Campaign 2004 Archive

The other day, I was reading this terrific article (I have included below) that discussed the pros and cons of the branding efforts of all of the Presidential campaigns.  I can speak directly to it, since I had a very similar experience during the 2004 Campaign.

When I first joined the Kerry Campaign, I tried to get a handle on what was the message of the campaign - specifically in terms of branding: what did John Kerry stand for? Someone told me that the “position book” was somewhere in the office and they would get it for me. I was trying to figure out how to drive how the website content would be framed - and spent WAY too much time looking for this object - which had all the reality of the door-stretcher that you hear about when you work in shopping malls.

I later learned that the branding message was not quite clear - as evidenced by the variations of tag lines we heard. For example:

• September 2003 - “The Courage to do What is Right for America”
• November 2003 - “The Real Deal” in military font
• January 2004 - “Bring It On”

I did finally find a document that described why they chose the “courage” theme, and then “The Real Deal” based on various focus groups, but the challenge was trying to wrest the message from Dean at the time who was offering change versus experience (sound familiar?). When you read Al’s article, note the strange similarities, which is why I thought it incredible instructive.
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I have been incredibly busy this cycle with all sorts of projects (interesting, few in politics), but watching the news has me feeling a little like a prognosticator when watching the sequence of events that have happened this cycle and last one.

The New York Times posted the article, “In Loose Style, McCain Leads a Camp Divided” where the discussion of the candidate, true to his persona, does things his way, and is found (at times) to be at odds with his staff or consultants. Even with the obligatory staff shakeup back in July, he is still finding the challenge of playing himself versus what the pundits, pollsters and consultants want him to be.

This has so many shades of the Kerry 04 campaign, it makes me cringe. In the beginning, we had two (or seven, depending on whose article you read) separate camps running the campaign when I joined, and the culture aptly demonstrated this. As the campaign was floundering, the hits that the staff regularly took with comments from people we assumed were more knowledgeable, all of which gave the teams a siege mentality. And when we emerged to the fore, there was a feeling of correctness and direction that still was fought from the inside to the outside.

Even with the inclusion of Mary Beth Cahill (one of my favorite leaders), the Washington, DC faction and the Boston faction were often at competing odds for the heart and mind of the campaign, let alone the New York faction. In McCain’s situation, I assume he is faced with a similar issue - but in his case, his own point-of-view, moral compass is working hard to frame the discussion in his own mind. A leader who has had to listen to feedback and make a decision that he believes is right, faced with a national campaign where the choices are a matter of hues - that is a challenge as well.

I do not like predictions on campaigns, but the way I see this campaign going - especially with the infrastructure and organization the Obama Campaign has pushed forward, I see a poor showing for McCain - even with an October Surprise.

But a word of caution to the Obama Camp: do not start making measurements yet. That was the undoing of the Kerry Campaign - and cost us the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people who would have voted if it was not “inevitable”. An old friend told me, a Presidential Election is a marathon, not a sprint. You guys just went through the most grueling part of the marathon and are now in the summer glide. We have a couple of weeks, if not days, before you have another uphill climb. Prepare for it.

I have been reading all sorts of posts on the performance of the different campaigns, including Colin Delany’s post on TechPresident about John Edward’s $1M funding surprise in five days and the insurgence of online fundraising after a successful win in Iowa and/or in New Hampshire. Well, I have always had the online stats from those first two weeks after Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire and thought maybe I could share them with you.

(click to see larger image)

Performance-based Metrics

One of the things we were doing from November until January was trying to unlock the secrets of fundraising and online performance. I spent untold hours pouring over data and online donations to determine the potential success formula. We learned that more pages on a contribution page is bad (went from a 20% conversion rate to an 80% conversion rate), one page minimum on the forms, fewer elements are better (you do not need them to check off each line on the FEC disclaimer) and watched how the conversion rate (contributions/unique visitors and finished contributing/started contributing) improved. But nothing could prepare us for the avalanche that happened on the day after Iowa.

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One of the questions I have been asked in the past two years was what it was like in the trenches when the campaign suddenly began to take off. As I have written in the archives, the change was astounding - but none so remarkable as what occurred on the night of the 19th. As all know, Kerry pulled off an incredible feat in winning the primary in Iowa - but what is not known is how difficult it had been to get Kerry to recognize the power of his own voice when helping the Internet side of the campaign. The image below is a data set I have talked about in the past, and now feel comfortable enough to share since this lesson is becoming more commonplace than before.

The Impact of Kerry saying JohnKerry.com on National Television

(click to see larger image)

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Following the previous post, a little bit on the history of DemComm.

If not for Mark Gorenberg…
One interesting anecdote from my time with the Kerry Campaign - when I originally negotiated my role, my primary tasks was to build the network of online Kerry supporters - through some form of structure which we had dubbed the Kerry Leadership Network. But as things quickly escalated, the KLN was quickly deprioritized over the course of the first two weeks of the camapign. When I arrived, the team was focusing on the Alexa stats that one of our earliest Internet supporters, Marc Gorenberg, was focusing on. At the time, Gephardt’s Alexa ranking was much higher than ours - and we needed to determine if the stats were truly reflective of our traffic.

After investigating our own traffic stats (which were confusing and wrong), it became obvious that issues concerning technical infrastructure were a higher priority (and we had Erin Hofteig and Dave Patten working with community members), I switched to my technical side and became the CTO. But, I always kept my involvement with community effort - working handedly with Dick Bell, Erin Hofteig and Dave Patten on our community efforts.

Aside from implementing an enterprise-worthy email CRM solution, one of our skunk-works projects were the creation of John Kerry personas on the social networking sites of the time (Ryze, Friendster, tribe.net to name a few). Erin’s work on these sites were so successful that we got a press hit regarding the number of “friends” JK was getting at Friendster - though one part of the story not reported was that, during the course of the campaign, JK’s profile was so popular and there were so many pseudo-JK profiles being created that Friendster had to create new features like an “official” profile and to overcome their limit of 500 friends at the time.

Returning to March 2003
As Kerry began to win primaries and other campaigns began to fold, we began to bring on more staff to handle the increasingly complex management of a national campaign. In the Internet, bnuilding an organization that three months prior, was the size of a small startup and now had to service the needs of a customer base the size of Amazon.com with similar needs in terms of customer service - the tasks was incredibly daunting.

As experts became available, we were hiring on members to become part of the Kerry team. It was in late March/early April that we hired Amanda Michel and Zack Exley to fill out our community efforts. Amanda came to us from the Dean Campaign, highly recommended by Jim Moore for her work through Generation Dean. Zack was brought on to focus on community - and, at the time, focused on the execution of effective email campaigns.

I had met Cam at eTech and lobbied for him at Kerry because of his exceptional work with the Clark Campaign and the Clark Community Network. He came onboard to spec out the next generation of a community platform that would engage our supporters beyond the typical forum (which had been staffed and maintained by our supporters) or blog (run by Dick, Peter Daou and Ari Rabin-Hayt).

Creating DemComm
The challenged we faced at this time was dealing with various issues that startups see frequently when they have explosive growth - moving from a simple infrastructure and small staff to an enterprise-worthy infrastructure, serious customer service and integrating an infusion of new staff. Couple this challenge with the fact that we were not be allowed to “officially” work with the DNC until we were “officially” the nominee (though being presumptive allowed us to finally begin our integration efforts), we had a extremely large task in terms of technical infrastructure. And, with Amanda, Zack and Cam joining us in April, we were trying to ramp up quickly.

From discussions with online futurists (like David Weinberger from ClueTrain Manefesto and Howard Rheingold), it became obvious that creating a team of community experts and leveraging some of the collaborative technologies could get us further along in our underestanding and development of a online community strategy that was far beyond our personal bandwidth and budget.

While we were attempting that model with demtech (and having difficulty with specific requirements to help us build a solution), the concept was still sound and lead to the creation of DemComm.

Creating another skunk-works project
On April 2nd, seven people were added to the DemComm group which, as Jock mentioned, included Amanda, Cam, Howard, Nanci, Jon, Jerry Michalski, John Coates and myself. One of the problems I faced was, while I knew this was an important effort, I had a number of other projects I had to address (including completing the infrastructure buildout for the website, a new Online Action Center, and a total rebuild of the contribution, marketing and reporting engines by our tech team), we agreed that Amanda take charge of this group - since she had the strongest reporting connection through Zack.

As Amanda wrote:

Howard is absolutely right - the success of our efforts will rely on wide acceptance throughout the campaign and the grassroots (via bi-directional communication). For example, promotion of the online community and its efforts and aims needs to become part of the campaign’s message to the grassroots. Of course, self-organizing won’t work if our architecture won’t
support it.

A plan is the best way to leverage support and involvement throughout the campaign. 100% support won’t make the difference, but substantial support will. Pushing for the plan early on will also ensure that our efforts get worked into the campaign’s general election strategy.

Pushing for direct action throughout our community is essential. And not just because of its immediate results and the benefits of immediate engagement - asks for direct action are good reminders of our goal.

I propose that during our meeting on Thursday that we discuss the process for putting together the plan. Most everyone has raised questions that need to be answered, or at least addressed before we make any big decisions. Let’s figure out how to pursue possible solutions in a timely way - and how
to delegate work among us all. We don’t have much time to put this in place - six to eight weeks is the max for planning time.

The team began to work on the plan - and, through the hard work of the people on the team, we had the initial draft that Jock shows on the Greater Democracy post by the self-imposed deadline. The challenge we had was, at that time - the campaign was focusing on fundraising, staffing up and the insanity behind building up for the coming Convention.

But it should be clear - that DemComm was another skunk-works project: no one in the senior staff (with the possible exception of the Dir of Internet) knew about DemComm. We all knew that the goal was to prepare a proposal for the campaign that would be guidance for development - and help in supporting Cam’s community solution. Cam’s proposal (which I think is still one of the better ideas the campaign generated at the time - combining the best parts of threaded discussions, forums AND blogging) - was not accepted due to cost concerns and potential political liabilities (“What if someone said something on a Kerry Community blog that was racist or anti-American? Even though it came from an outside user, it still is a Kerry-branded site…”) So, while we had some of the best people working on DemComm, the challenge was - as a priority, the community effort had a very different focus. Which leads to Kock’s point of “sheeple” and how the campaign operated in 2004. And that is the topic of the next post.

Tags: DemComm, Kerry Campaign, online organizing, eCampaigning, Greater Democracy, Howard Rheingold, Jerry Michalski, Amanda Michel

Originally, I was going to write an post called, “Did Kerry take away any of the Dean lessons?” which was, from my initial thrust of Jock’s post at Greater Democracy, going to be a clarification of a couple of stories from the Kerry Campaign, including the specifics of DemTech, DemComm and the ideas behind Peer-to-Peer Campaigning. After writing a bit, I realized that my reply was better as a three-part post - explaining some of the myths and realities of the groups mentioned and efforts underway at the Kerry Campaign for engaging online community. To that end, may I clear up the story of DemTech:

Origins of DemTech
Originally, when I joined the Kerry Campaign, and we were in the doldrums, I noted that the technology infrastructure for most campaigns was sorely lacking (including ours) - leveraging consultants and very closed solutions to offer hosting and activism services for the candidates. Additionally, the database solutions (dominated by NGP) for fundraising, volunteer management and voter databases were large, complex data structures that would be a cumbersome project to tackle when and if we needed to merge databases with the eventual winner. To handle the systems, we were using people who were not as technical aqs we might require - and all of our appeals for technical support were met with indifference.

As many IT managers involved in mergers know, managing difference data sources and trying to merge them with limited technical resources and budgetary constraints can be a Herculean project that can be an incredible time suck. With a Presidential Campaign running at 100 mph, it would be much better if all of the primary candidates would work together to ensure that their technology infrastructure was compatable.

Reaching out to the primary campaigns
After we relaunched the Kerry Website in November of 2003 (with the help of JR and Brian), I created the demtech eGroup and reached out to all of the technical individuals in the other campaigns to suggest that we have a back-channel group where technical knowledge could be shared for the eventual merging of teams. Of all of the campaigns, the only ones that really connected at the time was Nicco (from Dean) and Turo (from Kucinich). All of us were quite focused on the tasks at hand, but the channel gave Turo a way to see if we could help him out of a problem.

Before this effort, there was also an eGroup called Tech4Dean which (from my understanding) was working on corralling the IT energy that supported the Dean Campaign into projects for the campaign (as did the Clark Campaign with Clark TechCorps). The challenge we faced was that the campaign was so busy with so many efforts, that the DeanTech group could not get the appropriate focus. But from this model, I revised the mission of the demtech group - attempting to capitalize on the centering of the efforts on behalf of the 2004 election. From the original “charter” letter on the demtech wiki:

…the idea for DemTech was a “safe space” for the campaign tech staffers to meet and exchange ideas (as shown on the original intro). It seems today that DemTech is a space for some of the leaders of the volunteer community who are interested in both process and technology to deliver and develop solutions for the Democratic Party for local, state and national efforts….

…DemTech can become a clearinghouse for the tech groups online. The goal is to create a team that focuses on a set of priorities (e.g. field management, voter outreach, social networking solutions, news clipping, etcera) that builds teams that focuses on development of solutions.

As mentioned earlier, the greatest challenge was the unifying effort of trying to build a project (three months to the Convention, eight months to the election) which did not have access to the customer (Field Director, Communications Director, etcera) or the customer was focused on other, more pressing problems (”Who is thinking of field in each state when the Convention is only XX months away!!!”). One of the group’s greatest challenges was that we had incredible energy, but little in the way of guidance from the campaign (I remember one of our calls where I was frustrated being unable to give strong product guidance to our team). We realized we might be too early to the party, but found one effort that we knew could be beneficial - how to build an effective online community. Thus was borne the idea of DemComm.

Tags: demtech, Kerry Campaign, online organizing, eCampaigning, Greater Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a team they made - and then became.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next post: where we went from here…

The Guardian profile: Ralph Nader
Was reading this profile and remembered that one of the funniest stories I had when I first joined the campaign was what the organization was like back in September 2003. When I walked in, the number of volunteers I had seen in the summer had evaporated - all of the desks were either filled with chum from events for the campaign or the rest of the Internet staff on terribly uncomfortable desks.
People never really understand what it takes to run a campaign - and I never had a clue. I walked into this world - and had my eyes opened - something I did not expect.

After four weeks of hard campaigning, sleepless nights, hand-shaking seniors in Sunrise Lakes, Century Village and Tamarac - it came down to the debate in Tampa - and the polls that followed.

That weekend, I spent every day and night hanging flyers for Peter. The day before, Jesse Jackson spent the day flying with Peter to get-out-the-vote in various cities. That evening, I enjoyed dinner with Peter, Craig Kirby (Edwards’ Deputy Campaign Manager and Peter’s Campaign manager) and the Reverand. As the dinner came to an end, I was tasked with being Peter’s driver for the last night. We were to hit local diners from 10pm til 3am — where Peter would be hand-shaking with voters. The next day, I worked the senior communities in Tamarac — meeting most of the Broward County political candidates in from of the Senior Center — and spent the last three hours in one of the black neighborhoods of Broward — all to get out the vote. As the polls closed, I got a call from Jared Asch, Peter’s Fundraising Director telling me that we were doing great in all of the major cities. We had a victory party set up at Bahia Cabana Bar - and I had to clean up from the day of campaigning.

Showered, shaved and freshly dressed - and in the car, I get a call from my friend Lisa Lindsey at Visions for Working Families. She told me the opening numbers - and they were not good. All I could do is pray they would get better - 20 point spread - that couldn’t be right. But, by the end of the night, 25 points separated Betty from Peter - and Peter’s concession speech was one of the toughest experiences I ever had in politics.