Feed aggregator

Do we live in a leaderless world? Obviously not – we don't have to look far to see how the decisions of bosses and politicians shape much of our everyday lives. Are there places in our world that exist outside of a top-down form of leadership? Yes – people collectively-organise, often to great effect, in many realms of life. And though this has been the case for all of human history – whether in church groups or terror networks – we are at a moment where the fusion of this kind of self-organisation, with ever-expanding social technology, is creating spaces that no longer require the type of 'leadership' we've become so used to.

For those of you already immersed in this world, the modern-legend that is Trafigura – the story of the PR firm that won an injunction against the reporting of Parliamentary proceedings involving its client, and then had it over-turned by a leak and a spontaneous, 12-hour online uprising in the 'Twittersphere' – is likely a familiar one by now. What the Trafigura 'campaign' represents though, is more than a 'good over evil', or 'David and Goliath' kind of victory – it represents a fundamentally different way of achieving social change, than that which most of our organisations will have had any previous experience being a part of.

What's different about Trafigura?

What's different about Trafigura, is the absence of a 'head'; a lead body – usually an organisation, but at least a charismatic individual – who can determine, broadly, the direction through which a likeminded group can move to achieve its aims. The only 'leader' of this campaign, was the idea that people have a right to know what happens in Parliament, regardless of the reputational effects that may have on the people or groups involved. And that was it – this idea exploded and very quickly became a trending topic on Twitter, feeding into a range of major blogs, mainstream news stories and, within half-a-day, the repeal of the gag order itself – a campaign victory by any traditional measure. But no single person or group could honestly claim the victory, because what happened was bigger than any of the individual parts.

What does this mean for us?

So what does all this mean for traditional campaigning organisations? Potentially, a lot, though it is still 'early days'. We can no longer assume that our knowledge, history of voice, or positioning will place us at the centre of mass collective sentiment around our issues or areas of work. On some level, the 'need' for a central organising body in a campaign seems – at least superficially – to be less relevant that it has ever been. As so many people can achieve critical mass, without being told to attend a particular event, or sign up to an organisation's platform, the potential for self-organisation is vast, and can, at times, outweigh the benefits of subscribing to an organisation's campaign actions. As institutions, it is impossible for us to move as quickly as individuals can, in response to an event or a piece of news. With the connecting power of social media, vast numbers of individual people are able to move very quickly, in roughly the same direction, without a helmsperson to steer the ship.

So are we, as campaigning organisations, on the verge of forced redundancy, in light of this shift towards decentralisation? No... or at least not necessarily.

If, in the coming months and years we are able to adapt to this changing terrain, and accept, that we won't always be able to 'lead' every campaign we want to take on, I think we will find our roles to be ever-more important, as e-campaigning becomes part of more and more peoples' social media routine. Alternatively, if we cling to the more traditional, command-and-control mechanisms of brand consistency and uniform messaging, people may very well find other ways of getting themselves heard on the issues they care about, that are less-restricting to their personal schedules or ideas of activism.

Practically speaking though, what would campaigning look like in this new environment? The ever-allusive answer is that it could look like a lot of different things, which is another reason it may be harder for some organisations to adapt effectively. It's much harder to plan for a campaign when you 

1. don't know when it might happen
2. don't know exactly what it's going to be about, and
3. don't know what contribution you might be making to it.

What to do about it

But luckily we're not flying totally blind here and there are still things we can do to prepare! The key is in flexibility; if a Trafigura-esque (spontaneous, leaderless) 'campaign' emerges within your area of expertise:

Make sure you've already got the relevant information available online – reports, stories, interviews – so you can start to link to it and share it around, as soon as the topic appears to be taking off. If people are linking to your information repeatedly, it builds a collective sense of trust that your messages carry some authority in the given area. Trust will make your next steps that much easier.

Figure out who the others are who seem to have some authority on the issues. This may cut against some organisations' instincts, but promote what they are saying and doing as well, whether via Twitter, a blog, your website, or a Facebook page. Reciprocity is an important tenet of social media culture, and will inevitably benefit your both work and your cause, if you can demonstrate that you're involvement is bigger than just your organisation.

Lastly, (and maybe most importantly) be prepared to offer whatever makes sense to those in the 'campaign' who are most active and vocal. Maybe this means providing a meeting space for activists looking to move their online actions into 'real world'; maybe this means making an introduction to a relevant politician whom you've already built a relationship with; maybe this means setting-up a one-off campaign action for supporters to engage with... your potential types of contributions in such a situation could be endless, but your potential returns could be greater than those of many of our most successful traditional campaigns.

The potential for unprecedented numbers of people to come together to affect change has never been greater; let's make sure that, though we might not be in the middle of it all, at least we can find ourselves a place where it counts...

Liam Barrington-Bush is co-founder of Concrete Solutions C.I.C., a (currently being registered) Community Interest Company that works with large voluntary and public organisations, and small community groups, to improve understanding and working relationships between those working for community benefit, at all levels. He can be found on Twitter at @hackofalltrades.

The email-to-action e-campaigning model is only one of many models for e-campaigning. The campaign strategy should determine the appropriate model.

The email-to-action e-campaigning model has been the dominant model for the last decade. It involves emailing supporters (plus promoting in other ways) to ask them to take a campaigning action usually on a website. It parallels the traditional tactic of petitioning and letter-writing, but makes it easier, more accessible and higher volume than a paper-based approach. When people talking about e-campaigning don't specify a model, they are usually thinking about this email-to-action model.

What people can be asked to do with this model is only limited by creativity, but some action examples include:

• petitions
• messages to politician / targets
• join online group
• make a video (or other content photos, poems, voice message, etc.)
• donate
• phone a politician / target
• attend or organise and event
• volunteer to undertake some research for the campaign
• facilitate people to self-organise

Why and When to use it

The email-to-action e-campaigning model should be used when the campaign research and strategy identifies that:

1. Mass participation is needed to undermine opponents, enhance allies or convince undecided targets
2. The supporter base needs to be built-up to have more influence
3. The campaign will be multi-stage and thus people need to be mobilised more than once
4. Digital channels lower the barriers to participation and can help attract and mobilise more support than is possible offline
5. A large proportion of supporters will occasionally need to be mobilised within hours
6. Mass media (TV, newspapers, radio) are unlikely to cover the campaign and thus it needs to bypass mass media and go directly to people.
7. It scales-up extremely well: it takes almost as much effort to email 100 subscribers and 100,000 subscribers.

How does it work?

It's power is its simplicity:

1. Subscribe: People provide their email address to get action alert emails (the biggest weakness and strength of the model)
2. Compose and send: Emails are sent to subscribers with simple instructions (using one thing) to do something, usually requiring clicking on a link to a webpage
3. Receive and decide to act: People follow the simple instructions and:
1. Complete the action
2. See a completion page and receive an email acknowledging their action. Both of these can prompt them to take further actions.
3. For message-to-target actions, the message is automatically delivered to a target via email or webform
4. Spread the word: People can optionally forward the email to friends, family and colleagues in their email address book in a familiar, simply and safe environment: their email tool. Other 'secondary

Why the dominant model?

There is a good reason why the email-to-action model is dominant: it provides good results for the effort required.

The more specific reasons are that:

1. Global standard: 1.6+ billion people have email addresses and the standard stays stable and reliable
2. Few constraints: Email is a flexible format (unlike mobile phone SMS texts or Facebook messages)
3. Convenient: Emails arriving in people's inbox prompt them to act since they already check their email for other things.
4. Cost: From the campaigning side: the cost-per-sent-message is lower than alternatives in terms of money and effort
5. Connected: Most people have immediate access to the web when reading their email
6. Effective: good emails get higher participation than other channels
7. Sharable: email is still the way most people share content with their friends, family and colleagues.
8. Everywhere: people use it at work, home, school, on their phones or in libraries and Internet cafés
9. Fast: it arrives within seconds or minutes and is waiting for you when you check email

No other tool offers this crucial mix of success factors and no realistic alternative is on the horizon (social networks and Google Wave are not realistic alternatives right now). Spam is a nuisance, but is minimised by modern anti-spam tools and services.

Success Stories

A conservative measure of what email-to-action model can achieve is what others have achieved with it. Yet so much more could be achieved with a wider vision. Organisations have different success from e-campaigning depending on objectives, priorities and luck. Examples include:

1. Drop Haiti's Debt (2010):
   Days after Haiti's catastrophic earthquake in Jan. 2010, the links between high poverty-levels, poor building standards and government debt became apparent. Massive worldwide attention was on Haiti in terms of humanitarian activities and related fundraising and political leaders were working towards a coordinated response. Raising the issue of Haiti's debt (a call some had been making for a decade and on which there was an agreement in principle) thus appealed to the public, the media and political leaders: it was the right time. Within three weeks, political leaders agreed.
2. Obama Campaign (2007-8):
   Used the Internet to recruit and mobilise 13 million online supporters, gather 60% of total donations and establish new records for US political campaigns in repeat giving. It put tools in people's hands to go out and campaign for Obama in all 50 US states. Other factors helped, like Obama's charisma and message, and the economic crisis, along with having positive ads nationally and negative ads locally.
3. Green My Apple (2006):
   Mobilised the Apple user community to apply pressure on Apple Corporation CEO Steve Jobs. The website was the main focus point since Apple users are technically and design savvy, but offline activity such as stunts at MacWorld conferences and the Apple Annual General Meeting also contributed. The campaign was off the back of an annual report card and league table of electronics companies for their environmental record. Apple conceded to many point within a few months.
4. Make Poverty History (2005):
   The UK part of the campaign recruited 500,000 supporters online in 12 months, 95% of which was in the 6 month lead-up to the G8 meeting in Scotland. It was helped by blanket media coverage and celebrity endorsement. When this stopped after the G8 meeting (July 05), recruitment dropped dramatically. It also stimulated national campaigns around the world and left a global coalition as its legacy.
5. Oxfam GB (2001-2004):
   Grew from 5,000 supporters online to 200,000 in the UK and 400,000 worldwide. Growth was steady, driven by regular actions through the year, Chris Martin's (Coldplay) support, online advertising, offline recruitment and a story arc that engaged people.
6. Amnesty International UK (2008):
   Asked people to "Send a Mothers Day card to the Tiananmen Mothers" (mothers of those massacred in around Tiananmen Square). Everyone who completed the action was asked to donate. 0.5% (some tests have achieved 2.5%) of action supporters donated and the average value was £16. 42% of those donating were new, 46% of those donating were lapsed and the remaining 12% were existing donors.
7. MoveOn.org (from 1998) / GetUp.org.au (from 2006) / Avaaz.org (from 2007) / 38Degrees.org.uk (from 2009):
   Variations on the model of being member centred rather than issue centred. They have significant membership within each of the three coverage areas and, as their members fund them, they are self-financing after the initial few years. They use the same email-to-action cycle that others use but get more return due to their ability to mirror the news cycle and/or the popular concerns.

What Tools Are Needed?

At its simplest, only a emailing tool is necessary since you can ask people to email in to subscribe and can email out with it. This assumes what you ask people to do doesn't require a form on your site as it could be a form on another site (like a government contact-your-political representative system) or an action requiring them make a phone call, attend an event, etc.

However these minimum requirements quickly become cumbersome if a campaign is growing. Thus the minimum for any scalable campaign would be:

1. A mass emailing tool (with tracking and reporting)
2. An e-action tool (page layout including petition form / message to target form / other form , data storage, completion email and page)
3. A web tracking and reporting tool

Specialist e-campaigning tools do the best job as they are made for this model and integrate both the email and the e-action tool. However many organisation have a separate tools for emailing and e-actions. If you have multi-lingual needs, only a few tools can handle this properly (most claim to do it and then have major gaps).

Increasingly important in these tools is connectors to social media. 

Beyond Email

Email is the key to starting and maintaining an on-going relationship with large number of supporters. However the actions that emails ask people to participate in can also be promoted via other channels such as blogs, social media, advertising, communities, etc. If the campaign actions gets media coverage, people searching online will also find the action. 

All of these efforts are higher effort and/or cost than emailing. Thus emailing tends to be the core activity in this model with the other activities broaden the reach by getting the attention of people not subscribed to the email list and attracting some of them to become subscribers.

Beyond On-site eActions

The most common approach to using the email-to-action model is to email your subscribers to go to your site to do an action online.  Yet since political and corporate targets increasingly have online presences (and not just an email address), there is the opportunity to direct participants to those presences. This means they could be contacting a politician via Twitter or Facebook instead of just email. The advantage is that it is more public. Actions could also involve participants to do something for the campaign like researching political opinion or expressing a point via video, a poem or photos.

Furthermore, actions don't even need to be online.  They could involve phone calls, visits to a politician, organising/attending a local event, introducing neighbours to the campaign and many other ideas.

Beyond The Email-to-Action Model

There are also other ways of these email, the web and social media that are not in the email-to-action model but use the same channels and tools in different ways. I'll write a post about those other models another day!

Your thoughts?

Please add your thoughts, additions and challenges below.

MyDavidCameron.com is a site that is collecting and publishing photo-shopped versions of David Cameron. What is interesting about it (besides the fact is has gone 'viral') is that it is being credited with reducing the opinion poll prospects of David Cameron/Conservatives. What I am interested in is if this is a credible claim: can an online campaign with a few hundred thousands visitors affect the outcome of an election?

Background for non-UK readers

Here in the UK, an election is looming (we're not exactly sure yet - but by June 2010 at the latest). For the last few years, many people assumed the current governing party (Labour - led by Gordon Brown) would be replaced by the official opposition (Conservatives - led by David Cameron). In the last few weeks the poll numbers for the Conservatives have gone down while the poll numbers for Labour have gone up (note: there are other parties - Lib Dems, Regional parties in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, smaller parties - but the media focus primarily on Labour and Conservatives)

My perspective (a non party-political analysis)

I think MyDavidCameron.com does a great job at capitalising on one section of the population's distrust of the Conservative party and their suspicion that David Cameron has put a 'gloss' on the Conservative party that can be easily scraped away. The site also ignores the widespread dissatisfaction with the Labour party and simply aims to undermine David Cameron's/the Conservative party image.

There seems to be a claim (heard from someone else in a chat today) that the site - by itself - has had a real measurable direct cause-and-effect impact on the decline in favourable viewing of the Conservatives. Yet I find hard to believe because the site has only 250,000 unique visitors as of writing (which is great for such a specialised site) and yet there are 46+ million eligible voters. 

Update 12 March 2010: Where the first 250,000 visitors came from on MyDavidCameron.com

What I think could be happening is that:

1. Tweeters, Bloggers and Facebookers spread it around
2. Because the site is overtly party-political, party-political types (including party PR people) are interested in it and spread the word
3. Because party-political types are interested in it, journalists pick it up and write a story about it to fulfil their day's 'quota' of news on stuff other's haven't written about before.
4. Other media picks it up (known as the echo-chamber in the media) and before long most media channels cover it for a day-or two which both sets of another cycle of twitter, Facebook and blog coverage
5. Conservatives/David Cameron gets scared and start reacting - defending their plans rather than staying focused on their positive-toned message
6. This subtle 'panic' from the conservatives and the media coverage that seed 'fear, uncertainty, doubt' (long claimed as Microsoft's strategy to undermine rivals) is picked up by the electorate and when asked for an opinion, it erodes their faith in the conservatives

So in the end, it is the media and an overreaction that does the influencing and the campaign itself influences the politicos who influence journalists (perpetually looking for their next exciting story) who influence the wider media.

Even a month of occasional but growing online and offline media coverage is unlikely to be even noticed by most of the population. So can the site really influence opinion polls of a party considering that a random sample of 1,000 people would consist of only 5 people on the elecion role (assuming everyone visiting the site was on the UK election role which is likely untrue) and more likely that no people of 1,000 would even know about the site.

What I am getting at is not to diminish MyDavidCameron.com as I think it is funny and provoking. Rather it is an attempt to use it as a case for understanding the deeper sequence of events that any public campaign needs to achieve to have a hope of a wider impact than just number of actions or visitors. Then, in understanding that, to find ways we can repeat it for non party-political campaigning.

The MyDavidCameron.com blog has a post about the lessons from the site to date yet what I am trying to get do is explore the ripple effects that took off from a good idea (as there are lots out there) to shape public political perceptions (since that is ultimately my work and likely yours!).

So, my questions:

1. What impact do you think the MyDavidCameron.com site has had
2. How do you think that impact unfolded?
3. What are the lessons we can learn for non party-political campaigning
4. What makes this type of success repeatable?

Read Part 1: "How to Campaign Like Obama"

Or download both parts in a single file to print.

When you think about the Obama Campaign for US President (2008) or Republican Scott Brown's 'surprise' election as US Senator (Jan 2010), one of the aspects many people focus on is the way the campaigns used the Internet. While the Internet was an important channel for the campaigns, there were many factors that contribute a campaigns' success.

Obama's Secret to Internet Success

Obama's campaign was widely acknowledged as being highly successful online. Obama's Democratic and Republican competitors all had Internet activities. Most were even run by veterans of the Howard Dean campaign in 2004 that pioneered the approaches Obama's campaign used (which itself copied and adapted the techniques non-profit campaigning organisations had been using from years, especially MoveOn.org).

So if the strategy and tools were not new, what made the difference? Joe Rospers, the Obama Campaign Online Director spoke at an event I attend in December 2008 and confirmed what I suspected. The difference was that the Online Director (Rospers) had autonomy and authority and had a direct presence at all top-level meetings.

"[Online activity] can't exist under fundraising or under communications. It really needs to be a parallel operation so you can manage competing interests"
Thomas Gensemer (BSD Managing Director)

Rospers was one of the first people hired to the Obama campaign before there officially was an Obama campaign. He attended all of the top campaign meetings and regularly shaped the campaign strategy and messaging. He had authority and budget to hire people and implement the tools necessary (he was on secondment from Blue State Digital (BSD) which provided the tools the Obama campaign used).

Obama's competitors had people with similar skills, but they were constrained by the hierarchy, usually reporting to a communication director who participated in top meetings and had budget and hiring authority. Giving Rospers a seat at the top table gave the Internet more autonomy and priority in the Obama campaign, including influencing relevant offline aspects of the strategy, and thus set itself up to have highly successful Internet activity.

This seemingly small difference has multiple impacts:

1. Direct experience with online campaigning at the senior level means direct participating in shaping the overall campaign as well as strong vision and leadership for the team delivering the campaign online.
2. More attention for delivering online campaigning because it isn't just one of many areas of responsibility of a communications director.
3. Fast decision making and implementation because little or no negotiation is needed to divide resources since the resource available for online campaigning are already known.
4. Ability to set priorities based on experience and evidence rather than perceptions and hype (e.g. email vs. social networking).

The eCampaigning Myths

While many people underestimate the power of having an e-campaigning expert at the top table, they also overestimate or mis-attribute other factors. The top myths about Obama's e-campaigning are:

1. Myth: The Obama campaign used new / novel tools
   Fact: No new tools were used that others had not used before. The Obama campaign integrated, optimised and managed existing tools by people with the appropriate expertise and time.
2. Myth: They had a large budget for Internet activities
   Fact: They had a relatively small budget to start with. However they knew the return from the online work and as this return was realised, their budget grew accordingly.
3. Myth: They started with a lot of staff to run Internet activities
   Fact: They started with the online director and hired the right people at the right time as the growing budget allowed. They ended up with a large team (81 staff, almost 100 volunteers).
4. Myth: They started with a large online supporter base
   Fact: They started with no online supporter base. However they had lots of potential supporters since there was already considerable excitement around Obama's candidacy and they had a fantastic launch and were ready to convert the potential into actual supporters.
5. Myth: Social networking sites were important to the campaign
   Fact: Rospers has said that the value of supporters on social networking sites was in the "single digits", so fewer than 10% of support originated from the social networking sites. While they had a lot of membership (5 million friends) and publicity around their social networking support, it produced little tangible results in terms of donations or participation. It likely helped recruit some supporters and supported the impression of a youthful and trendy campaign.

Being Online Matters, but for Different Reasons

When journalists and others allude to the fact that Obama won the because of the Internet, they were mostly wrong. Being online still matters, just for different reasons than most think: the marginal boost it provides and the perception it generates (and/or prevents) if the campaign appeals to people.

Ultimately, it is not being online that matters, but getting more attention and harnessing it. Online provides a relatively small boost in getting attention since the herd-behaviour of mass media still reaches almost everyone at the same time. However this attention from mass media is fleeting and cannot be sustained. Online is an excellent medium for sustaining and deepening attention once contact details (e.g. email address, mobile phone number) are obtained. Then attention can be sustained independent of mass media by sending regular, direct and timely communication to supporters.

In addition to this tangible benefit of campaigning online, there are other benefits. For politicians and organisations, being online:

1. Shows they are suitable for today and the future, not stuck in the past
2. Shows they adapt to new trends
3. Bypasses and extends on mass media coverage for candidates and supporters (un-filtered message)
4. Makes them seem more approachable and genuine
5. Strengthens inter-supporter bonds by connecting them to each other
6. Builds supporter commitment through doing things for candidates (favours/volunteers)
7. Enables and supports people to self-organise
8. Allows the crowd-sourcing of campaign data collection, idea generation and a local presence everywhere
9. Allows the opposition to capitalise on dissatisfaction with the current regime: online is an unofficial channel to confront, counter and parallel government / official channels

Obama's eCampaigning Formula

Technology was only one factor in Obama's success. Real e-campaigning success comes from having:

1. People with the right expertise
2. Strong strategy and plans (campaigning and e-campaigning)
3. Power: top level involvement, budget and decision making authority
4. Integrated and coordinated activity with the broader campaign
5. A compelling message and ask
6. Tools that allow the strategy and integration to be implemented and measured

Since I made a formula for Obama's overall success, here is one for his e-campaigning success:

Expertise + Planning + Power + Message + Integration + Tools = Success

All these online success factors build on the overall campaign success factors, including being seen as an underdog. The Internet is a particularly good medium for opposition because it is unconstrained by the rules and activity of governing. Being perceived as the underdog is relevant for both the Obama campaign and the Scott Brown campaign and translates particularly well on the Internet were it is relatively easy to organise dissent. Thus Organising for America (the post-election name for using the Obama campaign online network and resources) is less appealing now that Obama is the sitting US president.

Not only are people less inspired to support a sitting president's agenda, but the 'energy' of the Obama campaign has now been replicated by the Tea Party movement: the conservative movement that has sprung up to oppose Obama's agenda now that the Republicans are the opposition.

Obama's experience as a local campaigner (called a community organiser in the US) was also crucial online. The principles of campaigning locally - focusing on people and personal relevance - infused all parts of the campaign and are particularly relevant online. When the Obama campaign asked people to take action, some were online actions like donating and promoting. Yet other activity was offline like organising house parties and canvassing door-to-door. Differentiating between online and offline activities is thus an artificial divide because online communications got real people to help offline in real ways. Online was simply another communication channel.

Obama's Digital Tools and Practices

I've said that the Obama campaign used no new tools. So what tools did his campaign use? The most used were:

1. Email, especially fundraising: constantly updating supporters and asking for specific things they could do. Email is still the most universal and flexible way of reaching people online. By election day, the email list had 13 million members.
2. Website(s): the end-point of all emails, online ads, social media links, etc., it started with a prominent ask to join the campaign by providing an email address and zip code and also consisted of latest news, insider commentary, the Obama campaign social network (MyBO, 2 million accounts), downloadable content, etc. A separate voter registration site was also used with less obvious Obama branding.
3. Online Advertising: primarily focused on email list building: an easy, low risk asks that could be followed by other asks. Toward the end of the campaign, specific constituencies were targeted. Some advertising was also done to coincide with key milestones. Online advertising was a small proportion of the advertising budget because mass media still reaches more people, faster than online.
4. Video: most videos were of why people supported Obama and usually didn't even have Obama's image in it. They were timely and often had local appeal. Some were even produced by supporters and adopted by the Obama campaign. The result was 2,400 videos viewed for a combined total 2,000 years.
5. Blogging: while the Obama campaign did have its own blog, more important was getting supporters with blogs to write about the campaign to help reach each blog's existing community.
6. Social media: social networks and other social media were primarily a recruiting ground for the email list. There was basic continuous engagements with key social networks, but most engagement was via email
7. Analysis: analysis of what was working was crucial for smart campaigning. This goes beyond split-testing emails and web pages to testing rebuttal strategies and analysing data supporters collected.
8. Segmenting: unlike mass media, targeting specific profiles of people online is relatively easy, and the Obama campaign did this extensively online. Auto-segmenting was by location and a number of 'tracks' exists for people to opt-into.
9. Other: there was also activity via Twitter, mobile phones but its overall contribution to the campaign was primarily in the perception of Obama.

How Supporters Were Put To Work

The digital tools were used to ask people to support the campaign by:

1. Donating: repeat donations of small amounts were one of the key differences with other campaigns past and present. Critical to this was precision timing to coincide with mass media stories, events and key milestones. 3 out of 4 donors gave online.
2. Do-It-Yourself: The Obama campaign provided guides, fact-sheets, videos, photos, speeches, phone scripts, data, etc. to supporters as raw materials to create their own campaign material and activities for use online, face-to-face and by phone. The result was hundreds of thousands of user-created pro-Obama videos, blog posts, phone calls, door-step visits, etc.
3. Organise / participate in local events: people were encouraged to organise house parties, video screenings, phone calling and other events to get supporters and potential supporters together to organise to help Obama win. The result was millions of volunteers other campaigns didn't have and couldn't match by hiring (McCain's campaign hired local unemployed people at minimum wage, and they were often Obama supporters!). They were also the origin of a lot email subscribers.
4. Local canvassing: supporting going door-to-door promoting Obama and armed with fact-sheets and self-printed/produced materials as well as record-keeping sheets to collect data (e.g. email addresses) and record the results of each visit.
5. Collecting Data: when people are interacting with others online, on their doorstep, by phone or at events they are creating a constant flow of data about who is a supporter, who's not and their perception. When structured, stored and analysed it can be more accurate than polls and surveys.
6. Fighting back: Obama's campaign was confronted by a deluge of unsubstantiated and potentially damaging accusations. Supporters were asked to identify them, alert the campaign and counter them via their own networks (e.g. reply-all to an email with the lies backed up with links to references). The Fight The Smears site was set up to support this. This strategy kept Obama focused on positive messages while supporters directly responded to accusations.
7. Get-out-the-vote: Being a supporter doesn't mean you actually show up to vote. So a get-out-to-vote effort makes voting social and attempts to remove any obstacles to you voting. On election days (primary and national), Obama supporters were emailed and texted a list of 5 others to call to see if they were going to vote. Online advertising was also used. Even lifts were offered to people who had mobility challenges.

Obama's Online Strategy

In general, the strategy evolved over time based on what was working and what was needed at different phases of the campaign. However the general online strategy involved:

1. Make the campaign about people's hopes, not Obama's, and with the voice of a supporter, hence the slogan: Yes We Can. Online this also means multi-way communication: campaign-to-supporter, supporter-to-campaign and supporter-to-supporter. Supporters should feel they own the campaign. It means talking to people not at them.
2. Attract everyone to the campaign website and get them to 'join' the campaign by providing their email address (to re-contact them) and zip code (postal code to identify political constituency). As Joe Rospers recently put it "having someone become a fan on Facebook, share something or follow you on Twitter, those are the opportunities to begin relationships with new people in places they are already spending time. What going to determine the outcome of the election is which party or organisation can manage to turn those beginning of relationships into deep meaningful relationships."
3. Make everyone on the email list a starting-point for further connections with their network and community online and offline.
4. Support self-organising: a locally owned and directed campaign everywhere is more effective than any centrally directed campaign. Provide customer-service team to help people help the campaign.
"We didn't necessarily want our supporters reading off a script," Plouffe said. "We said 'Speak from your own heart about Barack Obama.' Nothing is more powerful than authenticity. People can have a very sensitive bullshit meter. They'll sniff out inauthenticity in a minute, especially young voters. Don't be a slave to scripts." - David Plouffe
5. Authenticity: respect supporter spontaneity in how they talk about and promote the campaign. This means providing direction but not enforcing a message. It also means talking to them like adults.
6. Provide a range of options for them to be involved so each person can determine their participation themselves. As a result, 80% of supporters did something to support the campaign.
7. Make donating an emotional act to immediate needs. Being timely is critical for urgency and relevance and being easy and affordable is important to encourage anyone to donate and re-donate (donors gave more than 2 times on average).
8. Scale-up the online team as the fundraising results grow. This ensures the people are there to continue engaging and mobilising supporters. Hire experienced people (300 people by election day).
9. Provide Incentives: Donors and volunteers were entered into draws for dinner with Obama, told that an existing supporter would provide a matching donation, were able to write a message to a new person their matching donation convinced to donate, got to attend events by taking caucus training. In many cases, the incentive was social: reinforcing you were part of a movement for change by connecting you to that movement.
10. Focus on creating great content. A conviction that great content is more important than great tools meant a focus on the message not the medium.
11. Constantly improve. Discover what is working through constant testing and analysis and apply it immediately.
12. Anticipate success and threats and respond proactively. One example was that a team working on building a presence in states that held primaries after 'Super Tuesday' before 'Super Tuesday' primaries were even held. If Obama was out of the nomination on Super Tuesday, it was wasted effort. If he was still in, he was ahead of the competition. Another example was having a full presidential transition site (change.gov) up within minutes of Obama's win being announced. 

Conclusion

The successes and lessons of the Obama campaign are highly relevant to NGOs because they show:

1. Expertise and planning to plan and run an effective campaign are crucial and provide a higher return than inexperienced people
2. Successful e-campaigning depends on the overall campaign being well researched and planned yet still nimble to opportunities and threats
3. Obama's campaign copied techniques and tools used daily for civil society e-campaigning. These are easily reproducible with the right expertise and priorities.
4. A well organised and integrated e-campaigning with the right priorities can make a significant contribution to the overall campaign.
5. Daily/weekly incremental improvements multiply into significant online success over the life of a campaign. This is why split-testing and analysis is so important.
6. The real barriers for many NGO organisations' e-campaigning are not tools and techniques, but expertise, research, strategy, planning, priorities, budget, leadership, etc.

Any NGO campaign that can get the organisational issues addressed is 90% of the way to being successful at e-campaigning. Obama's campaign versus his competitors is simply one of most recent and dramatic examples.

Further Reading and Viewing This article has been in draft since 2008.  In that time countless articles about the Obama campaign have been read, presentations have been watched, conversations have been had and thoughts have evolved. This is a list of some of the source material that has either helped me write this or have confirmed what I already wrote.

• Online Tactics for Success, Jan. 2009
• Learning from Obama, Colin Delany, Aug. 2009
• Is this man the future of politics? (with video) Guardian, Feb. 2009
• Near-Flawless Run is Credited in Victory, New York Times, Nov. 2008
• The New Organizers, What's really behind Obama's ground game, Zack Exley, 8 Oct 2008
• How Obama Really Did It, Technology Review, Sep. 2008
• Video (below): Applying Obama Online Lessons to Local Campaigns (22 Jan 2010)
  
• Unread: The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe (book), Nov. 2009 or read excerpts
• Audio: Talking digital election with Joe Rospars (10 Mar 2010)
• Article with video: The Digital Election: Prepare to be Spammed (12 Mar 2010)

Also see Part 2: How To eCampaign Like Obama

Or download both parts in a single file to print.

I tend to get agitated when naive journalists suggest that the Internet was the decisive factor in winning a campaign. This occurred frequently with the Obama campaign (2008) and more recently (January 2010) with Republican Scott Brown's campaign in Massachusetts, USA.

This article is written just with what I know about campaigning, e-campaigning and what I observed, read and heard about the Obama campaign.

Understanding the real reason they won and the what role the Internet and other digital media played in that win are crucial for campaigning practitioners and managers to know what are priorities and know what contribution digital media can have a campaign.

The Fundamentals of Campaigning

Before any campaign starts, there needs to be a power analysis: an assessment of where the 'power' to achieve your goals lie and how to influence it. For elections it is very clear: power is with voters and you need to be their best choice for the leadership they wish to see. For non party-political campaign, it is usually less clear.

Thus, regardless of if it is Obama's Campaign in 2008, Republican Scott Brown's campaign in 2010 or any other politician, the fundamental strategy is to:

1. Get existing supporters to vote for you (and/or your agenda) - not just say they will vote for you.
2. Convince non-affiliated voters that are favourable to your agenda to vote for you. This includes ensuring they are on the electoral register.
3. Convince those truly non-affiliated and those non-affiliated who are only slightly unfavourable to your party to vote for you
4. Demoralise, seed doubts in or demotivate opposition supporters so they don't vote (usually not explicitly as that would likely backfire)

In 21st century politics, getting existing supporters to vote is necessary but not sufficient. Getting non-affiliated support is crucial, but most will already favour a party so the key is to get them to actually vote. Note that many people (including many journalists) believe the myth that real power is with the independents - but political scientists have discredited this for decades.

This fundamental strategy applies to non party-political (civil society) campaigns too (assuming the power analysis results in the same conclusion: inspire and mobilise large number of people to act). However campaigns are complex and it takes getting many things right for them to succeed. I'm going to explore how Obama did it and debunk some myths journalists and others use to oversimplify his (and others') success.

Campaigning like Obama isn't difficult if you have the right priorities and people with the right expertise - but are almost impossible without that. Unfortunately these are exactly the areas on which most campaigning organisations compromise. Yet if you are determined to apply the learning from the Obama campaign in your own campaigning, here is what you need to know.

How Obama Won

We all know that campaigning is most effective when all campaigning activity is aligned. Before I go into how to campaign online like Obama, I'll first explore how to campaign like Obama.

The goals of the Obama campaign were simple: fundraise, convince voters and get them to actually vote. Unfortunately not all civil society campaigns have (or can have) such clear goals.

The key factors in Obama's campaign success in achieving this were:

1. Obama's has experience as a 'local campaigner' (a 'community organizer' in US English): someone who would organise and motivate local communities to fight for an issue against an entrenched institution. So how his campaign was run has real lessons for campaigners and campaigning organisations around the world - perhaps more lessons than it has for party-political campaigning. The 'field program' (4,000 paid local organisers to coordinate the volunteers) is thus cited by as the key reason Obama won. As David Plouffe put it: "There's nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being. Nothing."
2. Obama's personal charisma, demeanour and life story
   Obama has many qualities that appeal to people: he is an inspiring public speaker, he exuded calm when many in the US were panicking over the financial meltdown and his life story. For a campaigning non-profit, the equivalent would be campaign message: does it appeal to the intended audience?
3. Opportunity: disillusioned with of GW Bush and Republicans plus an economic meltdown Obama happened to be the right candidate for the time. He promised change when the opinion of the existing administration was at an all time low. He offered a calm, thoughtful response when people were panicking about the economy. He promised unity when people were sick of partisanship. He offered hope when people were losing it. For a campaigning non-profit, being in-tune with the mood and stories of the times makes a significant different in the likelihood of success.
4. Outsider: Obama was perceived as an 'underdog' in the campaign for a range of reasons: better financed rivals, representing the party in opposition, perceptions of his ancestry, a short history in politics, etc. This helps be seen as an alternative to everything people have disliked about the current system and government.
5. Expertise: talented team with the right involvement and authority
6. Strategy: people’s campaign, inclusive, networking
7. Integrated communication: talking about the same thing at the same time across all channels (Obama, news, advertising, website, emails)
8. Inspired people: "change you can believe in" - a positive message
9. Consistency: he and his campaign stayed on message and united
10. Proactive: they anticipated, outsmarted and outpaced competitors
11. Tactics: local everywhere - face-to-face, Internet, media

Obama's experience as a local campaigner (called a community organiser in the US) was crucial for many of these areas. The principles of campaigning locally - focusing on people and personal relevance - infused all parts of the campaign.

A suitable formula is:

Planning + Message + Opportunity = Success

Most organisations focus on the message: researching it, planning it and delivering it. Very few do comprehensive campaign planning (including contingency and continuity planning) and are organised to rapidly take advantage of opportunities. It is not money that buys these, but priorities and expertise.

The General Campaign Myths

1. Myth: you need a lot of money.
   Fact: While Obama's campaign ended with more than $600 million USD, it didn't start with much money. It was able to raise that much money because it had the right priorities from the beginning and remained committed to them throughout. What it did was invest in the right areas from the beginning.
2. Myth: All of Obama's donors gave $200 or less
   Fact: A majority of Obama's donors gave $200 or less each time, but only 26% had a total contribution of $200 or less (the same as George Bush in 2004). Obama's real fundraising success was in encouraging repeat donors.
3. Myth: Obama's campaign had lots of staff
   Fact: By the end of the campaign it has lots of staff, but at the beginning it focused on having the right staff for that stage.
4. Myth: Obama's campaign's use of the Internet was instrumental in its success.
   Fact: I'd love for this to be true. While the Internet was one of the key tools for the Obama campaign, it was the way the Obama campaign synchronised it communication strategy across all channels and used each for its strengths that helped him win. The Internet was only one of these channels.

The Obama Campaigning Model

Many people think there is a new 'Obama' campaigning model. However everything the Obama campaign did, someone else had done before. So what made the real difference? Best practice.

While everything the Obama campaign did has been done before, others did a few things well. The Obama campaign focused on doing everything well. This meant they got a tremendous multiplier effect by being effective across all areas of the campaign. For example:

• Contingency planning: They identified Obama's potential weaknesses, produced their own anti-Obama ads and then tested them on focus groups with a range of counter-strategies. Thus when their opponents used them, they knew how to respond (or not respond) and could do it within hours.
• Continuity planning: They put time into planning for phases of the campaign that they may never have got to, but if they did they would be ahead of opponents. For example they had a team working exclusively on the plans for post "Super Tuesday" - the day in the process to select each party's' candidates when so many states vote that there could be a decisive winner. There was also a team working on the strategy and implementation of the transition to the presidency before he's even won.
• Empowering supporters: the communication constantly emphasised that this was not just about Obama, it was about the ability of the American people to bring about change. This went beyond rhetoric to practice by encouraging, directing and supporting people to self-organise - including giving them the tools and information to do so and letting people tell their own story in their own way of why they supported Obama.
• Daily Alignment: all channels needed to be on the same topic on the same day. Thus when Obama spoke on a topic, this would be reflected in the advertising, by volunteers knocking on doors as well as in emails and on the website.
• Nimbleness: responding within hours via email and online video often meant scooping mass media.
• Analysis: It is said that Carl Rove, architect of GW Bush's two wins, was a data-geek. The Obama campaign took this one step further and not only had an analysis team, but used its supporter network to collect more real-time data. As a result, they could adapt their strategy and tactics daily to what they were finding.
• Online, email is crucial: They focused on using email for campaigning online, with the primary objective of all social networking presences to direct people to sign-up for emails on the Obama site. This had been best practice for over a decade and will remain best practice for the foreseeable future despite Facebook, Twitter and whatever else comes along. Email is still the best medium to directly and repeatedly reach supporters.
• Hiring experienced people: The Obama campaign hired people who had doing it before, knew where to focus and what to avoid. They also hired enough people to do the jobs required so each person could do their job well.

Lessons for Campaigning Organisations

So what should campaigning organisations learn from this?:

1. Planning is crucial. In addition to policy research, audience research and a campaign strategy, but also power analysis, target research, continuity plans, contingency plans. This includes planning so that opportunities can be seized when they arise.
2. Analyse performance. This keeps you focused on what works and provides insights to keep you ahead of the targets. The science of campaigning is just as important as the art. Take data analysis seriously or be doomed to waste money, time and get off-track.
3. Audience-centred public communication: it's about them and their passions, not you. This applies even to evidence-led organisations (vs. member led): even with the agenda determined by the evidence, the messaging to the public and supporters need to be about how it is relevant to them. For a diverse audience or a locally relevant issue, this means segmented communications.
4. Invest in experience. Hire a specialist. Give them responsibility and autonomy. Get training for existing staff or individual weaknesses. Run small scale experiments. Stimulate specialists and support staff with feedback from performance analysis. Just don't pile it on overworked staff (at least without removing other work), new graduates or interns. Knowing how to communicate does not mean you can campaigning effectively.
5. Plan for scaling: the resources (people's time and budget) it took to double or triple supporters or donations need to be increased to continue succeeding. If they do not increase, not only will success slow, but it may actually reverse if the successes (e.g. new recruits, donations) are not nurtured.
6. Combine campaigning with donating. Results from a growing number of organisations are showing that donating around campaigning actions works and is accepted by supporters. It doesn't mean abandoning dedicated fundraising efforts, just adding fundraising as an option for campaign planning (e.g. to fund a stunt or the campaign).

Smart Campaigning

Applying these strategies, principles, priorities and practices not necessarily easy, but they are smart. The key question: is winning your campaign important enough to be smart with your campaigning?

What it takes to be smart with campaigning is what the Obama campaign team had: informed leadership from the top and people with the right skills and knowledge. Sadly, most campaigns have gaps in both areas and either fail to recognise them or fail to resolve them. The best time to start resolving them is now.

Ultimately smart campaigning means that if it can be won, it is won sooner. That saves money in the long term and is easier than trying to fix things along the way. Perhaps what is thus needed is an investment plan for campaigns than spans the budget cycles and allows a strong foundation to be established.

Further Reading and Viewing Read Part 2: How to eCampaign like Obama

Or download both parts in a single file to print.

To read more about the overall Obama Campaign and his competitors see:

• Barak Obama: How He Did It, Newsweek, Oct 2008
• How Barack Obama won the US election, Telegraph, Nov 2008
• Five Reasons Why Obama Won the '08 Election
• How Barak Obama Won, BBC news, Nov 2008
•  Tracking Campaign Finance, BBC News, Oct 2008

What is split-testing?

Split-testing is simply 'splitting' a group into two or more parts to expose to an 'ask' that differs by a single-variable. The results of each 'ask' is then compared to see which one performed the best. For emailings, this involves splitting the recipient list and the emailing sent to each differs by a single-variable like subject line, message tone, time/date of sending, etc.

The purpose of split-testing is to learn what will get a given recipient group to give the best response. Of course, what constitutes 'best' is up to your specific objectives and your test versions. Furthermore, results vary significantly between different group profiles, over time and often to seeming small variations in the messaging. Thus others' results, while useful to plan your test, should not be assumed to apply to your audience and objectives.

Split-testing is a well established technique and has been used in direct marketing for decades and in science for centuries.

Email split-testing principles

1. The people in each of the 'splits' have roughly the same composition as each other and of the overall group. A few sub-groups would have very different profiles, but as long as they are equally present in all splits then it is fine. A random split usually suffices for this.
2. The messaging differs by only one-variable. This is essential unless you venture into the more complicated multi-variate testing. A single-variable could be the subject line and then all other aspect (e.g. send date and time, sender, message body) are the same. If more than one vairable differs, the test results are compromised.
3. Identify one of your versions as the 'control' version. This is normally the one that represents the current way of doing things against which your 'test' versions will be compared.
   
4. Ensure a sufficient split (sample size) that is sufficient for testing and statistically valid. Most emailing split-tests fail on this criteria.

Planning an email split-test

1. Propose a split-test if not everyone agrees with what works best (this also helps avoid ego-bruising conflicts!)
2. Find out what existing evidence exists internally or externally. This can help you shape the split-test.
3. Run your split-test and share the results with peers across the sector
4. Run more split-tests based on what you learn, depending on the results consider
5. Plan to re-run the split tests in 12 months effectively building up a yearly schedule for new and repeat split tests

Being statistically valid

To be statistically valid, you should calculate the right sample size (for email, the number who open/click/participate depending on what you are testing) for your population (total email list size) with a given confidence level (and/or percentage difference between results) to find the confidence interval (the percentage range above which differences are statistically valid according to your confidence level).

If all that sounds confusing, use one of the many online sample size calculators.

I consider sample size to be not the number of people sent or receiving the email, but the number of people who do the action you want to measure (open/click/participate). This is because for public opinion surveys, they don't call 1,000 people, they call as many as it takes to get 1,000 responses!

So for anyone doing an email split-test, this means you need to:

1. know your 'normal' range of open/click/participation rates
2. calculate the sample size needed for a given confidence interval and population
3. calculate from your open/click/participation rates what size of split would get you this sample size
4. Doing the split (or delaying it)

You can, of course, do split-test less scientifically, but then their results are more open to dispute - and that is often on of the two key reasons we run email split-tests: to settle a difference in opinion about what works best and to improve engagement.

Thus, if you:

1. have 20,000 people on your email list (population) and you
2. want a confidence level of 95% with a
3. confidence interval of 1% then
4. you need a sample size of 6,489.

If you are comparing split-test at open rates and the norm is 40%, each 'split' needs to be 16,222 people (6489/0.4) - and thus you don't have enough for a split test with this confidence level and interval.

By increasing the confidence interval to 2%, it only requires a sample size of 2,144 and thus each split needs to be 5,360 (2144/0.4) so you can either have two splits and then email the rest with the best performing email, or 3 splits (almost 4) and learn the results for next time.

It also means that with a confidence interval of 2%, any difference of less than 2% isn't statistically valid = an insignificant difference!

You can start to see that having a large email list (e.g. > 50,000 subscribers) and high open/click/participation rates are almost pre-conditions for doing email split-testing :-)

Text vs HTML Emails

A debate that frequently re-surfaces (see this from 2000 and this from 2004) about mass emailings is the effectiveness of HTML vs. text. This is thus (due to 'Planning' point 1 above) a perfect candidate for a split-test.

Technology wise, multi-part emails make it possible to include both a plain-text version and an html version in a single email, so that people can choose with their email reader (e.g. Outlook, Gmail) what version they want to read. But this is more than a technology issue.

The existing evidence is not consistent: some says HTML gets higher click rates (it won't affect open rates for this test), whole others says text does. See:

• HTML vs. Plain Text - a Test, 2 Aug 07
• Compare performance in the latest vs. the 2006 MailerMailer Reports
• search around and find others

The results from different published test results are inconsistent:

1. The 2 August 2007 test finds:
   
   • A "Lite HTML" email outperformed Plain Text by 55% in click-through rate. 
   • A "Heavy HTML" (Ad style) email vs. Plain Text email. Plain Text outperformed Heavy HTML by 34%.
2. The MailerMailer reports find:
   
   • June 2009: "There is virtually no difference in click rates between HTML (3.05%) and text email messages (2.95%)
   • Jun 2006: "recipients are more likely to click on links in html emails (3.31), than plain text (2.71%)"

Despite this, we can learn a few things from them for our own tests:

1. Having a 'heavy' html (e.g. highly designed email newsletter) email may reduce click-throughs
   
2. The same test separated by a few years may have different results.

So why does light vs heavy html make a difference? The test don't tell us that, but we can speculate:

• People probably like being communicated with but not marketed to.  Think of it like snail-mail: a flier through the mailbox barely gets a glance, a personally addressed, hand written (or at least signed) letter gets opened, read and saved.
• In email terms, 'light html' is showing you've taken some care to communicate clearly, heavy html says you are marketing and plain text is like a quick note on a post-it note put through the door.
• In terms of the differences between years, people are becoming more experienced with email and are learning and adapting to what they receive. Thus their behaviour changes too.

Email and Mobile Phones

The rapid rise of the use of mobile phones for fetching email and browsing the web means plain text still needs to be a consideration. Specifically:

• HTML versions that can be read without images loading (both for phones and for modern email readers)
• Multi-part emails so that a device can use the plain text version if it is configured properly
• Avoiding fixed-width emails so that they 'flow' properly into different sized devices
  

Perhaps the real question in the "html or plain text email" debate should be "html or plain text email for what" as this 13 Dec 2007 article starts to explore.

Benchmarking: What is it?

Read the 2009 eCampaigning Review Insights and Benchmarks

The idea of "benchmarking" seems to a concept that people love to throw around at work, but very often is misunderstood. I'd like to help demystify it.  While I am no expert in benchmarking, almost a decade of doing benchmarking for a range of campaigning organisations has meant I have needed to research what it was, form a clear opinion on it and apply it in practice.

The idea (but not the application) of benchmarking is very simple: comparing common processes or metrics across different initiatives.

Benchmarking helps determine how good the results you are achieving and the process you are using are. If you achieve 25% on something, is that great, average or poor? You don't know until you identify what is great, average and poor results - and that is benchmarking.

A Benchmarking Example

A good example is how we each present ourselves.  There are elements of this we can choose (e.g. clothing, hair styles), elements we can not choose (e.g. genetics) and elements we can influence (body shape, how we speak, how we behave, lifestyle). As "social" animals we are constantly comparing others and ourselves with others.

This could be called social benchmarking. How we look is not benchmarking, but how we look compared to others is. We can measure some aspects and can't easily measure others. But it is not the results of individual comparisons that make the real different, but the package of comparisons and its impact on the end result.

What is NOT Benchmarking?

• Measuring results of any one initiative (email, action, campaign)
• Analysis of how a single email or campaigning action performed
• Evaluating the impact/success of a single action or campaign
• Reporting on how any one initiative performed
• Listing best practices used in any single initiative
• The results of a single survey of supporters or the public
• Producing a single plan or strategy
  

While these can contribute to a benchmarking effort, they are not in themselves benchmarking because they do not compare the results to anything.

What IS Benchmarking?

• Comparing the results of multiple initiatives (email, action, campaign, survey)
• Analysis of how multiple emails or campaigning actions performed
• Comparing the evaluation/success of multiple actions or campaigns
• Comparing best practices between actions, campaigns or organisations
• Comparing strategies or plans across organisations

The hardest part of benchmarking is really ensuring there is common criteria that is comparable. This means consistency of approach between multiple initiatives and multiple organisations. While the analysis of each single initiative is the most time consuming, ensuring the consistency of analysis is critical for insightful benchmarking.

Why Benchmark?

The basic reason for benchmarking is improvement. If you do regular benchmarking, it is thus for continuous improvement. The reason for improving is not only to be better in an area than others, but also to not get left behind and increase the benefits for a given cost and effort.

What this means in practice depends on what you benchmark. But for campaigning it usually means:

1. Having a greater campaigning impact (and ideally faster)
2. Recruiting more supporters (and not losing existing ones)
3. Cutting out ineffective activities (and the associated cost and effort)

Benchmarking Approaches

There are generally a two different styles of benchmarking:

1. Internal benchmarking: where results are compared internally over multiple different activities, time periods, geographical areas, etc.
2. Peer Benchmarking: where results are compared between organisations in the same sector
   

Internal benchmarking is relatively easy because the information required is readily available (if it exists).  Peer benchmarking is more difficult because it requires either use of publicly available data which is either incomplete or over-aggregated. Collaborative benchmarking occurs when multiple organisations each contribute data for the benchmarking exercise.

Furthermore, benchmarking can either be:

1. Quantitatively-oriented: where metrics are calculated and compared e.g. what is a good performance level and who was closest/furthest to it. This is generally data-right (more initiatives compared) but context-poor (less information about each initiative being compared).
2. Qualitatively-oriented: where processes and perception is critiqued and compared  e.g. what "best" looks and/or feel like and who was closest/furthest to it. This is generally data-poor (fewer initiatives compared) but context-rich (more information about each initiative being compared).
   

Benchmarking in Practice

Producing the 2009 eCampaigning Benchmarking Report is thus a qualitative and quantitative collaborative peer benchmarking initiative. 

The quantitative analysis requires four key steps:

1. Identifying the measures that are important and measurable
2. Collecting uniform input data in terms of what the data represents and how it is formatted
3. Analysing the input data in a consistent way (e.g. consistent formulas)
4. Comparing the results between emails, actions, organisations, themes, segments, countries, etc.
5. Review the results, interpret their meaning and make recommendations based on the findings

The qualitative analysis more of a evolving cycle:

1. Determine what "good" looks/feels like and how to recognise it
2. Design a way to record and report the findings
3. Apply the current methodology to a few real initiatives
4. Review if the methodology is suitable and refine it as necessary
5. Apply the refined methodology to a few new real initiatives (and refine further if necessary)
6. Review the results, interpret their meaning and make recommendations based on the findings

You may already use forms of internal benchmarking such as:

• Split (A/B) Testing of email and website performance
• Comparing results between email and actions
• Looking at peer organisations' websites and seeing what they do different/similar
• Sharing normal performance statistics with people in other organisations
  

Ideas for Benchmarking

Doing an eCampaigning Benchmarking Study is only one way you can use benchmarking. Other ways include:

• Surveying opinion (e.g. public, supporters, campaigning targets) before launching a campaign and then re-surveying them during and/or after the campaign and comparing the change in results
• Comparing your strategy with that of other organisations (or internally across departments, across time, etc.)
• Comparing campaigning communications (e.g. actions, emails, printed material, media coverage)

You probably have more ideas of what types of campaigning benchmarking could be done, so please suggest some others.

 

Aung San Suu Kyi was elected as the leader of Burma - only to be imprisoned by Generals and illegally detained for decades.

If you are interested in the campaign, go directly to: 64ForSuu.org orfollow the 64ForSuu blog

For anyone interested in how the campaign was put together, read on.

Since most people who read my blog are campaigners and campaign managers and we deal with campaigns every day, all day, I'll focus on how it got set-up and delivered in 6 days.

Note: I had no formal involvement with this campaign other than helping it find someone to deliver it in the time-scale required and giving free advice on the requirements. I am interested in it as a case for rapid e-campaigning.

It Started With a Phone Call

On Thursday 21 May, The Burma Campaign UK got a phone call. It was from a prominent UK figure who suggested a campaign be put together in the lead-up to Aung San Suu Kyi's 64th birthday and launched on the day she was to have been released. A coalition was rapidly formed around the 64 For Suu Campaign.

The Burma Campaign UK is a small with a small budget and small team, so budget was also made available to commission the website. Since Burma campaigning is what The Burma Campaign UK do, they jumped at the opportunity.

The 64 For Suu campaign is a coalition - not a Burma Campaign UK project. Coalition members include: US Campaign for Burma, Open Society Institute, Not On Our Watch, Amnesty International, Avaaz, English Pen, Trade Union Congress, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Human Rights Watch.

Budget: £5,000

Deadline: Wed 27 May 2009 launch date

Constraint: it was a long-weekend in the UK (with good weather forecast), so most people had plans.

The underlying driver is that in the last few weeks, Aung San Suu Kyi has been imprisioned and put on trial for 'breaking the terms of her illegal house arrest': someone swam to her house and stayed there despite being asked to leave and despite being guarded by those who imprisioned her. So this was already a hot media issue.

Finding a Design and Development Team

The next challenge was finding someone to design the site and develop it.  Part of the challenge was that it was top-secret (embargoed in media-speak) until launch. Since Aung San Suu Kyi was already a top story in the media, any link to the Burma Campaign UK could easily have guessed the topic. So a public call for help was not directly possible, and they had to find someone who was available and willing to work over the long weekend.

Johnny from the Burma Campaign UK called me late Thursday afternoon to ask for advice on a team. At this point I was already travelling for a long weekend abroad. After talking it through, I offered to put a call out on some email lists I am on where web design-development teams are known to be in the community and interested in campaigning.

What I asked was he develop a list of priorities to help any prospective suppliers to know what they were getting into. The requirements were:

Priority one (essential to site):

The site must be able to endure heavy traffic. Visitors are able to come to site and:

• Submit short text messages less than one hundred words long
• Embed videos from other sites
• Submit images

The site will also:

• Integrate Twitter messages (if tagged appropriately).
• Integrate submitted content on a feed (facebook style) on the site homepage.
  

The site must be able to:

• Gather email, location and name date from users when they submit their data. This data must be able to be exported easily.
• Allow visitors to be able to sort all submitted entries (video, text, image, tweets) by content type, date submitted, views.
• Be user moderated where users can flag bad content and the site manager can remove.
• Go viral by including “share” features for social networks etc..
• Able to include captcha’s on the sign up page if needed.
  

Priority two (would enrich site)

• Users to be able to vote up or down content (digg style)
• Content to be shown on a map automatically  according to where the user uploaded it from (if they submitted location details)
• Site to be searchable

Johnny set up a generic email address at Google Mail to receive proposals and 10 were received.

Design, Development and Hosting

Rechord was the selected provider (over nine others who offered their services) for design and development, primarily because they could deliver on time, and on budget which meant working over a long-weekend with great weather. They are also personally passionate about the issue and were known to Johnny through their participation in the annual eCampaigning Forum event and on the eCampaigning Forum Network email list so both of those factors helped. This is despite having a full workload until July!

By the end of Friday the design was done and then it was on to the site development. All while most of us (myself included) relaxed for the long weekend.

Despite the prioritised requirements list, a number of major features were not mentioned up-front and had to be added. This included a blog, contact page and press page

By Tuesday night (21:30 BST) the site was ready (at least with the priority one requirements) and Johnny had sent out a launch email embargoed until 00:01 27 May.

Web hosting was provided by Catalyst2 who, over the sunny bank weekend, designed and built a server and hosting capable handling peak demand and other scenarios.  This is important since the Burma Campaign UK had experienced overwhelming demand with different scenarios in the last 18 months.

This hosting aspect is critical as any human rights and peace organisations taking on military regemes or issues related to the a military will know.

Content and Allies

While the site development was going on, the 64 For suu coalition was busy collecting and developing the content for the site as well as lining up allies for the campaign. This included Sarah Brown (wife of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown), Stephen Fry (well know UK actor) and other celebrities.

The 64 For suu coalition lined up a number of allies, including George Clooney, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Vaclav Havel, David Beckham, Daniel Craig, and the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. The plan with famous allies was, among other things, to get suportive video clips of them and to get them posting messages of support on twitter.

The Launch

Ths 64ForSuu.org site was designed, developed and launched in 6 days.

The site was launched on Wednesday 27 May and immediately started to attract support via Twitter, photos and videos:

• Twitter: #assk64 has tag or 64forsuu.org site references (and was already the third most popular tag on Twitter by 11am)
• See the text, twitter, photo and video messages via the gallery
• Searching for "Aung San Suu Kyi" or "Burma" didn't see the site in the first page of results yet, but given that searching for "64forsuu" returns 300+ results, it is likely only a matter of time.
• Since Johnny (then a volunteer) was one of the people responsible for the massive Facebook Group to support the Monk's protests in Burma in September 2007, it is obvious he would also post there as well.
  

Post Launch

Too many campaigns I have worked on have a pause after launch due to staff exhaustion. However this is the most important time. The 64 For Suu coalition team seem to be working flat-out promoting the site and have delegated many tasks to volunteers.

One such task was setting up the 64forSuu twitter account and then following anyone who mentioned the hashtag #assk64, the campaign 64forsuu or other related keywords.  Turns out there is a service for auto-following anyone who mentions keywords you decide upon: Twollow.com.

The site was multi-lingual. this is normally a significant complicating factor in the design and build of a website and in the ongoing maintenance.  However in this case it wasn't because the translations (including English) were independent of the site using the GetText system and using Pootle to delegate localisations (language translations and local adaptations). Luckily Rechord has this experience because they has just worked on Oxfam's The Big Promise project with me and I had specified using GetText because it simplifies the localisation process.

Highlights

• Over 17,000 64's* were submitted to the site from over 100 countries (*64forSuu.org asked people to submit a message of support to Burma's imprisoned democracy leader via videos, text or twitter message. These messages of support are known as 64's.)
  
• World leaders including Prime Minister Gordon Brown submitted 64's
• Major celebrities such as Julia Roberts, Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, Daniel Craig, David Beckham and Bono submitted 64's
  
• There have been over 76,000 unique visits; the site has proved popular in ASEAN countries. Thailand and Singapore rank third and fourth in number of visits, while Burma is eighth.
• Through replies and re-tweets, the campaign message reached an estimated 5 million people through Twitter alone in its first five days.
• Celebrities who tweeted include Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, Kevin Spacey and Demi Moore.
• Supporters were able to submit their 64 via 64forSuu.org, Twitter and Facebook
• The site generated thousands of media articles according to Google news
• The site was attacked through a sophisticated cyber attack on Aung San Suu Kyi's 64th birthday. June 19th. (see details)
  
• We wanted the site to be as accessible as possible worldwide so we translated the interface into 9 languages including: Burmese, Indonesian, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Thai.
• The site was part of a huge growth in online support for Aung San Suu Kyi, we saw over 60,000 new people join her Facebook page
  

Insider Perspective

Johnny Chatterton, the Project Manager for 64forSuu.org (then with Burma Campaign UK and now with 38 Degrees) also contributed to this posting with the following:

Thanks Duane for putting this post together. 64forSuu.org has been a very successful project in a number of ways, we saw Presidents, Prime ministers and celebrities submit messages of support to Burma's democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Millions of people were reached by the website through Twitter, Facebook, email and coalition campaign sites.

• We intended 64foSuu.org to be an emergency campaign - to show the outrage worldwide at the ongoing sham trial of Burma's democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi in the run up to her 64th Birthday. As such the campaign was a huge succeess in engaging high profile support and thousands of new supporters of the global campaign for a free, democratic Burma.
• The website was groundbreaking in a number of ways, not least the time in which it was put together. We were pleased at the way we managed to integrate, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube into the site as this allowed us to reach a very wide audience. This was critical as we have over 100,000 supporters on Facebook.
• Personally the project has been fantastic to work on. When we launched it on May 27th it was fantastic to see hundreds of tweets flood in. The site then started to gain momentum and we saw surges of engagement linked to key events and the support of key celebrities. I was also very happy with the way that the development team at Rechord and the hosting team at Catalyst2 dealt with the cyber attack on the site. The attack couldn't have come at a worst time; the site was attacked on Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday on the day the campaign culminated . However, as Duane wrote, from the outset we asked the team to be ready to for a cyber attack and as such they responded rapidly and effectively. The system we had created worked and despite the sophisticated nature of the attack we were only offline for 20 minutes - for security however I can't go into the technical details of how the site was attacked.
• The project simply would not have been produced so quickly if we hadn't arranged an extremely streamlined decision making progress, this was helped by the fact that the key decision makers (The Directors at the Burma Campaign UK) had Blackberrys so I could contact them and share designs with them at all times. The fact that the site was cross-platform was also critical to its success as it meant we reached a far wider audience than a website alone would have. The wide coalition supporting the site helped in generating both content for the site and media interest in the site.
• Initially it appeared that Aung San Suu Kyi's trial would be concluded very quickly, but in fact it has been drawn out to such an extent that it is still ongoing. This has meant that the site is still relevant as people are still giving messages of support to Aung San Suu Kyi on the website and are still engaged with the issues.
• I'd also like to underline how grateful we are to everyone that supported 64forSuu.org and to the development team that made it possible especially Rachel Collinson and her team at Rechord and Jacob Colton and the team at Catalyst2 . The team we assembled was a pleasure to work with, responding quickly, professionally and creatively as the project evolved and grew.
  

Lessons Learned

Many organisations take months or years to plan a campaign, so if you wated to do it in 6 days or less, what should you do?:

1. Be open to opportunities when they present themselves. The 64 For suu coalition had two opportunities: the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi and the call from a prominent figure to do something (with supporting funding)
2.  Prioritise your needs for a website. It needs to be simple but compelling. You can improve things that are lower priority after launch
3. Streamline signoff. The 64 For suu coalition small team size is a virtune in this case. Larger organisations will need to form a team with full signoff authority and instant available if they want to move quickly.
   
4. Ask for what you really need. The 64 For suu coalition asked for people who could deliver over the long weekend and got it.  In campaigning we do things that not only we are passionate about, but others are too. They will do what it takes to help if you ask them. The budget helps - but it was not the determining factor.
5. Approach allies to help with launch promotion
6. Keep content to the minimum for launch and focus on the essential.
7. Provide allies (e.g. bloggers, allies, journalists) with an embargoed launch brief so they can prepare to distribute it to coincide with your launch

As usual, I'm sure there is other learning from the campaign -

so please add it below.

Tonee's Email to the ECF Network list:

Jambo from Kenya,

I need your advice on funding sources for Wazimba website development. This will help us attract and involve Kenyan youth in sharing their stories on political issues in Kenya as part of a political education and engagement process leading up to the next national elections.

Those of you at ECF09 will know some of the work we've been doing in Kenya both around the violence here last year and in using bluetooth to engage people in political and social issues.  Our wazimba.org (organisational) and wazimba.net (social network) websites are working to engage Kenyan youth in political issues and provide a safe space for them to speak out through sharing their stories. This is important in a place where what you say can end up getting you in various measures of trouble (Kenya).

Over the next three weeks before Kenyan schools open (24 April) we are running a large number of social events where we are promoting the sites to attract them to the websites. To do this, we need £1,000 GBP (about €1,100 Euros or $1,500 US dollars) to fund site improvements. Do you know of any grants or funding sources for this type of work?

Since a fibre optic cable will be connected to Kenya in July, there is a huge demand from web companies to build sites with lots of video and flash. This means no pro-bono work is happening from the companies that provided the original sites.  Funding would get us on their priority list to get the work done.  It would also allow us to get our bluetooth ideas and technology (which we shared at ECF09) out there and open source it much faster.

I'm open to suggestions for getting this funding, but I'm not sure where to start looking.

Regards

Tonee

Ps. I really am related to Obama..he just doesn't call back. He owes me money.. :-)

What Happened Next...

Patrick, from Action Medical Research, then replied to the list (and via twitter) proposing everyone contribute small amount to raise the £1,000 Tonee needed:

Hey guys,

I'll put in £20 for this if four other people will do the same - email me!

Patrick

..and in less than an hour, £470 was pledged. By 11am the next day, all £1,000 had been pledged!

Contributions

FairSay collected the contributions and covered both the processing fee each system below takes (up to £40 on £1,000) and the bank transfer charges to Kenya (about £33). Furthermore:

1. Messages with donor name are listed below (manually added).
2. Anyone wishing anonymity will have their message listed under 'Anonymous'
3. The donation form was removed once £1,000 has been acheived
4. Any amount over £1,000 will we'll discuss with Tonee at Wazimba and/or people on the eCampaigning Forum List as to what to do with it (including the possibility of returning it)

£0 Goal: £1,000 (£1,200 pledged)
  £1,141 from 51 people contributing (Updated 22 Apr 2009 at 11:30 BST)

I'm sure 95% of you did the same thing I did today: watch the inauguration of Obama as US President. But what does it mean to us as campaigners and e-campaigners?

What I realised is that today was a very cool day from a campaigning perspective because 10+ campaigns had potentially big wins. With so much of international campaigning issues being shaped by the US President's position on an issue, Obama as US President means the following progressive campaigns made progress (although there is always more to make):

1. Civil rights movement in the US (an obvious one)
2. US acceptance of climate change science and a commitment to actions
3. Poverty: cut extreme poverty in half by 2015
4. Environment: protected areas, public transport, clean cars, etc
5. US health care for all
6. Women's right to choose abortion
7. HIV/Aids and/or safe sex: more options for education and prevention
8. Labour rights: remove restrictions to organising
9. Human rights: ban torture and close Guantanamo Bay detention centre
10. Women: pass the Fair Pay Restoration Act

There are many more (Ben Brandzel emailed me 43 reasons in a mass email just before the election) but given the severity of the recession and that Obama has only been US President for a few hours, we'll see how these progress.  Of course there are others I'd love to see, but its a good start.

The other interesting things about this event:

• He was a local campaigner (community organiser in US English)
• He emphasised that 'it is up to everyone': the same premise campaigning works on
• The symbolism of him attaining the position is far more powerful than the reality. If it inspires hundreds of millions of people to have hope and to work for it then that is a positive spirit of the times for campaigners and campaigning to build upon.

On the interactive media front, the new White House web site is up and takes a new step for a political leader towards public participation. This will be interesting to watch and perhaps used to nudge other national leaders to new heights of public participation (and for some, new lows of participation-washing)

So as peers in campaigning and e-campaigning, what does Obama's ascent to the US Presidency mean for you personally and professionally?

2009 is going to be a touch year not just for you, but for me and many others supporting campaigning and e-campaigning. So I'll make you a deal: you tell me what you are likely to want/need in 2009 to help you get through the year and I (and others who read this) will try and provide it.

The State of Campaigning

The need for campaigning doesn't decrease when there is a recession - it gets greater. Globall, regionally, nationally and locally the planet and more people will need defending though campaigning than in 2008 Your going to need to defend against government budget cuts, donation declines and a decline in attention to environmental and social issues.

Conclusion: campaigning will be more critcal than ever.

How Can I (and others like me) Help?

I set-up FairSay to help more organisations have access to my e-campaigning skills, knowledge and networks than I could working inside any one campaigning organisation. I've identified critical gaps in e-campaigning and organised FairSay's services to help you ge the most out of e-campaigning and minimise the risk. That should be even more valuable in a recession as you don't have time to waste time and money doing things that don't work.

However now that I am outside the day-to-day operations of any campaigning organisation (I used to be in Oxfam GB), I don't know if what I can provide is what you want/need. If I am to help you succeed, you need to tell me what you need.

Next Steps...

Here's how we can prepare for 2009:

1. Comment below as to what types of things you think you'll need in 2009
2. I'll compile those into a number of key options
3. I'll launch a poll to help gauge opinion on what is the most/least important
4. Everyone will be able to view the results - so we'll all learn from it
   

Now that Obama is the US president-elect, his team have launched the Change.gov site to continue the spirit of his campaign: involving US citizens in informing his plans and transforming the USA. While it is a natural continuation of his message and campaign, it is relatively unique not only for its ambitions, but also for the success planning that obviously went into it.

To launched Change.gov so rapidly, the Obama Campaign would have had to divert people and budget from the campaign to conceptualise, design and build the site so that when the campaign was won, it could instantly issue instructions to register the Change.gov domain name and point it at the website that had been built for it. Following launch,

Change.gov would have needed a promotion plan to direct people to the site. Strangely, as 10 Nov. 2008, no promotion for the Change.gov sits has been sent to those subscribed to the Obama campaign email updates. Perhaps this is planned once the Change.gov site has more content or perhaps it is an oversight.

Since Change.gov has just launched, it is a bit early to see the longer term effects of this initiative, but from the basic fact that success planning was undertaken and implemented, it should be interesting to continue to watch it unfold.

Success Planning by Campaigning Organisations

Success planning is so rare in campaigning that I know of one good example: PETA's fast-food campaign. Using a strategy I'll call 'domino campaigning', PETA focused on one fast-food chain at a time and demanded they adopt animal-welfare standards in their supply chains. McDonald's was first (Oct 1999) with the McCruelty campaign and once this was won (Sep 2000) , PETA immediately switched to focus on Burger King with their Murder King campaign.

When I say immediately, I mean PETA:

1. Responded to the McCruelty campaign wiin with a call for Burger King to follow McDonald's example
2. Had the Murder King website up the same day as the McDonalds win
3. They had media stunts and other activities ready from day 1

PETA won the Murder King Campaign (June 2001) and then focused on:

• Wendy's with the Wicked Wendy's campaign (won Sept 2001)
• Safeway US with the Shameway campaign (won May 2002)
• KFC with the KFC Cruelty campaign (still ongoing with some national wins)

The stunning success of this campaign was likely partly due to the fact that all the momentum that was built for each target could immediately be re-focused on the next target.

Missed Opportunity

Missed opportunities for success plans are more common in with campaigning organisations than are success plans themselves. One example I have direct experience of is the success of Oxfam's Nestle-focused action in Dec 2002. The short version of the issue was that Nestle was demanding $6 million USD (£3.7 million GBP) from the Ethiopian Government at a time when there was a Famine that threatened to be worse than that in the 1980s.

Oxfam was asking Nestle to cancel it's claim so the money could be diverted to famine relief. Thirty-ish days later, Nestle agreed to cancel its claim if they money went to an independent famine relief organisation (Red Cross). Oxfam, and thus the poor in Ethiopia, won.

However the action was only symbolic of a much bigger issue: the debt corporations around the world claimed least-developed countries owned them.

This bigger issue Oxfam chose not to take on due to other campaigning plans. However a few independent-minded campaigners in Wales had other plans. Oxfam and Friends of the Earth campaigners in Wales did some investigation and found out that Wales-based company Big Food Group (which owns Iceland chain of supermarkets) was claiming £12 million GBP from Guyana.

They wrote a letter to the Iceland Managing Director within a month of the Nestle win, stating the facts of the claim and the request to cancel it. On May 17 the story was reported in the press and by May 18, Big Foods Group has canceled the claim. The claim was likely dropped with the aim of preventing it from escalating into the level of brand-damage the Nestle-focused action had generated.

While this action appeared to the target like good planning, it was really down to the initiative of a few people. Has there been a success plan in place for dealing with corporate claims from the lest developed countries, it is quite likely much more could have been achieved.

Planning for Success

It is quite normal that for campaigning organisations (unlike political campaigns), you never know exactly when, or even if, a win is forthcoming. However this does not negate the need for success planning: it just means you need to always be 1-2 steps ahead of the current focus.

Humanitarian organisations already do this since they never know when, where or how big the next disaster will be. Thus campaigners (often from humanitarian organisations) can do it too as PETA have shown.

Related articles

• Obama launches Web site to reach public (10 Nov 2008) - CNN
  
• Obama's Social Media Advantage, Act II (6 Nov 2008) - Read Write Web
• PETA Corporate Campaigns

Over the coming weeks and months, the staff and observers of the Obama campaign will spawn articles, books, new companies and blog posts (like this one) that summarise what factors made the campaign successful and what others can learn from it.

I'll leave the big picture to those closer to the campaign, but one point I think is key is that it was not the use of the Internet that helped make the campaign successful, it was the building and mobilisation of a network. While the Internet made this easier, faster and perhaps bigger than has been done before, if a better tool for networking came along for the next election then it would be wise to use it and not the Internet (although I don't think it will! for decades!).

Why the Distinction?

This distinction is important because if you think it was the Internet that made a big difference, then you could use the Internet without ever using networking. However if you think of campaigning as networking then you plan to use the right tool for the right task and the Internet will be part of that.

Networking is key because it is about not only establishing a relationship with supporters, but also about sustaining it, developing it, extending it and helping supporters do the same.

It was because of the Obama Campaign's networking that they were able to raise $650 million USD and it was because of the networking that they didn't have to spend it on hiring 'local canvassers' as the McCain campaign did, but could instead spend it on offices, ads, staff, etc.

Obvious? To many of us, yes. But too many people I come across in campaigning organisations (outside those working full-time online) still don't get this point - so I thought it worth pointing out again.

The Obama Campaign's Networking

So what did the Obama Campaign do in this area?:

1. Focused on collecting email and/or contact details at every touch point
   
2. Stored the data they collected in databases for easy segmenting and targeting
3. Has a graduated scale of actions supporters could take from donating to organising
4. Put the data and the tools to use it in the hands of the volunteer supporters (as well as staff) so they could use it locally to identify and recruit supporters and mobilise them on election day
5. Asked for a small donation on every occasion - and had incentives to donate like matched donations for new donors and a message from an existing donor so it was a social experience
6. Used the Internet in timely ways to recruit, engage, mobilise, record data and deliver the tools to use the data. Ultimately this was about mobilising people face-to-face not online. The Internet only helped reach out to potential and existing supporters.

So while networking was not the only factor in the success of the Obama campaign (e.g. other factors were a public disenchanted with Republican leadership, the economic downturn, Obama as a great inspirer, McCain's choice of Palin as VP candidate), it underpinned all of his other activities by bring the people and money resources needed to win the campaign.

What Campaigning Organisations Can Learn

Campaigning organisations can learn a lot from this and could likely do it better than the Obama campaign if they put their minds to it. They could do better because they:

• Have more specific issues
• Have existing passionate supporters
• Do not have a polerised opposition
• Do not dissolve the campaign once it has been won but instead re-focus it on related issues.

Some may grumble about the lack of budget, but the Obama Campaign started with little and grew to $650 million USD in less than 2 years. The Atheist  Campaign in the UK raised £100,000 in 3 days - during a time of recession. I can only conclude from this that much more is possible of campaigning organisations are a bit bolder and have bigger visions. Even deeper may be the failure to focus on value / return instead of cost which is a cronic problem in most campaigning organisation....but that is another blog post :-)

So campaigning organisations should learn from this:

1. Integrated planning ensure all mediums can contribute to achieving the same objectives according to their strengths
   
2. The real power is in the network of people.
3. The Internet can help networking by helping to:
• Connect to people
• Connect people with each others
• Allow people to connect with the campaign
4. Ask campaigning supporters to donate and they will (with good timing, specific asks and/or good incentives)
5. Ask campaigning supporters to volunteer in specific ways and they will
6. Focus on what produces the best return, not what costs the most

Related Articles

• Has US politics changed forever? (7 Nov 2008) - BBC News
  
• Obama's Social Media Advantage, Act II (6 Nov 2008) - ReadWriteWeb
• Obama's Social Media Advantage (5 Nov 2008) - ReadWriteWeb
• Ten marketing lessons from the Barack Obama Presidential campaign (6 Nov 2008) - Web Ink Now
  
• Washington diary: America's future (6 Nov 2008) - BBC News
• How Obama Really Did It (19 Aug 2008) - Technology Review
• 6 Lessons We Can Learn From Barack Obama's Online Marketing Strategy (23 Jul 2008) - Web Profits
• Internet key to Obama victories (22 May 2008) - BBC News
• Obama's online organization (12 May 2008) - Know It All
• How the Barack Obama Campaign Uses Wikis to Organize Volunteers (4 Mar 2008) - ReadWriteWeb
  

What are your thoughts on this?

Most organisation's I've worked with, fundraising and campaigning were separate with only minimal interaction to coordinate communicating timing or promote to each other's networks. But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, it is a lose-lose scenario for all fundraisers, campaigners, supporters and beneficiaries when it isn't integrated. This means most organisations are operating in a lose-lose scenario all the time.

The Atheist Bus Campaign launched 21 Oct 2008 in association with the British Humanist Association tippled its donations target just a few hours after launching.

The Atheist Bus Campaign (with which I have no involvement) has been adopted by the The British Humanist Association. The campaign demonstrates how donating can be a bold and popular political statement. Theirhad a target of £5,500 in donations and achieved this by 10:06 on the day of launch. By 14:30 they had £18,000 (and further updates below). Donors comments makes very clear this is a political act by people who support the idea.

This is by no means the first campaign to use donating as a campaigning action, but is one of the first in the UK. Internationally, MoveOn.org (US), GetUp.org.au (Australia) and Avaaz.org (global) have all done it. But these are new organisations. It is existing organisations that haven't tended to integrate donating and campaigning.

My guess is most donors have never been active supporters of the Britsh Humanist Association but simply heard about it through the growing news coverage starting with the Guardian and then the BBC (among others I'm sure).

All they are asking is for funds to buy ads on the outside of London buses that say "There's probably no god, so stop worrying and enjoy your life". Support seems to be coming from across the UK, not just London, and many people are donating and asking for the campaign to be expanded across the UK.

Since the Atheist Bus campaign reached its fundraising goal by 10:06 am on the day of launch, it has broadened the goals to include advertisements on the inside of buses too. Let's see if they heed supporters' calls to expand the campaign across the UK too.

Given the rate this is growing, I'd be surprised if the JustGiving.com site on which it is running didn't crash :-) (the BHA's site is very slow and I assume this is due to traffic attracted from this initiative).

Note that the action is actually very simple:

• No fancy technology (the JustGiving service is used)
• No fancy creative
• No massive promotion
• Just an idea that appeals to a lot of people who feel they are not being heard.

Of course, they could be doing even better if the tools they used implemented best practices and it is at times like this you want all the best practices to be in place to get the most of the moment. Chain of Events

1. Started with an article on the Guardian Comment Is Free site by comedy writer Ariane Sherine in June 08
2. Was then made into a pledge on PledgeBank by Political Blogger Jon Worth as part of a strategy with Ariane
   
3. Ariane and Jon got the British Humanist Association to adopt it and well known atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins endorsed it and provided and matching-funds.
   

4. BBC's 'Atheist Bus' article was the most emailed article on the BBC News website on 21 Oct 2008

   On 21 October, a new post by Ariane on Guardian's Comment is Free helped to launch the action and presumably to help launch the Atheist Campaign site.
5. Articles in The Times and The Telegraph helped considerably as I suspect did the article on the BBC News website as it was the most popular emailed story of the day (and the 4th most popular read story and it briefly peaked at the #1 read story between 14:00 and 15:00)
   
6. Bloggers also helped
7. BBC Five Live interviewed Ariane Sherine (Atheist Bus Campaign co-founder) and received listener comments
   
8. The Atheist Campaign also has a Facebook group with lively discussion
   
9. A donation widget from JustGiving is featured on the AtheistCampaign.org site - but I suspect this didn't result in much traffic on the launch day as it needs wide distribution to do so.
10. More coverage on BBC Five Live on the Richard Bacon show at 23:00.
    

Thanks to:

• Heather for pointing out the PledgeBank initiative which helped unravel the chain of events
• Jon for further insight and an insider perspective
• Tim for pointing me to the BBC Five Live interview
  

The Lessons?

1. Starting trying to integrate donations as a campaigning action
2. Link donations the success of the campaigning action: it is up to supporters to make it happen
3. Be prepared for success (I don't know if the British Humanist Society is) and for supporters to have a more ambitious vision that the organisation
4. Tell your fundraisers: campaigning can be income generating

Updates

Average donation value: £15

Largest donation: £3,000

Smallest donation: £2

Donor country: most seem to be in the UK, but others from around the world are contributing. In fact on 23 Oct, two donations over £1,000 were received between 01:00 and 05:00 in the morning, suggesting contributions from outside the UK.

How the Atheist Bus donations have grown since launch on 21 Oct 2008.

New donations per hour to the Atheist Bus Campaign since launch.

The JustGiving blog details how it unfolded in the first 18 hours after launch.

You can do a lot with public data :-)

Karina has been blogging about the lead up to the launch of In My Name both on her own site and on the In My Name blog. She will no doubt  continue after launch. So you can see the behind-the-scenes work and the public face of In My Name.

It is an initiative of GCAP which is the umbrella coalition of Make Poverty History UK, One Campaign US and many others around the world.

There was an error processing your feed. The error was:

"401 Authorization Required. Invalid login credentials!"

This was probably caused by a change to your password. To resolve the problem please go to http://freemyfeed.com/ and free your feed again.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

-FreeMyFeed

New apprentices are starting at the council next week.

Your chance to enjoy four, free outdoor cinema events in Bristol this autumn, 2010.

Fun activities at Bristol's City Museum & Art Gallery marking the 80th anniversary of Alfred the Gorilla.

Bristol Trading Standards issued a warning today concerning a new potential advance fee fraud which was spotted and prevented by a local Council housing officer last week.