Today marks the end of what might well be the e-campaign of the decade: Barack Obama's race to the White House.
Eight years ago, almost nobody had heard from Barack Obama. Today, he's one of the best known 'brands' on the planet. And a big part of this 'zero-to-hero' story takes place online: Obama showed himself a master in mobilizing the Internet population through social networks, email, mobile and blogging.
Money, money, money
No money, no campaign. So first thing on a fresh candidate's to do list is looking for funds. In the past, that money mostly came from a small group of corporations and wealthy individuals who could provide large sums of money to a national campaign. However, in 2002 legislation limited individual contributions and campaigns started to rely on so-called 'bundlers': fundraisers who could influence their network of friends to make maximum individual donations. And that is exactly what Hillary Clinton and John McCain did. Obama on the other hand didn't have the connections Clinton had and (on top) came a little late to the game. By the time he entered the race, Clinton already secured the party's top donors and most successful bundlers.
So Obama had to look elsewhere for his money.
He sat together with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes (Tribune photo by Phil Velasquez / September 20, 2007) , and together they figured out a very clever plan to raise money from the online community at large through small donations (often smaller than $100). Of course, this also fitted perfectly in his 'bottom-up' vision of creating an ever growing 'fan base' of everyday people helping him to get to the oval office, instead of the typical 'top-down' mentality often found in political campaigns. The master plan spanned the full range of marketing tactics available, both online and offline. And in the center of it all was the Barack Obama website.
The outcome was staggering: for the first time in political memory, a candidate was able to build a significant Democratic financial advantage. And the nice little advantage of gathering it electronically is that it is available for use immediately!
Some figures:
- by July 2007, 258.000 people donated money, 90% of which gave $100 or
less
- By April 2008, the Obama campaign had received $120 million on
contributions of $200 or less.
- In September 2008 alone, 632.000 new
donors were registered. The total income for that month alone was a
staggering $150 million (including a couple of millions from some mega
fund-raising events).
To put that in context: McCain received $84
million for his entire general election campaign.
My Barack Obama
Obama already announced his website online a day before his announcement of running for office. Apart from being a nice looking website holding a lot of information (video's, wallpapers, BarackTV, blog, tax calculator,...), it allows users to register for 'My Barack Obama' (short: 'MyBO'), a collection of social networking tools. The tools encourage people to take destiny in their hands and preach the Obama talk in a number of different ways:
- raising money : People can create a personal fundraising goal where they can set up a goal, invite friends by e-mail to contribute and follow progress.
- 'neighbor to neighbor' visits and calls : Via the website, everyone can get a list of undecided voters in their neighborhood. Not only do you get a list of addresses, but the website also gives you a map to plan your walk, a script for talking to the voters and printable flyers. For people who'd rather want to call out, there's a list of phone numbers and a call script. After the door-to-doors or calls, you enter your feedback back into the system.
- blogging : Everyone can keep a personal blog on the MyBO website
- organizing events : People can look for events in their region, sign up and send them to their friends. In addition, people can also create their own events.
- volunteer : people can volunteer to help the campaign by helping to register voters, housing an event organiser, making calls, ...
And while McCain also created a social networking website (McCainSpace), there are some differences:
- McCain never put his website at the heart of his campaign
- the social networking features were launched late in the campaign. On top of that, the first version had a lot of problems and the relaunch end of august just came far too late.
The result is that while MyBO has built to hundreds of thousands of members, McCain's equivalent never hit critical mass.
Crowdsourcing
Obama uses the people to get his message out, which in marketing terms is referred to as 'crowdsourcing'. He uses the crowd to be his preachers, to visit or call voters, to organize events, to raise money or e.g. to fight the attacks from the McCain camp. On the 'fight the smears' website, visitors can send emails to their friends with arguments to silence the attackers.
The power of information
Behind this all, there's... data. lots of data. The Obama campaign has teamed up with the best of data miners to make sense out of all data coming in and use this knowledge to further empower the campaign. A couple examples:
- The Obama team handles requests to attend local events semi-automatically while monitoring trends in requests such as location, requesting organizations etc. (technology provided by RightNow technologies)
- If people use the FAQ on the website, web analytics is used to monitor popular keywords and questions by region to understand the concerns of people in different parts of the country (technology provided by RightNow technologies)
- To a.o. provide people with a list of undecided voters, the Obama team links to the contact tool of the Voter Activation Network (VAN) holding information on past voter activity and key issues (technology provided by Voter Activation Network).
- The software to manage the large group of volunteers nationwide offers complete tracking of all communications and scheduled activities for each volunteer, live 'top caller' reports, easy to use call screens etc. (technology provided by TinyHorse Solutions).
- Personal data (email address, zip code, ...) is enriched by publicly available socio-geographic data (eg average income) to segment the database and personalise the message in eg emails.
All this intelligence is not only used to power the online MyBO tools, but also the other channels in Obama's 360° media treatment. In part II of this post we will take a closer look at Obama's take on social networks, mobile, email marketing and advertising.
> to part II
