For Barack Obama’s historic presidential run, Blue State Digital developed and managed an online campaign operation that was unprecedented in size, scope, and influence.
Led by founding partner Joe Rospars, our work for the Obama campaign drove hundreds of millions of dollars in online donations, tens of millions of voter contacts, and an email campaign that engaged more than 13.5 million individual supporters. Blue State Digital played a crucial, widely acknowledged role in the election of the president. Here’s how we did it.The Challenge
In late 2006, as they began prepping for a presidential run, then-Senator Obama and his small team faced seemingly insurmountable hurdles. Unlike most major presidential candidates, the young senator hadn’t spent years assembling a stable of wealthy donors, building an infrastructure of establishment support, or gladhanding influential voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Aware of the pioneering work Blue State Digital had done for other political campaigns — including Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s successful 2006 reelection bid — Obama for America reached out and asked us to take charge of the campaign’s online components. Our ambitious task: Use every tactic in our arsenal — including online fundraising, email communications, social media marketing, design, web video, grassroots organizing, search and display advertising, staff- and user-generated content, cutting-edge analytics and optimization, and peer-to-peer mobilization — to help the candidate build a national campaign from scratch and sustain it through Election Day 2008.
The Program
Working closely with the staff at campaign headquarters in Chicago, BSD built an online campaign hub to funnel and multiply the enthusiasm of the candidate’s supporters. Located at BarackObama.com, this powerful hub was custom-built to exploit the integrated capabilities of the BSD Tools, our robust technology platform.
BSD’s strategic approach — since refined and expanded in dozens of engagements with brands, nonprofits, and political campaigns — found its ideal match in Barack Obama. The candidate’s inspiring vision for a revitalized democracy was perfectly aligned with the capabilities of our technology and the strategic principles we bring to our creative work. For instance: Tens of thousands of small donations can exceed the financial influence of a major corporation. A hundred passionate followers can unlock latent support in thousands of others. Demoralized, disengaged citizens can be inspired to participate if “participation” means more than just voting on Election Day.
Powered by the BSD Online Tools, BarackObama.com served as the engagement hub for tens of millions of supporters, including the more than 13 million who subscribed to our email list. It was there that supporters gave money; set up personal fundraising circles and volunteer groups; posted blog entries and user events; watched videos and read up-to-date content on the campaign blog; earned game-style “points,” which inspired them to get more deeply involved; and downloaded up-to-date canvassing and calling lists, then uploaded the results when they were done contacting potential voters. These are just a few of the dozens of engagement techniques that the BSD Tools enabled for the campaign.
The Results
First we’ll mention the most important result of all: On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.
Widely studied and copied, BarackObama.com is, to date, the most effective campaign website in the history of electoral politics anywhere in the world — and the online engagement and communications program we ran atop it sets the standard for campaigns of all kinds and at all levels. Here’s an overview of what BSD’s technology and staff accomplished:
- Fundraising. Obama for America mobilized 3 million individual donors, who made 6.5 million donations totaling $500 million over the course of the campaign. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less, and the average online donation was about $80. The average donor gave more than twice.
- Email Communications. More than 13 million people provided their email addresses to Obama for America via MyBO. The campaign sent more than 7,000 different messages, many of them targeted to specific donation levels — for example, people who gave less than $200 or more than $1,000. In total, more than 2 billion emails landed in supporters’ inboxes.
- Engagement and Mobilization. Obama supporters used the BSD Tools to create more than 2 million user profiles, write more than 400,000 blog entries, post more than 200,000 events, and create more than 45,000 volunteer groups.
- Phonebanking. During just the four days prior to Election Day, Obama supporters used BSD’s phonebanking technology to make more than 3 million phone calls. This figure is on top of the millions of calls supporters made during the weeks prior to the election.
- Video. Over the course of the campaign, users spent more than 14 million hours watching more than 1,000 Obama campaign-related videos on YouTube. All told, the campaign’s videos garnered more than 50 million views and 1.2 billion minutes of view time.
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