By David F. Carr

Campaign Web sites have a way of looking a lot like each other - lots of red, white, and blue, with a prominent "Donate Now" button on the home page. So what makes barackobama.com special? It's a big question, since without it and the grassroots movement the campaign organized around it, it's unlikely that Barack Obama, an African American Senator still in the middle of his first term, would be brushing past Hillary Clinton and reaching for the presidency.

As I write this, Senator Clinton has yet to surrender to what all the pundits and professional vote counters say is an inevitable, if narrow, defeat. But Obama has come a long way in what he himself often characterizes as an "improbable quest," and his Web site has played a large role in getting people involved in the campaign.

For the record, I run a broward4obama.com Web site for grassroots supporters in Broward County, Fla.; BlueBroward.org, an organizing Web site for local Democratic Clubs and allied grassroots; as well as Web sites for several state and local candidates. So, yes, I'm an Obama supporter.

But I'm also a long-time business technology journalist, having spent much of my career covering information technology implementations. As a journalist as well as a Web developer, I'm keenly interested to learn more about what the campaign has done on the Web, how it overcame the social networking challenges it faced, and how it continues to wrestle with data management, integration, and security challenges. More than anything, I want to know why it's worked so well.

What I found was a highly sophisticated information technology strategy—one with hard-won lessons for any CIO or business technology executive looking to use social networks or other technologies to push power down to the "ground troops" of their organization.

Indeed, Obama's strategy didn't rely on unique or bleeding-edge technology—far from it—but on using established hardware and software to empower a highly decentralized, largely self-organizing, network of volunteers.

"The approach to the campaign from the very beginning, coming from Barack, was to put as much power as we can in the hands of regular folks to organize in their communities and empower them to take control," says Joe Rospars, the campaign's new media director. "That ethos comes from him. We've been trying to reflect that in all we've been doing in the Web site, the new media site, and when that's combined with the fuel of millions of people willing to get involved—those two things make a pretty powerful mix." With more than 800,000 people registered on the Web site, the campaign's challenge is to get them working on "campaign relevant outcomes" including fundraising and voter contact, Rospars says.

OBAMA'S I.T. STRATEGY

By most accounts, Clinton started out with a more traditional campaign and kept a tighter rein on the user participation on her Web site. She entered the race with the most name recognition, political clout, and big-money backers. And yet she wound up seeing her initial financial advantage eclipsed by a Lilliputian horde of small donors, most of whom made their contributions over the Internet. Consider these statistics from a report of the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute:

Obama has topped the $259 million President George W. Bush raised in that phase of his reelection campaign, which was the previous record.

Late in the game, Clinton has begun doing better with small donors, but only after she began punctuating every speech with an appeal for supporters to go to hillaryclinton.com and make a donation to allow her to keep going.

So what was barackobama.com strategy and how does it differ from Hillary's Web campaign, especially since Clinton's Web site eventually duplicated (superficially, at least) virtually every feature that Obama's offered—many of which are becoming standard equipment on campaign Web sites large and small?

Part of the answer is that the Obama campaign has Chris Hughes, who was one of the three co-founders of Facebook and now runs the campaign's my.barackobama.com, which itself is a sort of social network. Hughes is not a software developer (it was his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg who wrote the original Facebook code), but he brought an appreciation how to nurture and manage online communities. "What I do now for the campaign is work on building out the technology to make sure the online community for Barack

Obama supporters is as robust as possible and as helpful as possible to the goal of getting people out to vote," Hughes says. At Facebook, he had been a product manager working on the development of features such as the "share this on Facebook" widget you see on news and blog sites all over the Web, and he retains an ownership stake in Facebook, a private company valued at more than $15 billion.

Having gotten to know Obama after helping set up a Facebook page for his senate office, Hughes took a leave to join the campaign full-time shortly after Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007. "As I got to know him more as an individual candidate, I saw him as completely in line with my own value system and what I felt the country was desperately in need of," Hughes says.

At the same time, Hughes was inspired by the idea of what Internet technology could do for Obama, and saw him as the right candidate to take advantage of it. "Online technology is at a place now that is pretty significantly different from where it was in 2004. I felt that if it was used well, and keyed to campaign goals of fundraising, and bringing people into the campaign, and bringing people to the polls to the vote, that it could make a significant difference."

"We want to make it super efficient, super streamlined, make it viral," says Steve Spinner, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor who is a member of Obama's National Finance Committee and spearheads the campaign's efforts to work with technology firms. Other campaigns have used the Web "but it's never been leveraged in this way, through chat groups and community groups, and through Facebook and other social networking sites," he says.

The Web site allows the campaign to be "owned by the masses," Spinner says, but he encourages even big donors to complete the transaction through the Web site, saving himself the time it would take to drive to their home or office to collect a check. Although hillaryclinton.com eventually matched most of the features of barackobama.com, the Obama campaign embraced the Web more enthusiastically and fielded many of those capabilities about six months ahead of the competition, Spinner says. "The DNA of everyone working on the Obama campaign is very much a startup mentality, where what matters is how you build it, how fast you roll it out, and how you tie it together."

BUILDING BARACKOBAMA.COM

New media director Rospars came to the campaign as a veteran of Howard Dean's blog team. (In the 2004 Democratic primary, effective use of the Internet gave Dean the aura of a front runner, but his campaign collapsed immediately after the first caucus in Iowa.) Rospars is also one of the founders of Blue State Digital, a digital consulting firm that is one of the campaign's major technology vendors. Along with CTO Michael Slaby, Rospars joined the staff of the campaign exploratory committee on Jan. 31, 2007, and they pulled the Web site together in about 10 days, basing it on a suite of software Blue State had assembled over the past couple of election cycles.

The functionality barackobama.com boasts today, including the my.barackobama.com personalized pages and community tools, largely was in place before Feb. 10, 2007, the day Obama announced his candidacy.

A supporter could register, establish a personal profile page, network with online friends, form or join groups and chapters based on either geography or issues and interests, and set up a personal fundraising page with a "thermometer" showing that person's goal and how close they are to reaching it. They could post events and track RSVPs. Every registered supporter also got their own blog, with the ability to cross-post entries to the community blogs of the interest groups they joined. In addition to its blog, each interest group was also assigned a "listserve," or Internet mailing list.

The campaign Web site incorporates open source technologies including Movable Type for the campaign blog, group blogs, and blogs for individual members, with many custom features built on the PHP programming language and MySQL database.

The campaign staff organizes itself using many of the same tools, such as community blogs and event scheduling, that the volunteers use, Rospars says. "That's one way we keep ourselves honest."

But the secret sauce is not so much the software as how the campaign uses it. The Web tools that let volunteers organize themselves happen to mesh particularly well with Obama's message. Listen to any of his speeches and at some point you'll hear some variation of "this is your campaign, this is not about me."

"This was us calling Americans to get involved and really own a piece of the campaign," Rospars says.

Lisa Daly was one of the people who answered the call. "It still seems to me to be vastly under reported, the significance of this," says Daly, who became an unpaid volunteer coordinator for Central New York. "Yes, Howard Dean got lots of small donations on the Web, which was a big deal at the time, but using technology to nourish all these little groups in all 50 states and overseas had never been done before. There were all these people like me who wanted to get involved, and they made it so easy."

The approach "was particularly well tailored to a national political campaign," Daly says, and wouldn't necessarily work the same way for marketing anything other than a charismatic presidential candidate. "It requires that people trying to seek you out, too."

Having gotten advance warning, she actually signed up on the Web site "like 11:30 or midnight" of the night before Obama's announcement and immediately created interest groups for Syracuse and New York State. Within hours, "there were already thousands of people furiously creating groups and sending email."

These volunteers would prove a critical element of Obama's success at sustaining momentum through an extended primary season and letting him contain the victories of his principal competitor, Hillary Clinton. In states that Clinton was always expected to win —such as her Senate power base of New York - volunteers would have to carry the campaign almost singlehandedly, with minimal help from paid staff, and the volunteer efforts kept the delegate split from being as lopsided as it might have been otherwise. For example, Obama captured 40% of the vote in the Feb. 5 New York primary, compared with the 28% predicted by a USA Today/Gallup poll taken on Jan. 28. His gain came largely at the expense of other candidates then in the race, given that the same poll showed Clinton with the support of 56% of New York voters and she actually got 57%.

And in places like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Oregon, whose primaries might not have mattered as much if the race had been decided quickly, volunteers who found each other through the Web site organized their own freelance pro-Obama efforts long before the first campaign staffer came to town.

"Absolutely, that's key," Hughes says. "The whole underlying approach is that you're not waiting for the campaign to come to you." The campaign nurtured independent action by building a functional, purposeful online community "and making sure people weren't just rummaging around on the Web site," Hughes says by gently redirecting supporters away from unproductive activities. "We made it a priority, with several full-time staff members focused on it from the very beginning."

"Chris was there from the start; I interacted with him right away," Daly says. In the very beginning, Hughes was very hands on, personally responding to bug reports and requests for new features, she says. "Then I think he got overwhelmed after a while because there was so much activity going on, so he withdrew a little bit and had other people do that for him." Early on, someone formed an administrators group where group administrators could help each other with ideas about what was and wasn't working, as well as a Web site feedback group. Hughes and his team also actively participated in those, Daly says.

One key application that Blue State provided is the tool for making phone calls from home. It was a new component of the software suite, so it was "in pretty rough shape when I got here," Hughes says, and has gone through "all sorts of modifications" to make it more useful, including tools for better management of the scripts and lists, and better back-end integration with voter databases.

In its default interactive mode, the tool presents the first name and phone number of a person to call, and sends the user down a different path through the call script depending on whether the volunteer reaches the voter, and, if so, whether that person likes or dislikes Obama or is undecided. Volunteers also record bad and disconnected numbers, which helps to clean up the voter list for future use.

One important improvement has been the ability to preview the script (including all its conditional branches) so the volunteer can run through it before starting to make calls. Alternatively, if the volunteer has a shaky Internet connection, or the Web site is overloaded and responding slowly, the site lets users print the script and a list of numbers to call offline, then post the results of those calls later.

Scalability, however, has sometimes been a problem. In the days leading up to February's Super Tuesday primaries, the phone banking tool "was completely overwhelmed to the point where it was almost useless," says Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a campaign volunteer from Los Angeles. "So that was a problem. On the whole, it worked pretty well." He learned to print out his lists when he wasn't sure the Web site would be reliable. "You never knew if 1,000 people would be trying to call at exactly the same time."

TECHNOLOGY CREATES SELF STARTERS

Well-funded campaigns enjoy the luxury of paid staff to make calls and knock on doors in hotly contested precincts. Yet even the richest campaigns benefit from having volunteers who are willing those same things for free, just because they think it's important that their candidate win.

But in the 2004 race, I heard from many Kerry-Edwards volunteers who said they had to be very persistent to get the campaign to put them to work. That is, they tried volunteering several different ways—over the campaign Web site, at recruiting events, or with a call to the local Democratic Party office—but it was a long time before anyone got back to them.

So it's significant that Obama's supporters talk about how easy it was for them to get involved. They didn't have to wait for someone from headquarters to return their call—the Web site gave them the tools to be self-starters. Instead of centralized control, the Obama campaign relied on decentralized, grassroots energy. That's really the only way they could have done it, says Josh Uretsky, co-chair of Philadelphia for Obama.

"No campaign has enough infrastructure to manage the number of volunteers Obama's campaign has," Uretsky says. The challenge is to give volunteers the freedom to organize themselves, but with enough direction "that they actually do useful things," he says.

"This allows you to be involved, no matter how relevant or irrelevant your state is in the headlines," says Timothy Foley, who joined the campaign staff as new media director for the primaries in New Hampshire and New York and continues to participate on a volunteer basis. "You could get involved as much or as little as you would like, and you could get organized even if your state was not one of the traditional early states."

Daly says one of her challenges was finding outlets for volunteer energy. "We wound up with people doing things a professional campaign might roll their eyes at, but they were not harmful, and they were keeping people busy," Daly says. For example, a "honk-and-wave" event is a campaign ritual where people stand on a busy street corner waving signs and trying to get drivers to honk if they support your candidate, and her group held several of those when it was just getting organized in 2007. It was a way for people to show their support at an early stage when there was not much else for them to do.

"The campaign has done a good job of allowing people to create their own rules and to be happier." Even from a cynical strategic perspective, that means, she says, is "they've swallowed the bait."

"They're committed, because they're working hard for you, and they start giving money. By using their energy, you've made them a part of the campaign," she says.

Uretsky's Philadelphia grassroots group got started back in August, when most experts were predicting the race would be over by the time of the New Hampshire primary in January. So for months, except for an occasional conference call with campaign headquarters, the group operated autonomously. And even after the official campaign came to town for the Pennsylvania primary in April, the Philadelphia volunteer group retained a measure of independence. "There are some things the campaign is choosing not to do that we think should be done, and so we do it," Uretsky says. For example, in the weeks leading up to the primary the group invested in buying campaign buttons for volunteers who wanted to be able to display a visual token of their support.

SOCIAL NETWORKING WITH A PURPOSE

While my.barackobama.com looks like a social network such as Facebook, it's a more focused one, Rospars says. "Folks are using our Web site for online donations or making phone calls, or planning events and being active in the community," rather than to socialize, he says.

Even while trying to build my.barackobama.com into the campaign's online center of gravity, its Web presence also extends across a constellation of other Internet watering holes including MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, BlackPlanet—and, of course, Facebook. Facebook and other general purpose social networks are valuable to the campaign because they let volunteers reach out through online connections they have established for other purposes and bring some of those connections into the campaign.

"We have several hundred thousand supporters on Facebook, and those folks are able to reach out and find others on their network," Rospars says, and they have been effective at reaching out to friends in states with an upcoming primary. "We've tried to engage that community and all the communities to do real substantive work," Rospars says, touting the value of "engaging people in those communities on their own terms." And when it comes to activities that can only be accomplished through barackobama.com, such as using its online phone bank tool, "we try to make sure those opportunities are both obvious and attractive" to the campaign's Facebook and MySpace friends.

Hughes leads a team of community managers who monitor activity on the my.barackobama.com communities and the affinity groups on other sites, alike, trying to keep it productive. For example, they individually review requests to form new my.barackobama.com interest groups to make sure they are appropriate to the campaign's mission and don't duplicate the efforts of another group that already exists, he says.

"There is a challenge there, in terms of figuring out how much organization needs to come from here, in the center, and how much we can rely on the grassroots to organize well," Hughes says. For the most part, allowing volunteers a healthy dose of autonomy has worked well, he says.

The grassroots organization that has grown up around the electronic community lets the campaign staff magnify its own efforts. For example, earlier this month the campaign organized more than 100 "Vote for Change" voter registration events, at least one in every state in the country, with campaign headquarters providing coordination and training. Now many of the local organizers who participated are continuing the effort with follow-up events on their own. "We don't have unlimited staff work on those events every single weekend," Hughes says, but with enough volunteers it can still happen. "For the most part, we haven't even talked to those people; they're planning these events on their own."

Several of the campaign workers interviewed emphasized that online activity is most important when it produces offline action. While working for the campaign in Los Angeles, Spitzer-Rubenstein says he looked for people who were "willing to go out of their way to make a difference," and those are usually the ones who were willing to show up in person. "They're more likely to be committed to it than someone who has signed up online but hasn't had to do anything about it," he says. And when it comes to the ultimate goal, he is convinced, "the best way get somebody's vote is to knock on their door and talk to them in person."

But Rospars argues volunteers can be active both online and off. "We want them to reach out to their friends who haven't been to our site. We want them to do voter contact to the people in their community whom they don't know. Or they can go take our message to the folks in their address book who they do know," he says.

CHAOS AND CONFLICT

Much as a military campaign can suffer from "the fog of war," a national political campaign is inherently chaotic. With so much going on, some things are bound to go wrong, and the decentralized structure of the Obama campaign is potentially risky in that it allows so many people to make independent decisions.

Last year, the campaign clashed with a volunteer who had set up what looked like an official campaign page on MySpace. After trying to partner with the owner of that page, or perhaps hire him to work for Obama, the campaign wound up forcing the issue by having MySpace shut down the page and replace it with one that really would be official.

Overall, though, the chaos factor hasn't been as big as many involved with the campaign feared it might be.

Foley, the New Media Director for the New York and New Hampshire primaries, says he was always alert for the possibility that the campaign's online openness would backfire, but it rarely did. "I never had to use my administrative access to delete any comment on any blog post," he says. "Sometimes they would go off-topic, sometimes spectacularly off-topic, and the comments may not have anything to do with the rally you're trying to organize, but they never strayed far from the general topic of the campaign."

When the campaign effort in New Hampshire was first getting organized in 2007, Foley did run into a few instances where people would post notices saying Obama would be at a certain event when in fact he was not. "I guess the organizer was thinking 'If I just get enough RSVPs, they'll have to send him,'" Foley says. Other times, Foley simply found himself wishing for a little more organization. "You might have [a] fantastic event, really trying to drive people toward, and then someone creates a competing event close by at the same time." In most cases, once contacted, the other organizer would be willing to combine the two events.

"If that's the biggest problem you have with decentralizing, that more people want to work on your campaign, and they're all trying to do everything at once, that's a good problem to have," Foley says.

For all its virtues, the technology platform behind the Obama campaign certainly is not perfect. One day, someone sent me a link to a video of volunteers in my area working on voter registration that had been posted to the Web site, and when I clicked all I saw was screen full of PHP error messages, apparently related to an overloaded MySQL database connection. I got the same error message from every my.barackobama.com page, including the fundraising page, although judging from the fact that it didn't seem to generate a lot of complaints from the user community (and Rospars didn't seem to know about it), this was probably a transitory glitch that only affected a subset of Web site users. A few weeks earlier, a security flaw allowed some prankster to inject a little bit of JavaScript into a blog post and redirect visitors to hillaryclinton.com.

But Barbara Frantonius, a volunteer coordinator in California who works as a software testing and quality assurance professional, said she sees flaws in the campaign systems that make her wonder how prepared the campaign is for the general election in the Fall. While Obama's marketing and branding has been "absolutely stellar," she says, "I haven't liked the behind-the-scenes systems those of us in the trenches are supposed to be using."

Most distressing to her was the way the campaign switched back and forth between two or three different systems for tracking voter contact as it moved from state-to-state, making her wonder about issues of data integrity. She started out with one called Torchlight, then found herself being told to alternate between VoteBuilder and Build a Hope, both of which are based on a system from Voter Activation Network, a Democrat-friendly campaign data vendor. "Each of them was tracking an obscurely different piece of the pie," Frantonius says of the systems. And because she didn't get a chance to download information before her access to one system was cut off and she was told to start using the next, she was left with no record of the voter identification work her voters had done in their own area, she says. "The next day, it's gone, and you don't get it back again."

Rospars and Hughes insist the campaign is very much aware of its data management and integration challenges and is putting energy into addressing them.

"Data management is obviously a huge challenge," particularly given the need to "improvise around multiple vendors, multiple data sets." Rospars says. "We have smart, dedicated folks dealing with it. The proof is in the pudding end of the day - are you getting them out to vote?"

Technologists reading this should also remember that a presidential campaign isn't quite like any other kind of enterprise, Rospars says. It has to get very big very fast, "and then you go out of business," he says. "A lot of decisions are made with that in mind. It's not like you have 36 months to build the system and ramp it up."

Comments (1)

	1. 11-07-2008 06:45
	Excellent, Karen. Thanks so much for all the reporting that went into this - and the perspective. Now the challenge to use all this energy going forward, to grow the networks to include everyone. Guest

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