E-mail and SMS formed a significant part of the campaign that ultimately secured US president Barack Obama a second term in the oval office.
Speaking at The Digital Edge event in Midrand yesterday, Harper Reed, the CTO for the "Obama for America" campaign outlined what it took to win the election in 2012.
"In 2008, the iPhone was about a year old, Android phones had just been released to the market, Facebook pages were created because of the Barack Obama campaign and Twitter was used by hippies. All these things were not part of the status quo; they were just fancy gadgets," said Reed, referring to the digital climate when Obama was first elected as president.
"In 2012, our parents were using these things. Suddenly, all of this tech is normal and the Obama team needed someone who understood this."
According to Reed, he was hired as CTO in 2011 when the people in charge of Obama's campaign were trying to figure out how to get technology to work to their advantage. To do so, they realised that they needed to have software developers and engineers on their team, he added.
His first task was to hire people, expanding the tech staff to a size about 10 times bigger than what it was in 2008, Reed noted. "The innovation on this campaign was the team. We started from zero," he said. "When I walked onto the campaign, there was no infrastructure, there was nothing left over from 2008. And with a limited amount of time, we had no time to innovate, so we had to focus only on execution."
Most of the fundraising for the campaign went through e-mail, said Reed, adding that while social was also a part of the campaign strategy, e-mail was the predominant means of communication with voters and ultimately raising over $700 million.
He outlined the campaign's "Quick Donate" targeted e-mail strategy, which automatically deducted money from the person's credit card when they clicked on a link in an e-mail. The innovation with "Quick Donate" was that they took away the two-phase authentication process, which appears asking the person if they are sure they want to make a contribution. And by removing this barrier to conversion, the campaign raised about $250 million, Reed pointed out.
"We also did a lot of campaigning with SMS, which I was a little worried about it but worked perfectly fine," said Reed. "We used SMS data to do better content distribution and it made voter contact more efficient."
The data the campaigners gained through their contact with voters was used to better target future interactions and helped them to address the voters' problems and listen to their complaints, he said.
From a social perspective, the team used social media data to communicate with people living in highly contested states or with people who were connected to people living in these states, said Reed. Similarly, on Twitter they sent direct messages to individuals who had influence in important stares, as well as to those who followed Barack Obama or his wife Michelle.
Campaigning in the cloud
From an infrastructure standpoint, Reed described the Obama campaign as "pretty cloudy". With about 200 products that needed to be deployed, he asserted that the tech staff could not have done what they needed to do without using cloud computing.
The tech team built a platform, which they dubbed Narwhal, which functioned as an interface to a shared data store for all campaign applications. For Reed, Narwhal allowed them to focus on the products. These included things like mobile applications and contribution applications.
Responsive Web-design was essential, he said, stressing that it was important that both internal and external apps worked on any and all devices. "We had millions of volunteers; we didn't know where they were from or what devices they were going to have, so we needed to make sure that their phones, tablets and computers all worked with our applications." The campaign's contribution app was built by two engineers and alone it raised about $750 million, said Reed.
According to Reed, listening to the users is the only way to build usable applications and by communicating with them, the tech team built a community around them. "The difference between a functional and a usable app is that dialogue with the users," he said, adding that the platforms and apps were easy for the voters to use. By including the community in some of the work, it made them feel like they were a part of the campaign, he said.
In line with this, the team ran countless tests and actually planned for failure, Reed said. "If you understand failure, you can understand success," he said, adding that the tech staff practiced failure again and again so that there were no problems on election day.
"All of this tech just helped us to better focus on the problems and on the products," he concluded. "In the end it is about building a great team, practising failure and facilitating community."
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