How Obama Really Did It
MIT’s Technology Review features a great cover story on Blue State Digital, and Barack Obama’s “social-networking strategy that took an obscure senator to the doors of the White House.”
The article provides a long and detailed look at BSD’s comprehensive technology system, and the strategies that Obama’s new media team (led by BSD Founding Partner Joe Rospars) have used with those tools to create the strongest online campaign in history.
It also features a video of Blue State Digital Founding Partner and CTO Jascha Franklin-Hodge, explaining Blue State’s work with the Obama Campaign.
An excerpt from the article explains:
Founded by alumni of the Dean campaign, Blue State Digital added interactive elements to Obama's website--including MyBO--and now tends to its daily care and feeding. The site's servers hum away in a Boston suburb and are backed up in the Chicago area.
MyBO and the main campaign site made it easy to give money--the fuel for any campaign, because it pays for advertising and staff. Visitors could use credit cards to make one-time donations or to sign up for recurring monthly contributions. MyBO also made giving money a social event: supporters could set personal targets, run their own fund-raising efforts, and watch personal fund-–raising thermometers rise. To bring people to the site in the first place, the campaign sought to make Obama a ubiquitous presence on as many new-media platforms as possible.
Client Spotlight
my.barackobama.com
Then-Senator Barack Obama retained BSD to manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects of his 2008 Presidential primary campaign. Critically important to President Obama's victory in November 2008 was his campaign's use of the BSD Online Tools Suite. The campaign utilized BSD's tools to mobilize over 3 million individual donors to contribute over $500 million online, to motivate over 2 million social networking participants, and to create and promote more than 200,000 offline events across the country. Full Case Study »
Client Feedback
“We had a website, but no real organizing tools. I called Blue State Digital and within days, hundreds of screening parties were being created.”