Comparing England’s eCampaigning

Posted on April 29, 2005 by Sanford

Funny – after the Presidential election in the US – I was expecting a very spirited online campaign effort in the UK – especially with a six-month build-up to the anticipated May 5th election date. And, as an interested party and a spectator – I have been watching the websites and on the three major party websites for the past month – ever since PM Blair dissolved Parliament. So, have the parties and campaigns leveraged the vantage point from across the pond to communicate to the masses via the Internet?

Basic Principles
Initially, the question is what does the campaign wish to accomplish with the Internet effort? In the Dean Campaign, it was (my assumption) to build the mailing list and then drive actions by the supporters to help the campaign in various forms (volunteer, donate, gather supporters). In the Kerry campaign, we refined this act by building the list, requesting support (first in terms of fundraising and then in terms of house parties and volunteer efforts). MoveOn.org originated a lot of these concepts – derived directly from fundraising tactics – and took what many of the dotcommers said about the Internet: it is a way to get a distributed group of people to act in a unifed fashion. The best analogy I can derive is watching a swarm of bees – each individual one is moving in its own fashion, but the group looks like they are moving in a unified direction. By focusing on the desire of the group, the swarm can be generally lead in a direction that is along the gradient of their desire.

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Participatory Democracy or Integrated Marketing?

Posted on March 20, 2005 by Sanford

On my way to the airport on Friday, I got a telephone call from Friends of Kerry. It had been some time since I had received a telephone call from the campaign – and I was surprised to get a request – not for money, but for having my name included in Kerry’s Citizen’s Roll Call for saving the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve. Interestingly enough, this did not start out as a call for money, but for my name to become part of the petition – very similar to the petition handlers I often see on the streets of New York or London.

Granted, I was then asked for a donation – which somewhat disappointed me (but then again, how else are they to generate funds) – but this could be the first step in terms of building a true integrated marketing campaign – leveraging what occurs on the web, on the phone, in direct mail and events in the news – to bring the concept of participatory democracy to the next level.

One thing that any of the Democratic organizations could be doing – is integrating the actions of what occurs on the web, direct mail, phone and email. This requires a substantial effort in managing process information (e.g. did the person sign the petition, did they donate, did they mail in a donation) but the potential benefit of being able to comment to me on the phone (“Mr. Dickert, thank you for signing our Roll Call – your involvement helps Senator Kerry make a difference in this Senate…”) makes that little difference that can help both in donations as well as future involvement when volunter action is called upon.

To date, I have not seen this effort in the DNC – my understanding is that the web site and the fundraising systems are separate at present (or share a slight interface), but the integration of these systems and databases – and the timely management of the data within them – would help identify the valued Influentials that are incredibly cruical to the Democrat’s cause. By building this relationship, and using a little integrated marketing techniques – we can foster more participation – and help every Democratic campaign to win.

Minor anecdote – I was recently visiting a friend’s home in London and picked up a call for him. The telemarketing script was incredibly enagaging – and, while I knew the effort was telemarketing, the use of an engaging script and engagement words were spectacular. We in the US could learn a little from this effort – understated but engaging.

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DNC Tech: Open-Source for real?

Posted on February 8, 2005 by Sanford

After all of the hub-bub is done and the Governor is elected as the new DNC Chair – Gov. Dean is going to be inundated with all sorts of issues that need to be addressed: how to work with the DECs across the country, how to work with the party machine there in Washington DC, deal with the many inputs that are coming to him from his advisors both from the primary campaign and the DNC Chair campaign. And, as another voice in the crowd, I think there are a number of issues that need to be addressed in the organization in a more structural sense – this time focusing on the integration of the back-office technology and data services, not as an insland or silo of the organization, but as a true horizontial provider of services that can best work with the ongoing efforts of the party.

Learn the real lesson of open-source
In large businesses today, many CIOs are considering new alternatives to the Microsoft platform or the bespoke initiatives that have hamstrung organizations to particular vendors – whether being a “Microsoft” house or an “open-source platform” house – but keeping code proprietary – and keeping the organization tied to the provider much like a drug addict is to their supplier. My own experiences with outsourced organizations demonstrates that when budgets are tight and the need for innovation is high (e.g. expanding features, responding to competitor moves), the organization is hamstrung.

An alternative which has worked to my advantage in the past is to build an internal team that covered the various development and architectural needs. This provides strong management over development cycles, a strong management of the cost base, and potential innovation benefits are there since the connection to the producers (the programmers, designers, etcera) are close to the organizational customers (e.g. marketing, product team, customer service, etcera).

But, being the DNC and being Democrats in general, offers a unique organizational opportunity to benefit both the Democratic party both inside and outside the party structure and to leverage a truly democratic and distributed effort with all of the democratic minded people around the world.

Instead of focusing all of the attention within the organization, leverage the lessons of SourceForge and Clark TechCorps and build a team of open-source development managers/programmers who focus on the development of the various components and platform structures that are in line with what will be built for the upcoming elections. Instead of keeping the Volunteer Center behind an IP contract with Friends of Kerry or the ePatriots code behind the DNC firewall, hire a OS Project Manager and release it.

Then, use product development techniques by drawing in the customers that will be using the products (e.g. internal DNC staffers and external political types) to build the product requirements and priorities. These meetings have to be with the developers in them – whether they are face-to-face or virtual through conference calls and wikis – to provide the “skin-in-the-game” value and then let the project manager lead the team.

Are we giving away the store?
Is this a strange concept? Truthfully, no. It is an excellent concept – especially if it is a blended effort focusing on the development of a set of tools for a platform that will evolve. Using the internal teams initial drive, building the first branch of the codebase allows others to extend the codebase and grow it with features and add-ons (e.g. the client architecture that would be a secure solution to connecting with the back-end solution). Some of the best innovative work has been after a team launches code into the wild (e.g. Gnutella) and allows the community of developers a chance to extend it. With guidance and support by the DNC, any of these tools can be extended and developed as needed – especially if the DNC communicated with the developers in an effective manner. Think about what might have happened if AOL had actually managed the development of the Gnutella Network in the direction of an iTunes or Napster. Might we be discussing the financial windfall of AOL’s vision versus Apple’s?

Remember the fabric, not just the tools
One thing that I have seen hamstring organizations is a need to control the development of tools within an group – almost serialize the development along functionary lines (e.g. eCRM solution for Customer Service has integration problems with the email communicaton platform for the Marketing organization). One of the most important aspects of this development has to be the build of the middle-layer: how will the organization, both the enterprise and the extended parts communicate between themselves effectively? While many vendors will offer their solutions (e.g. TIBCO, Vitria), again, the needs here are relatively simple and the tools are available (e.g. XML-SOAP, web services) – all we need is an understanding of the fabric and the integration between the different services.

Interestingly enough, the fabric is all about the data – how will all of the services communicate back to the various data stores. That will be how the DNC will win in the infrastructure war – how fundraising will be able to provide understanding of their effectiveness across a large donor base, how the volunteer coordinators will be able to determine the effectiveness of their staff, and how the political team will determine how effective their message is reaching the public – by allowing the tools to allow the discourse of ideas to rise about the functionality of any particular technology or channel.

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Recognizing the First Team (continued)

Posted on December 10, 2004 by Sanford

Funniest thing about coming into the campaign that day – was noticing how small the space actually was – and how little space we had. Aside from the players already mentioned, I should introduce a couple of other folks who added color to the campaign in my first days. It should be clear that when I came into the campaign, I had absolutely no campaign experience whatsoever, let alone Presidential experience…

Aaron Rosenthal, Database Administrator – one of the funniest guys on our floor, Aaron ran our installation of NGP – which is the software database solution that the campaign used to manage the financial and compliance efforts and our membership database (which we affectionately called KerryBase or K-Base). Aaron had performed similar work with another campaign in the past — and joined the campaign in this capacity. One unique characteristic he had was a pet gecko (of which I forget its name), which unfortunately passed away sometime into the Primary season — handling such adversity and challenges that no normal gecko should ever be subjected to.

Jessica MacLeman, Dewey Square and Internet Team Member – from what I remembered of Jessica in those first few days was she was a recent graduate and had joined Dewey Square (the consulting firm) as an intern and became a team member of the Internet Team almost inadvertantly. She was to be responsible for state efforts — and became the main go-to person for various state page modifications and voter database solutions during the primary season.

Chad Lennox, Volunteer Coordinator – Chad was one of the “older” people in the basement – tirelessly managing the scores of volunteers that were there in the summer months, scrounding for volunteers and interns during the dry season (Sep-Dec), and then having to manage a tidal wave of supporters as JK began to surge in the polls in the month of January and after the Iowa win. Chad always had a smile for the many volunteers that joined the campaign – and his hard work earned him a promotion into the Political Desk as the primary season came to an end.

Aaron Rudenstine, Grassroots Fundraising – Aaron had a typical path to the campaign – was offered a role via one person, that person left the campaign, found himself looking for work, his skill and ability landed him with another group, he worked like the dickens, and then would find himself moving up the ladder a number of times – including becoming Mary Beth Cahill’s assistant for a time, then working Political as well. When we first met, Aaron was ready to take on the world and build up our Internet fundraising effort – and he tirelessly made telephone calls to our sparce number of donors in the cold winter months, worked the data, and became all-around data guy on the success of our online fundraising in those early months.

Richard Rho, Bulk Email “Commander” – Richard had graduated from Duke University with a law degree – and wanted to practice law in DC. He joined the Kerry Campaign in the Finance Department, working on compliance (to make sure all of the Federal Election Commissions rules for fundraising were kept up). At the time, our inbound email was beginning to get out of control, and we needed more staff to help us with the effort. Richard was one of the people that Matt Butler “highly recommended” – and he joined our customer service group. Around the same time, our outbound email efforts were just beginning to ramp up and we needed someone dedicated to composing and delivering our emails. This person had to have HTML skills, a eye for detail, and an easy going personality. Richard was overhearing our conversations and came over to me and said, “Hey – I can do HTML. I use to do a little bit of programming.” Two days later, Richard was driving our bulk email systems – and eventually went on to lead a team of publishers during the General campaign, handling all of the outbound emails for the entire nation.

Eric Wilfong, National Database Director – Later in the campaign, when we got short handed, we interviewed Eric (vitually) right out of school, on the recommendation from the owner of NGP, on the assumption that the installation would grow beyond simple usage of the web solution. Eric came on the campaign with energy and enthusiasm – and I do not think he ever expected what became his role on the campaign – an almost daily grind of managing the NGP installation, database requests from all parts of the nation, database integration issues, reports on various fundraising and campaign minutia, problems it had with other applications – all the kinds of things a true enterprise would hire an army of DBs and developers to manage. Eric kept his head about him and handled it with aplumb – and slowly began to crawl out of the insanity that was the database of the Kerry Campaign. Later on, he was able to get more support for his team’s efforts – and today shows a maturity and breath that few people can compare with (save sites like Amazon or eBay or Yahoo!).

There are a number of other people from the early days of the Internet team to describe – including Nick Grouf and Dave Waxman, who came aboard to provide guidance and internal political management on behalf of the Internet team, and volunteers JR Boynton and Brian Villalunga who worked tirelessly for the relaunch of the new Kerry website in November 2003, and Daniel and Mike – two other compliance guys who became part of our first Customer Service team.

What became a mighty force in the campaign – the Internet team – started out with extremely humble beginnings. While the Dean Campaign got a lot of visibility for what it accomplished, the Kerry team did a tremendous amount with what little they had.

What a team they made – and then became.

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Recognizing the First Team

Posted on November 3, 2004 by Sanford

You know – so many people will never be recognized for the efforts that were made by the founding members of the Kerry Internet Team – and how the Kerry Campaign built up it’s staff.

First off, it was the incredible fund-raising prowess of the Dean Campaign that caused the Kerry campaign to begin to notice what was happening on the campaign. A VC in California, Mark Gorenberg, was tasked with writing a memo for John Kerry in June of 2003. At a meeting on his boat, John tasked Marcus Jadotte, recently hired as the Deputy Campaign Manager to “get the Internet going”.

Luis Miranda, Cyber Organizer – Marcus’s first hire was Luis Miranda, a field operative in the Gore Campaign, Luis’ family had been into publishing in South Florida (one of the first Latin newspapers) and had been involved in doing screensavers before high school. Instead of focusing on technology, Luis got involved in politics. After the Gore campaign, Luis worked for various Washington DC groups, setting up websites and other projects. Marcus’ hire brought the first person into the organization who was focused primarily on the Internet, aside from Crossroad Strategies, the original team who had helped the Senator win his campaign against Bill Weld in his earlier Senate campaign.

Dave Patten, Volunteer Coordinator and Director of Customer Service – in terms of longevity, Dave Patten was the longest running staff member on the Internet Team – originally tasked with the overall volunteer efforts, but then became responsible for the process of responding to incoming emails into [email protected]. Given a simple laptop and Microsoft Outlook, Dave had to regularly wait 90 minutes before his Outlook would start while the 8000+ emails entered into his computer’s memory – and then regularly crash. With a purchase of an email Customer Relationship Management service and a growth of his team, Dave was now able to reply to tens of thousands of emails – whether by an automated response or by targeted responses determined by his team.

Morra Aarons, Director of Internet Communications – Morra joined the organization in August of 2003 after being the Director of Internet Marketing for iVillage, a woman’s site and eBookers, a very popular travel site in the U.K. (like Expedia). Through a personal connection, Morra joined the team working on various projects – and specifically focusing on the the connection between the Communications Department and the Internet Team – whose primary communication medium were emails.

In late August/early September, in preparation for the pending launch of the official announcement for Kerry in South Carolina, Marcus and the Internet Team engaged in a redesign of the website. With a last minute change of designs, the new Johnkerry.com website was relaunched in time for the Kerry announcement – with a lot of hard work on the part of Luis, Morra, Larry (from Crossroads) and maybe two other people.

During the months of August and September, additional members of the team came aboard, including:

Dick Bell, Blogmaster – Dick’s political cred comes from way back – including his stint at the DNC as the first creator of a political forum for the 1992 Campaign (I would need to confirm the year). Dick had always been an ardent supporter of John Kerry’s for many years. At the beginning, Dick’s contribution was to be the direct connection between the Communications Department and the blog. Armed with his many followers (the Troll Patrol as we affectionally called them), the Kerry blog took a shape all its own. Ironically, in a bucking against the blogosphere tide, the blog volunteers pushed for the campaign to support a forum http://forum.johnkerry.com — borne out of the problems that we had with the Movable Type implementation — and the furious attacks we had with the many Dean and Bush trolls. It should be said that Dick managed both the blog and the forum — and spent many a waking hour working those communities for our best efforts.

Erin Hofteig, MeetUp Coordinator and Community Manager – Erin was originally a volunteer — and at some point, was given the responsibility of managing the MeetUp efforts — a daunting task with limited internal support or resources. In addition, Erin took over the Kerry identities I had created on Friendster, Orkut and Ryze — using the identities as a way of directly communicating with ardent Kerry supporters on these online community aggregation sites.

Mike Memec, Webmaster – Mike was Luis’ righthand man — after returning from working abroad, Mike took on the daily website publishing tasks — all without having a lick of experience on the Internet. He dove in head-first into every project and came out swimmingly — getting the job done by hook or by crook. His remit often was ensuring the tasks that needed to be maintained on a daily basis, whether it meant changing the content on the home page, updating the calendar, whatever. He was always there – making sure it got accomplished, and almost always in good humor. And, in addition, Mike was the team’s comedy light — he knew where the funny bone was — and always knew how to drop a line that would make most of us laugh.

When I joined the campaign in September, the campaign had agreed to work with Mark Walsh, previously with AOL and the CTO of the DNC, where he was given the lead responsibility to manage the team. I arrived on what turned out to be Mark’s last week with the campaign, for one week after I arrived, Mark had closed the funding on Air America, and went off to become the CEO of the country’s first liberal radio network.

Next post: where we went from here…

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