Behind Obama’s Email Fundraising Success: Strategic Profanity and a Lot of Testing

[Note: speaking Obama's email list, there's current chatter about whether -- and how -- he should use it upcoming legislative battles. More on that here soon.]

Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday, Joshua Green has a great overview of the 2012 Obama campaign’s approach to email fundraising. One aspect won’t come as a surprise: just as their 2008 counterparts did, the 2012 email team focused on testing:

The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts. “We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for,” says Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics, “but on the messages themselves and even the formatting.” The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines—often as many as 18 variations—before picking a winner to blast out to tens of millions of subscribers. “When we saw something that really moved the dial, we would adopt it,” says Toby Fallsgraff, the campaign’s e-mail director, who oversaw a staff of 20 writers.

It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million.

A related point: campaign staff’s bets on which subject lines would perform best were often wrong: “‘We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,’ says Showalter. ‘Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons.’” Interestingly, a little cussin’ was good, of the “hell yeah I support the President” variety, perhaps both because it felt “real” and because it reflected supporters’ own desire to be fired up. Check out the full article — it’s worth your time. After the break, I’ve reprinted a graphic showing the HUGE range in possible returns from a single message…different subject lines could yield a four- or five-fold difference in the amount raised. Thanks to David Almacy and Jim McBride for sending the article around.

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Add comment November 30th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Infographic: How Americans Used Social Media and Mobile Devices for Politics in 2012

Our friends at the Pew Internet and American Life have put together a handy new infographic that covers much of their recent data on how we’re using digital technology in politics. What percentage of Twitter users are liberal? The answer might surprise you — as might the percentage of people who say that they’ve donated to a political campaign through a mobile phone.

I’ve reprinted the graphic below the break; thanks to Shaun Dakin for pointing it out.

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Add comment November 29th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Obama 2012 Web Tech’s Foundation: Testing, Redundancy and ‘Pragmatic Paranoia’

Web tech site Nettuts+ has a must-read (for online politics and technology nerds) interview with Daniel Ryan, OFA’s Director of Frontend Development. The article covers a lot of ground in great detail, looking both at the technology the campaign used for its web presence and at the process they used to decide how to employ it. I was particularly struck by the team’s “pragmatic paranoia” — in part because the 2008 campaign’s Election Day system failed in action, redundancy became a key 2012 tech goal:

Because of the institutional experience with this voter monitoring system’s failure, we never put ourselves in a place where a single system failure could do real damage. We had the luxury of time, which we used in part to build redundancies. Our payment processor, for instance, was actually one in-house system and one vendor system that Akamai flipped between automatically if one side went down. That system worked so well we replicated it for polling places. We had two APIs, one internal and one powered by Google, with a thin PHP app to make the output the same. Not only could Akamai automatically fail between them without the end user noticing, but we had a system in place where we could choose which states used which system proactively. This let us prevent a traffic spike outage. The systems we relied upon specifically for Election Day all had two backup systems: one powered by Google Doc spreadsheets and one consisting of printed hard-copies of critical data. I think our approach basically boiled down to pragmatic paranoia.

Pragmatic paranoia sounds like a damn good approach to online communications in general! I’m hoping to mine this article for more insights, time permitting — it’s full of good stuff. A geek-heaven sample:

One of the smartest things we did was run dozens of decoupled systems tied together with JavaScript and Akamai services. Broadly, our stack ran on Amazon Web Services, including thousands of EC2 instances, several large database clusters and S3 hosting. Our main site, www.barackobama.com, was an Expression Engine install backed by EC2 and RDS and fronted by Akamai caching.

Thanks to Tyler Gray for sending the article around.

– cpd

Add comment November 28th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

RootsCamp is Coming Up Fast

Hey kids, sorry for the recent publishing hiatus — we needed a little break down here in the e.politics bunker, in part to process the post-election analysis, in part to catch up on life.

One story cruelly overlooked in the meantime? RootsCamp is coming up next weekend, here in DC on November 30th and December 1st. I’ve raved about RootsCamp plenty of times in the past, and this year Epolitics.com is returning as a sponsor; I learn more there than just about any other single event in the political world. At RootsCamp you talk with practitioners just off the campaign trail, people who’ve been using the tools and putting the tactics to work day in and day out. Plus, it’s an unconference, meaning that participants create the agenda on the fly, and in the process talk with each other rather than at each other. Register now and you won’t regret it (Lefties only — sorry, Republican friends).

Add comment November 25th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Press Club Panel on Social Media and the 2012 Elections: Related Reading

Today’s Press Club discussion on social media’s role in 2012 is shaping up to be a terrific discussion, and you can follow the live coverage via the hashtag #SocialElection. Below are links to articles covering topics that are likely to come up, starting with a slew on Epolitics.com and moving on to excellent coverage from other sources. Enjoy.

– cpd

Add comment November 16th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Quick Hits, Post-Election Analysis Edition — November 13, 2012

Fan fave Quick Hits returns, this time rounding up some of the best post-election analysis of the digital campaign. Note the great coverage from Slate.com in particular, but there’s plenty of excellent reading below.

A Vast Left-Wing Competency. How Democrats became the party of effective campaigning—and why the GOP isn’t catching up anytime soon. Contrast with The GOP’s Gray Revolution. What happened to the Republicans’ post-2008 digital push, featuring plenty of friends-of-e.politics.
In Petraeus downfall, hubris meets high tech. C.f What 20,000 Pages of Inappropriate Emails Look Like.
Why It’s Going to Be Hard for Republicans to Match the Big Data Advantage Democrats Have Built. C.f. Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win, Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama’s Big Data Tactics and Obama’s Microtargeting ‘Nuclear Codes’.
Where Obama’s Ground Soldiers Were, and Who They Are.
Book review: ‘The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns’ by Sasha Issenberg. Really looking forward to reading this one.
ORCA vs. Gordon, a Battle of Election-Day Poll-Monitoring Systems, which Democrats won. C.f. Romney Campaign Acknowledges High-Tech Election Day Monitoring System ‘Had Its Challenges’ and Romney digital director: Orca wasn’t a loss. Plus, Romney Political Director: ‘The Ground Game Worked Fine’. Apparently doesn’t know what hit him.
New Technologies Boosted Obama Campaign’s Efforts. Campaign CTO talks about Dashboard and other field tech.
NGP VAN Provides Technology Backbone that Powers Democratic Ground Game Victory. Press release with some grassroots numbers.
How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File, and The GOP’s media cocoon. C.f. How Cute: Fox News is worried about media bias.
Drudge Handled Obama’s Win Just About How You’d Expect. C.f. After election results, Donald Trump throws fit on Twitter and The 20 biggest sore losers of election night.
Watch Mitt Romney’s Facebook Likes Decrease in Real Time, via Political Wire. Ouch.
Here’s Facebook’s Most-Liked Photo of All Time, and The Real Story of the Most-Liked Photograph of All Time.
MoveOn’s Vote Buddy Uses Facebook to Influence Friends’ Voting.
QR and NFC Help Rock the Youth Vote.
5 Things We Can Learn From This Year’s Political Campaign.
Election interactives: 3 visual presentation insights from last night.
Big Bet Six Months Ago Paved Way for President. Behind the ads that defined Romney in battleground states.
Romney’s Transition Site briefly visible. In other news, Dewey Defeats Truman!
The Rise and Fall of Social Media in American Politics (And How it May Rise Again).
How Ridiculous Gerrymanders Saved the House Republican Majority.
Facebook Obama Is Getting Desperate, judging from his posts. C.f. Women Are Absolutely Crushing Men at Clicking Facebook’s “I Voted” Widget and Obama Just Locked Up the Crucial Internet-Procrastinator Vote.
Study on Voting and Social Media Demonstrates Stupidity of Laws Against Instagramming Your Own Ballot.
How TV trounced the Internet when it came to reporting Obama’s victory.
EU Plans Groundbreaking Project To Monitor Internet Censorship Around the World.
When Victorious Obama Spoke to “Distant Nations,” China’s Web Users Were Listening.
Is Occupy Wall Street Outperforming the Red Cross in Hurricane Relief?
ControlShift Labs brings deep member engagement to the masses.
Top 10 Politics Websites – October 2012, by traffic.
The Prop 37 Phenomenon on Facebook. Admiring an online ad campaign.
The Obama Campaign’s Technology Is a Force Multiplier.
Facebook: I Want My Friends Back. C.f. Family Feud: Tense Thanksgiving for Facebook and George Takei. Plenty of folks unhappy with the ever-decreasing reach of Facebook posts.
Online videos gaining in US campaign: study. Also, Obama vs. Romney: Who’s Winning the YouTube Vote?
Political Campaigns Target Off-the-Grid Voters with Digital Armies of Volunteers, and Tracking Voters’ Clicks Online to Try to Sway Them.
Why the Tea Party Failed, including a look at various GOTV systems that crashed on election day, like this one.
Latest sign of the impending Apocalypse: Anthony Weiner Returns to Twitter.
Chart: Almost Every Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever. I so totally forgot that he went to Mars!
And finally, How the internet connects people with a quicksand fetish.

– cpd

Add comment November 13th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

November 16th: Press Club Panel on Social Media and the 2012 Presidential Race

Hurricane Sandy might have postponed our Press Club panel on social media in the presidential race, but never fear, it’s rescheduled for next Friday, November 16th. With the date change a few tickets have popped open, so check it out. Should be a terrific conversation.

The Online Election – Social Media and the 2012 Presidential Race

The 2012 U.S. Presidential Election is like none we have ever seen before. Americans now follow real-time debate commentary via Twitter, advocate for their candidates on Facebook and join Internet memes with Tumblr. Balancing tried-and-true strategies with bold experimentation, the campaigns of both President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney have invested heavily in social media as part of their fundraising, grassroots and media strategies. They have had to.

This panel will focus on how the 2012 presidential candidates have used social media as part of their campaign strategies, what future U.S. elections will look like as social media become even more predominate, and why communications executives should pay attention to these trends when considering their own clients’ goals and strategies.

Also on the panel:

David Almacy (Senior Vice President, Digital Media at Edelman)
Alex Howard (Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O’Reilly Media)
Emily Schultheis (National Political Reporter for POLITICO)
Anthony Shop (Managing Director of the Digital Agency Social Driver and Chairman of The National Press Club’s Events Committee)

Hope you can make it.

– cpd

Add comment November 9th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

What a Data-Driven, Internet-Enabled GOTV Operation Looks Like — And Doesn’t

What does a modern political field operation look like? I argued the other day that four million donors, most of whom have given small amounts apiece, built the foundation for a powerful ground game that the campaign hopes will push Obama over the top. Here’s a glimpse at what they paid for:

Many voters, bombarded by calls, have stopped picking up their phones. The volunteers often went minutes at a stretch with no one answering. Voters who did pick up often hung up immediately.

Obama campaign officials say why they have put greater emphasis on door-to-door canvassing, although they also have made millions of calls, distributing phone numbers of voters by email to volunteers who agreed to make calls from their homes.

The Democrats scoff at Republican claims of on-the-ground parity, insisting that the nature of their volunteers will give them an edge. Many have worked in their communities for a year or more with some, like Ramos, on the job continuously since 2008, said Jeremy Bird, the campaign’s national field director. An organization that uses local volunteers to canvass neighbors — first registering them, then getting them to the polls — has an advantage that newcomers will not be able to match, he and other campaign officials insist.

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Add comment November 6th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Via NOI & Google, an Easy, Embedded Polling Place & Election Info Finder App

These are the simple ways technology can help get out the vote: check out the polling place/ballot info finder below, developed by the NOI’s other election-related resources — very cool to see someone putting out this kind of data in a way that others can use.

– cpd

Add comment November 6th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

PollVault: ‘Crowdsourcing’ Your Voting Decisions

Regular contributor Beth Becker has a new toy! And is happy to share it with us.

PollVault: ‘Crowdsourcing’ Your Voting Decisions

By Beth Becker

From time to time I come across a new media/social media tool that can really make a difference in the world. The newest of these would be PollVault, sort of a Cliffs Notes ballot guide for Voters.

PollVault’s user-friendly design allows voters to crowd-source ballot advice, or crowd-poll, seeing the ballot opinions of organizations and people they trust. The result is a ballot discussion happening within an easy-to-read grid showing the voter’s virtual ballot next to the endorsements of a personalized, ten-member advisor panel, which now includes organizations as diverse as the Sierra Club, the NRA, The Human Society and GoProud, as well as one’s friends, neighbors and family. Over time, the advisors will expand exponentially to include everyone from celebrities, to artists, to Hollywood directors, movers and shakers in the financial world and Washington power brokers.

One thing that’s important to note: privacy is truly in the hands of the user. No one can see whom you’ve endorsed unless you allow them to.

So how does it work? From the voter’s perspective, it couldn’t be easier. You log in, give the tool your address and zip code and it pulls up what your ballot will look like when you go to vote. Then the fun begins. You can choose up to 10 advisors, which means you can see who they’ve endorsed/who they would vote for. Organizations* that have made endorsements relevant to your ballot are options and you can also choose to connect PollVault to Facebook and ask your Facebook friends to be be your advisors. (Again, they have to allow you to see their choices, such viewing is not automatic.) Once you’ve made your advisor choices you can then make your own decisions and be ready to go vote.

* Organizations that wish to have their endorsements listed on the site as advisors can send an email with all of their endorsements or simply a link to a webpage that lists their endorsements to contact@pollvault.com

Thanks Beth! – cpd

1 comment November 5th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Dems Unveil Integrated Mobile GOTV Tool

Just in time for election day, NGPVAN has put out a new mobile tool that helps campaigns target voters who haven’t yet turned out. The cool part? The “Mobile Pollwatcher” integrates with the VAN voter database so that ALL Democratic campaigns can share information about which voters need a little nudge to get them to the polls. Remember the all-important ground-game efficiency we talked about yesterday? This is the sort of tool that makes it happen in practice:

Thousands of Democratic campaign pollwatchers across the country will use any phone with mobile web access to log in real time which voters have cast ballots. This enables all the Democratic campaigns to focus their GOTV resources on those who have not yet voted.

….

Using Mobile Pollwatcher, Democratic poll watchers will log each voter who checks in at a polling location, via mobile web. Because of the collaborative data features of the VAN voter file product, all candidates will benefit when one campaign logs a voter as having voted. On the GOP side, while Mitt Romney’s campaign will be using a mobile pollwatching tool, because Republicans lack a collaborative system, downticket Republicans won’t benefit from Romney’s data. This difference will provide Democratic campaigns a critical advantage on Election Day.

We have so completely only begun to scratch the surface of what intelligent, interconnected mobile devices are going to do in politics. An app like this gives us a taste. What will 2014 look like? Or 2020….

– cpd

Add comment November 5th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Are Small Online Donors the Key (and Largely Overlooked) Factor in the Presidential Race?

Two days from the presidential election, here’s where we stand: tight in the popular vote, but with a small but consistent Obama lead in the bulk of the battleground states. Both campaigns are spending big money on TV ads, and Obama’s grassroots turnout operation is about to go into full gear.

Plenty of factors shaped the race and put us where we are now: the economy, the debates, the conventions and even the weather. But one fundamental fact has driven the campaigns’ tactics and strategy behind the scenes, in Obama’s case from the beginning of the race: Obama built a base of small-dollar online donors, and Romney didn’t. Obama’s lead in the battleground states? The relative equality of the ad war? Obama’s turnout machine? All dynamics driven by the Obama campaign’s ability to tap small donors again and again — and Romney’s lack of the same. Let’s see how we got here.

Advertising

Remember June and July, after Romney survived the primaries and Republican donors’ wallets opened up for him? Money poured into the Republican’s bank account and Democrats trembled to think of the ad barrage it would fund. One tiny example: in a typical left-wing fundraising email from that period (subject line: “We’re getting beat”), MoveOn begged supporters to give money in part because “Romney’s just out raised President Obama for the third straight month.” Likewise, Citizens United and related court cases were supposed to allow “independent” conservative groups to pummel Democrats into insensibility with a wave of political ads unlike anything ever seen.

Anyone living in a battleground state (or one with a competitive Senate race) will attest that the predicted ad deluge hit — to the benefit of local TV stations and to harm of anyone with taste, style and operational brain cells. But the ads mostly seem a wash, with the Left largely matching the Right in numbers of spots run (though targeted Congressional races may be a different story). One set of presidential-level TV ads DO seem to have made a difference, though: the wave of Obama spots that sought to define Romney as a job-destroying, out of touch corporate raider in the summer. As they were on the air, observers pointed to them as already swinging battleground polls in the President’s direction; even now, they seem to have helped create a “firewall” against a late Romney surge.

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1 comment November 4th, 2012 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us