While researching the impact of new technology on the Obama campaign, I kept running into the same name – Harper Reed.
Reed was the campaign’s chief technology officer. He was responsible for all successes and failures of the new tech that his team had developed. The team’s primary success was Dashboard, an online tool that allowed volunteers to work remotely.
During an interview with Robert Siegel on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Harper Reed was asked about the difference between volunteering for the Democrats, as opposed to the Republicans. He said, “But we wanted to offer this same experience to our people at home, to the volunteers who are either in an area that doesn’t have a field office or maybe they don’t want to leave or maybe they’re unable to leave (explaining why Dashboard is better than Republican phone bank)”
Robert Siegel then summarizes the effectiveness of Dashboard by saying, “You’re trying to connect for the Obama campaign in the same way that people connect for other reasons in social media.”
(More on Harper Reed and Team Obama here)
What that means is that Democratic volunteers reached out to the potential voters and tried to find a mutual interest in the Obama campaign. Identifying with the voters became a key strategy.
That is confirmed in an opinion article of Ethan Roeder, director of Data at Obama for America. He writes, “In 2011 and 2012, the Obama campaign, with the help of more than two million volunteers, had more than 24 million conversations with voters. Online tools gave Obama supporters resources to help them play a crucial role in their neighborhoods, and a series of “share your story” pages on the campaign Web site provided a venue for voters to communicate directly with the campaign in long form.”
The next inforgraphic demonstrates how exactly the Obama campaign team connected with the voters:
— By Tim Murphy; Illustration by Mark Matcho; source.
— By Tim Murphy; Illustration by Mark Matcho; motherjones.com