01 March 2009
The E-Campaign: Rallying Volunteers and Voters
By David Talbot
The 2008 election victory of Barack Obama showed that Web-based tools for donating money and efficiently harnessing the efforts of large numbers of volunteers can be extraordinarily powerful.
David Talbot is chief correspondent at Technology Review magazine.
This article appears in the March 2009 issue of eJournal USA, Nonviolent Paths to Social Change (PDF, 783 KB).
The 2008 U.S. presidential election showed the great power of online social networks to bring about change.
In 2007 and 2008, the political campaign of Barack Obama made extensive use of the Web, creating simple interfaces for supporters to organize themselves, donate money, raise awareness on specific issues such as health care reform, and contact voters. This was done at a scale that not only far exceeded what had been done in previous elections, but also surpassed the Web operations of Obama’s opponents — Senator John McCain in the general election, and, earlier, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic Party primary elections.
Obama’s online campaign strategy represented a natural evolution from his roots as a community organizer in Chicago. And it took advantage of the vast new interest in online social networks generally.
In recent years, hundreds of millions of people around the world have flocked to social-networking Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook, hi5, and Orkut, finding that they provide very powerful and simple ways to connect with friends, organize groups, share hobbies, and join causes. The Obama campaign established its presence within some of these sites, notably including Facebook, which had a huge Obama supporter network.
But more importantly, the campaign created its own social-networking site, called my.barackobama.com, or MyBO for short. It was custom-built by a private company named Blue State Digital, based in Washington, D.C. The results were impressive. Obama’s campaign collected $500 million in online donations from more than 3 million people. And thanks to MyBO — plus other strategies, including asking people at rallies to text message their e-mail addresses to the campaign — Obama developed a vast army of online volunteers. When the campaign ended, he held a list of 13 million supporters and their e-mail addresses, an enormous achievement.
An Abundance of Options
The hallmark of MyBO was simplicity and constant focus on prodding visitors to take some kind of action that helped the campaign. When you visited MyBO, a variety of options presented themselves. You could click a button to bring up a form for donating money. You could click another button to organize a small party for Obama at your home and download campaign literature to hand out to your friends and neighbors at the party.
If you didn’t want to host such an event, you could find one near your home by looking at a Google Maps application that showed icons of available parties. Click the icon, and you would get the address and contact information. You could establish your own fund-raising efforts and engage your friends and acquaintances in meeting a target that you would set.
Within MyBO, supporters’ self-directed fund-raising efforts raked in $30 million from 70,000 people. Notably, this part of the fund-raising required virtually no effort from Obama campaign staff, freeing them to perform other tasks.
Once you gave the campaign your e-mail address, you would get messages from the campaign — sometimes signed by Obama’s wife, Michelle, or even by former Vice President Al Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush but went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. These messages would ask people to perform specific functions that were helpful to the campaign at that time, perhaps calling undecided voters in such important U.S. states as Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the election was too close to call.
The campaign also rallied people based on geography, for example, providing MyBO members with lists of people living nearby who were not registered to vote and instructions for contacting and registering them. And they asked military veterans who supported Obama to volunteer to make telephone calls. For these volunteers, they created special phone lists, available through the Web, of other veterans to call in tightly contested states. Cultivating veterans became particularly important because Obama, who had not served in the military, faced John McCain, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and former prisoner of war.
Multifunctional Databases
Access to vast databases on American voters made these Web tools even more powerful. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have long spent considerable resources establishing very accurate lists of the names of every voter in the United States, together with any data that had been collected on the voter (mainly during phone interviews by various campaign volunteers over the years). Such information includes what political party a person prefers, whether they are strong supporters or only leaning in that direction, and what issues are of particular interest to them.
Each party maintains its own databases, and the Republicans traditionally have been more disciplined and organized about maintaining theirs at the national level. But between 2006 and 2008, the Democratic database was improved by a company named Voter Activation Network (VAN) in Somerville, Massachusetts. VAN, under contract to the Democratic National Committee, linked together databases from the 50 U.S. states and built simple ways for supporters to access the data in limited, controlled ways via the Web. MyBO, as well as the Web sites of other Democratic candidates in other races, linked with this newly improved database in very powerful ways.
As a result, once Barack Obama became the Democratic Party nominee, any average volunteers — whether they were logging on to MyBO, linking from the Web sites of other Democratic candidates, or linking from the Democratic National Committee’s own Web site — could click a button to download small batches of voters’ names and telephone numbers from the VAN database. Along with this list came a script for querying the voters about their views and an online form for recording their responses.
Millions of such calls were made by average supporters during the primary campaign. In addition, the MyBO tools allowed the volunteers to download voter registration forms — customized for each American state, as needed — to people on the database known to be unregistered but a likely Obama supporter based on demographic information.
The Obama campaign’s use of the database with such efficiency and at such a huge scale during the fast-moving presidential primary process had helped him to win the Democratic Party nomination. Such voter contacts — enabled through Web tools — were made at a huge scale also in the November general election, when Barack Obama faced John McCain. But the strategy changed as needed. For example, in just the final four days of the campaign, volunteers on MyBO made 3 million calls to voters, mainly to make sure people who were already registered to vote and already favored Obama actually got out of the house and voted.
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Blue State Digital, says that the scale of all of these operations exceeded anything done in any other campaign. Obama’s e-campaign included not only MyBO, but also the powerful leveraging of other new-media tools, from text messaging to YouTube videos. People spent 14 million hours watching campaign-related Obama videos on YouTube, 50 million views in all. And Obama had more than 3.4 million Facebook supporters, six times McCain’s number.
A Continuing Strategy
How will President Barack Obama use all of these resources now that he has taken office? Thanks to all of the voter calls made by Web-based volunteers, the Democratic Party now possesses 10 times more data on U.S. voters than it did just four years ago. This information can, in turn, be used not only in future elections to further improve how supporters are organized around specific issues to bring about change, but also, potentially, help engage ordinary Americans in fighting for new government policies.
However, it’s not yet clear to what extent the Democratic Party and Obama campaign organizations outside the White House will leverage the voter database or Obama’s 13-million-member e-mail list to help enact his agenda. The day after he won the election, Obama’s transition team launched a new Web site, http//www.change.gov. Through this site, his transition team solicited public comment on policy matters and broadcast videos of his nominees for cabinet posts, providing answers to the comments through YouTube. The transition team also posted the names and position papers of groups lobbying the team and launched an “Open for Questions” feature in which visitors could write and vote on questions for the Obama administration: In one December week, roughly 20,000 people posed 10,000 questions and cast one million votes on them.
But on inauguration day (January 20) the administration shut down www.change.gov and launched the new version of the presidential site, www.whitehouse.gov. As of late January, it had few interactive features, but it did start posting the text of Obama’s executive orders and included a promise that any nonemergency legislation would be posted on the site for five days, together with a feature for the public to add comments, before President Obama signed the legislation into law. While it’s not yet known what additional features the administration might add, Obama’s campaign promised to use the Web to furnish easily searchable files on government spending and other activities and to Webcast more public meetings. And Obama has already established the YouTube video address, in addition to the decades-old White House tradition of a weekly radio address.
It is unlikely that any future political campaign — or other widespread campaign for social change or other cause — will ignore the lessons of 2008. The Republicans can be expected to respond strongly in the 2010 congressional elections and the 2012 congressional and presidential elections.
Barack Obama’s victory showed that Web-based organizing can effectively marshal ordinary people into a force that rivals traditional institutions and power centers. Indeed, this lesson is being noted around the world. Blue State Digital has opened a London office to expand operations, and VAN has been fielding many calls from overseas. Similar moves are likely by Republican-leaning Web and database vendors.
Clearly, politics will never be the same. Back in 1992, a campaign manager used to remind Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton about the campaign’s most important theme: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Now, to quote Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic campaign operative: “It’s the network, stupid.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
