While not as sexy as politician elbow jabbing, the race to develop winning political platforms for the 2012 U.S. election cycle is a hot contest among strategists and programmers.
Following its win in 2008, Blue State Digital is the shop to beat. The company built the dynamic My.BarackObama.com and enabled the president’s campaign to integrate CRM, fundraising, email and other communications, along with organizing tools for their field program. The historic results were so revolutionary that it has since been copied by other candidates, issue groups and consumer marketers, leading to the clogging of countless inboxes with three years worth of cookie-cutter calls to action.
Top BSD execs have returned to lead President Obama’s re-election digital strategy, but the market they face now has changed drastically. We’ve seen the country’s political atmosphere shift as Republicans ramp up, Tea Party organizers forge grassroots support, Independents search for post-partisan ground, and Democrats vacillate over campaign promises kept and broken. Consequently, the tools that fuel these political movements have adapted to serve a more complex electorate.
Across the political spectrum, creative solutions will have notable implications for the upcoming election, not to mention for issue-based organizers and lobbyists post-election. Digital strategists will incorporate social gaming tactics in order to mobilize casual activists, and will draw on the OK Cupid! matching system to circumvent partisan differences. They will build and leverage massive open source networks. The new tools currently being developed have the potential to establish a strengthened, more engaged public in the long term.
The question, once again, is how these tools will lead to a dramatic shift in the way politics is fundamentally practiced in the modern people-powered electorate.
One thing is certain: Hiring or emulating BSD this time around will not magically catapult a candidate to Barackstar status. Other groups have stepped up.
“Hats off to BSD. They have a product that’s used by massive numbers of people, and obviously won a consequential election in 2008,” says Patrick Ruffini, partner at Engage, one of Washington D.C.’s top conservative digital strategy firms, and a veteran of the past three presidential races. “Since then the web is becoming more social, as is activism online.”
1. Multiply
To serve the social web’s activists better, Ruffini and his team at Engage have developed a platform called Multiply, one of numerous competitors that will play a role in shaping the future of Republican digital organizing and certainly the upcoming election. Ruffini describes Multiply as a “platform based around social gaming.” By targeting existing networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, where communities of both dedicated and casual activists already exist, Multiply uses game mechanics to incentivize increasingly difficult actions. For example, in a test-drive this past summer, users were asked to do things ranging from the simple (sharing a news story in their feed) to the much heavier (making a donation or phone banking). Multiply awarded badges, points and exclusive rewards to these participants, who might otherwise never have provided their email addresses to a campaign website or taken an action beyond clicking Facebook’s “Like” button.
“By gamifying the pieces, one of the things we found was increased engagement in the actions they were asked to do,” he says. “When prompted to take the next easiest action, we found a lot of people went through that process – up to the point where about 35% of users had completed all the actions.”
Tools like Multiply may allow Republicans to prove that they, too, can pack a digital punch in a presidential race. However, tools don’t operate in isolation. It wasn’t MyBO alone that made the 2008 Democratic party successful, but the way it facilitated spreading then-Senator Obama’s popular, hopeful message. Now that we’re faced with a terse, highly partisan and divided Congress, many of the first-time and moderate participants from 2008 have banded together in a deliberate effort to eschew party lines. They, too, have tools.
2. Ruck.us
One of the hotly anticipated launches of the political season, Ruck.us emerged Sept. 21 as an organizing platform designed for political independents, the apolitical, and bipartisan buddies. Co-founder and chief strategy officer Raymond Glendening says Ruck.us allows users to work directly on the issues they care about with like-minded individuals, whether they are liberal or conservative. Visitors to the site are prompted to respond to user-generated questions (yes, based on the OK Cupid! system) about their positions on a variety of issues. Subsequently they are placed in a “ruck” where they can communicate, organize and take action with others who share their views.
“You don’t have to be a slave to partisan labels,” Glendening says. “It’s crazy that with the growth of technology we still only have two choices for politics. It’s unnecessary to have to settle for black and white options. If we can change the culture of how people communicate and make this an extra outside-the-party thing, political discourse will get better.”
The site is just out of beta, so it’s too soon to predict if Ruck.us users will still align themselves along traditional party platforms, or whether this even matters. “There is a tendency among people to say, ‘Can’t we organize around non-partisan issues rather than through the party?’” says Ruffini. “It’s a delicate balancing act, because most people who are active are either one way or the other. Will social media change that? It’s a broader question.”
Veteran organizers who do believe in the essential nature of ideological party allegiances seem to be grappling with another strategically imperative question going into 2012: Are we really going to reinvent the wheel every election cycle under the auspices of a new candidate?
When Obama took office in 2008, he had a heady 13 million users in his network, which were turned over to the renamed Organizing for America as part of the Democratic National Committee. (For an exhaustive resource on this controversial move, see this TechPresident report.) Many have questioned whether these users would have been better served had they been funneled to groups that tackled specific issues, as opposed to being united around the re-election of a candidate.
3. Salsa Labs
Today, digital organizers are still grappling with the repercussions of the Obama network decision, and looking to avoid setting a precedent. Democrats divided over whether the Obama presidency has been a success will need to determine which tactics will rally voters to the ballot box next November. For example, climate or same-sex marriage activists could argue that Team Obama has dropped the ball on their issues. Therefore, they’ll need to communicate in a nuanced way to sell their bases on a second go-around.
In 2008, this was very expensive. Now it might not be.
April Pedersen is the co-founder of the progressive-leaning Salsa Labs, which just raised $5 million in funding to expand and develop its existing platform. The community now consists of more than 2,000 groups and reaches about 50 million people. Her organization’s objective is to find a way to drive down significant costs of models like BSD to be effective and scalable.
Salsa Labs seeks to accomplish that goal using Salsa Market, an open source developer’s resource that allows third parties to take advantage of apps and build new ones.
“It puts our users in the driver’s seat,” Pedersen says. “It takes the SalesForce app exchange model and applies it to our sectors. It allows for more advanced donor management, CRM and helps take organizing to next level.”
Some fantasize that progressive groups using the Salsa platform will be able to band together as necessary to take advantage of the full breadth of the network. However, Pedersen says there are some challenges to that vision since the user data belongs to the individual groups. The company is investigating how to move forward.
As with all tools, the substance of the candidates, dialogue, ideas and world events will be significant drivers behind the results. However, each of these approaches to user engagement offer a new way to empower voters and activists, making 2012 a cycle of tremendous potential.
Says Ruck.us’ Glendening: “In the long-range view, I hope we’re a piece of what changes the way politics is run in this country.”
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, CostinT
More About: 2012 election, contributor, features, platform, Politics, Social Media
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