Nancy along with some other folks that are using Social Media tools to engage citizens in monitoring the elections. His post about some of the different tools and websites in use out there is up on MediaShift, PBS’s blog and is well worth a read.

Every US Presidential election over the last 8 years (so two Bush victories and fingers crossed for a Democratic shift) has led to some innovative uses of the web for political organizing and campaigning. Those activities south of the border ultimately impact how many of our non-profit and political clients use the web in the years to come. This time out is certainly no exception, and the Obama campaign has been doing an impressive job throughout the Primaries and now through the election campaign, with both the official Obama website and other affiliated online campaigning ventures. At a conference I was at last week, what began to interest me more than that candidate work happening online was ways that the web is being used to monitor voter suppression/on-the-ground voting day issues. Two examples that have risen to the top for me are Theuptake.org and TwitterVoteReport.com:

• TheUptake.org is, in effect, a citizen journalism aggregating website, allowing users to upload campaign related video content that they produce to the website. They have a group within The Uptake of “Vote Chasers” that are focusing specifically on the highly contested states of Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Colorado and New Mexico to look at questionable tactics both parties are using to win those states. On November 4th, their citizen journalists will be monitoring polling stations to make sure voters are able to cast their ballots and reporting any voter suppression issues that arise. Due to the volume and distributed nature of their information gathering model — using many individuals who can capture video and images via cel phone technology — they’ll be able to report more widely than the current “traditional” news outlets can simply due to the sheer numbers of feet on the ground. The model is one that will be very familiar to any of you who recall the role of IndyMedia in the Seattle WTO events, though the advances in technology and the way that The Uptake is pulling content together and redistributing all contribute to a very strategic campaign.
• TwitterVoteReport.com is using Twitter feeds to get everyday citizens to report back on their voting day activities and then track those activities in one centralized place. In Twitter Vote Report’s own words, the idea is to achieve the following:
  

  Voters can read these messages and help one another solve problems, liking letting someone know when a polling place has been moved. Advocacy groups can use them to spot problems. Citizens can figure out how to lend fellow voters a hand. And the press can zero in on local voting stories worth telling. Just sending in short reports can help your fellow citizens to vote.

  They’re doing all of this through the use of specific “hash-tags” for people to report on specific topics, so things like “#machine” for voter machine issues, or “#wait:[minutes]” for reports of long lines at specific polling stations. Now there are, to date, a fairly limited number of registered US voters using Twitter, however, the concept of using the power of individuals to amass a larger picture of what is happening around a vital issue like voter access is a powerful vision for a seemingly frivolous tool like Twitter.

If you know of other cool web tools being used for election campaigning, please leave them in the comments, we could I’m sure write a book on all the examples out there.

The folks at Common Craft have put together a little web video explaining just what the heck Twitter is. I was at a conference last week and in a room full of three hundred attendees one of the speakers asked who in the audience was familiar with various Social Networking tools and Twitter was definitely the lowest one on the radar of people in the room. While this video doesn’t really get at how you can use Twitter for campaigning, capacity building and marketing it does a great job of the basics.

I have come across so much great content around the web this week that I can’t resist sharing some of the highlights:

• Nonprofit tech whiz Beth Kanter blogs on a subject I hear many of our clients asking about: “How Much Time Does it Take to do Social Media?” It’s a great attempt at quantifying the time & resources required to engage in social media, using a spectrum of different levels of investment (from Listen/Participate, through Generate Buzz / Sharing Your Story, to Community Building and Social Networking).
• Here’s another great social media post from Beth Kanter: “How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: What are the key questions nonprofits should ask about social media training?”
• Are you using your analytics (i.e. website stats) effectively? Have you defined Key Performance Indicators that provide you with quantifiable data about the effectiveness of your website? Check out web analytics superstar Avinash Kaushik’s post, “Eight Rules for Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators.”
• Constant Contact, one of the email providers we work with, recently posted a great article on how nonprofits can use email to connect with their membership at holiday time. Now is the time to strategize about your holiday email marketing, so it’s a timely piece.
• If that one was up your alley, check out Wild Apricot’s tips to manage your year-end fundraising campaigns. There are some real gems in there; I particularly like their suggestion to “offer real-life glimpses into the life of your organization.”
• And just for fun, here’s a list of the top 903 albums of all time, as voted by listeners at KEXP — my favourite radio station, based in Seattle but broadcasting worldwide via their website. They expose me to new music, and as a listener-supported public radio station, they also inspire me with their creative fundraising efforts and passionate, authentic connection with their music-loving membership.

One more link to grow on: After a post-vacation inbox crisis, I was inspired to make some changes to how I manage my daily email, RSS, and Twitter feeds — and I blogged about the process of battling information overload over at The Boss of You.

Please forgive the somewhat meta-title and topic of this post. I mean really, writing my first post on our new Raised Eyebrow blog about blogging. Isn’t that just a little bit too self-involved? Perhaps, but I was sparked to write it by a question that came to me by email this morning from a friend. Specifically, she asked:

I am looking for information, ideas, guidance etc. regarding the use of blogs as a means to share your project (whether business, music, clothing line etc.) with the world. How do you start? How do you gain credibility as a sincere ‘blogger’ - not a non-profit/business/clothing company/band seeking to use the medium to achieve your ends? How do you know that a blog is a good blog? How much time do you have to devote to blogging?

Now that’s a whole lot of questions. But I’ll do my best to tackle each of them:

1. How do you start? There are a few different ways to answer this question. The first is to focus on the technical, ie/ where do you get yourself a blog, but I think the question was more about the strategy/planning process of “creating” your blog. Figuring out things like what you’re going to write about, how you’re going to write it, how much research you need to do before you start writing your blog posts, and heck what your first post will even be about. The best place to start when thinking about writing a blog (and here I’m going to focus on more professional blogging and not personal journaling) is to think about why you want to write a blog and who your audience will be. Because we’re talking about blogging for business (or similarly in support of your non-profit organization or cause) we can fairly safely assume that you’re wanting to write a blog to help spread the word about your business/organization through building up your profile in the online community. Your audience, we can also assume, is potential customers, clients or supporters of your business/organization who you want to know more about your activities, the expertise you have in your area or topics related to your business/organization.
2. Credibility. The second question around credibility flows nicely out of the first one. Credibility online is very important. Online users can sniff out a plant or an overly PR crafted blog in a heartbeat and generally they won’t be too kind about it. So how do you build it? The same way you do offline: with open, honest communication and sincerity. Feel free to say that you’ve started your blog to help support your business/organization. In fact, that’s a must. But make sure that what you’re writing is enough to keep readers interested in coming back. So, for example, don’t just fill your blog with announcements about upcoming events and formal news releases, instead the kinds of tangental and more informal information that blogs are so well suited to. Things like: information about why you have switched to using a new type of packaging: because it’s more environmentally friendly, or because you’ve formed a solid personal relationship with a new local supplier, or even because it is cheaper and is allowing you to keep your final costs low at a time when other production costs are rising; stories about where your finding inspiration lately, everything from music you’re listening to at the office, to photos of inspiration boards you’ve got up as you’re designing the new product line/creating a new campaign. Anything really, as long as you’re comfortable with the degree to which the information is personal (and please, on a business blog make sure that the personal info you share does have professional relevance) and as long as it is honest and genuine.
3. How do you know that a blog is a good blog? Well that’s a bit tricky. There aren’t many gold standards to judge a blog by — though of course for the few and super famous there are the Bloggie awards — making it tricky to set out a list of criteria on which to judge the success of a blog. You can pay attention to your statistics (web stats that show how often your site is being visited), and you can check your ranking amongst other blogs in Technorati, but while numbers of visits is certainly an awesome thing, quality of visits is also going to be really important in judging the success of your blog from a business perspective.

   Setting out some criteria for how you’ll judge success is always a great idea at the start of any project, so here are some sample criteria that you could use to judge the success of your blog. Is it increasing business, ie/ are you making more sales, getting more members, raising more funds, etc.? Are you creating a positive online community that is helping to inspire you in your work? It’s easy to get burned out in our little worlds and blogging can be a great way to reach out to other like-minded folks to share ideas and recharge your inspiration batteries. Is it helping you share information about your work you had no other outlet for? Blogs can be a great way to communicate more informally with your audience, ie/ outside of press releases or even email newsletters, and often it will allow you to reach an audience you may not be able to reach with the more traditional media outlets.

4. How much time does it take? Well this is a rather appropriate question for me to be answering as I write my first blog post on a Saturday isn’t it. The answer can really vary. We’ve talked many of our clients out of blogging when we’ve been able to see that their resources are already way to thin for the work they currently have on their plate. With the number of blogs out there, and how frequently some of them are updated it can be really easy to think that blog posts can be tossed off as quickly as text messages. And sometimes they can. But often, and particularly when we’re talking about professional blogs which are likely to involve more research and thought than personal blogs, they can be really time consuming. The answer to how much time it takes really depends on a whole lot of factors. Basic things like: how quickly do you write? Or whether you plan to include a lot of photos and images that you’ll have to either take or research each time you post to the blog. It also depends how often you want your blog to be updated. If once a week is ok with you, then chances are you’ll be fine with an hour a week. If you’re looking at daily, then bump that time up. Writing a professional blog can also often mean keeping on top of topics in your industry, so reading other blogs in your industry, or subscribing to email newsletters and print newsletters/magazines to stay on top of things. That kind of research time also needs to be factored in to writing your blog, though you may already be doing that anyway.

I could easily go on and on about this topic, but I’ll close by giving you some links to some blogs written by some business folks we know that I think do a great job of supporting their businesses. You’ll notice these are all blogs authored by ladies, that’s cuz I’m going to cheat a bit and use examples from women we profiled in the book that Lauren and I authored recently, after all it is Saturday and I need to get away from the computer.

Awesome business blog examples:

• Poise the Blog: Cinnamon Cooper makes fabulous handbags, messenger bags and the like. She blogs about being a craft entrepreneur, about her products specifically and sometimes about life more generally.
• LunaBlog: The Lunapads International Blog is authored by the two owners of the company as well as their staff, and also includes guest posts by customers. They talk about all things related to alternative menstrual products, life as business owners, life as mothers of small children, other environmentally friendly choices they’re making, inspiring books they’re reading and new products they’re dreaming up.
• Vickie Howell’s Blog: Vickie has a tv show, several knitting books and her own line of yarn. She blogs about cool yarn projects she discovers online (knitting, crocheting, etc), new patterns, new podcasts she’s posted, and life as a rock star (ok so maybe not that last part so much, but Vickie is such a rock star that it seems fair to throw that in).

We find ourselves recommending YouTube to our clients on a regular basis as a low-cost and easy way for them to post videos on their websites and blogs. Why?

• It’s free. Set up an account, upload your video, and you’re good to go — YouTube will do the work of converting your video into a web-friendly format (Flash video, which has near-universal support among internet users), optimizing it for fast streaming, and even providing you with the code you’ll need to embed it into your web pages.
• YouTube has a built-in audience. Sure, your website gets good traffic, but YouTube gets crazy-good traffic. And YouTube visitors can and will find your video when it’s added to YouTube’s database, so long as you tag it with the appropriate keywords. You never know when and how this’ll pay off for you — for example, Vancouver-based vocal ensemble musica intima saw online CD sales increase when one of the singers posted a couple of YouTube videos, prompting a whole new audience to discover their exquisite sound.
• Search engine positioning. Just as you can leverage YouTube’s audience share, you can also piggyback on their excellent search engine ranking to get your videos to appear among the top search results for your keywords.
• Built-in technical support. By using a hosted solution like YouTube for your videos, you benefit from their technical support system.

Now, all that being said, YouTube isn’t the perfect solution for everyone. It does have a few downsides:

• Time limits. YouTube won’t allow videos longer than 10 minutes to be uploaded. (However, there’s an argument to be made that most web users won’t sit still for longer than 10 minutes, anyway…)
• Low quality. Because YouTube videos are optimized for fast streaming, you do lose some quality in picture and sound.
• The logo. YouTube places their logo on your video, so even if you embed the video on your website, their branding will show up.

For most people’s purposes, the benefits outweigh the costs, though of course each organization’s needs will be different. And YouTube isn’t the only option out there; Vimeo is another popular video hosting site, though its reach isn’t quite as wide as YouTube’s and their content policies are different.

Got a YouTube story to share? Post it in the comments.