Help Earthquake Victims in Haiti Blue State Digital

Get informed: Sign Up for the BSDwire

Case Study: my.barackobama.com

Click to see a screenshot

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.

background and goals

For his 2008 Presidential primary run, the campaign of President Barack Obama knew they needed to build an unprecedented community outreach program. With the 2004 Presidential race as a guide, they knew that online contributions, online activism, and online community-building would be paramount as the race heated up, and they needed a technology platform that would power all of these and more.

In 2006, after a careful search of the market, the campaign turned to BSD as they began preparing in earnest for his Presidential run, retaining the firm to build and manage a state-of-the-art Internet campaign operation and to manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking aspects of his 2008 Presidential primary campaign.

fundraising

The community-driven communications platform built and operated by BSD at http://MyBarackObama.com, which exploited all of the capabilities of the BSD Online Tools Suite, is arguably the most effective online campaign Web site in history. The success of the program (like the success of the Obama campaign in general) is most critically measured by its fundraising success.

The BSD Online Tools Suite provides technology support for a sophisticated Internet-based fundraising program, including outbound segmentation by gift and activity history, detailed tracking by source code, and real-time statistics. Obama for America made full use of all of these fundraising tactics to their great benefit.

The campaign used the BSD Online Tools to mobilize more than 3 million individual donors to make a total of 6.5 million donations online, adding up to over $500 million in donations online. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.

Obama for America was the first organization to make use of BSD’s innovative “Grassroots Match” technology, a gift-matching program that brings together new donors and their matching donors personally, so that they can meet, communicate, and reinforce one another’s commitment to their common cause. For the Obama campaign, “Grassroots Match” brought a significant and measurable lift in contributions compared to traditional anonymous-match programs, as well as concomitant media attention. Ultimately, tens of millions of dollars were contributed via Blue State Digital’s tools and through personal fundraising pages created online as part of the “myBO” (MyBarackObama.com) social network. On the personal fundraising pages, 70,000 individuals raised $30 million.

advocacy and activism

BSD’s online tools integrate contribution opportunities into a holistic activist environment, which the Obama campaign aggressively leveraged. More than 13 million people provided their email addresses to the campaign via the BSD-powered Web site. Over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 different messages, many of them targeted to specific donation levels (people who gave less than $200, for example, or those who gave more than $1,000). In total, more than 2 billion e-mails landed in inboxes. (Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry had 3 million e-addresses on his list; former Vermont Governor Howard Dean had 600,000.)

The Obama campaign’s constituency base used the BSD tools on the campaign Web site to create over 2 million user profiles, write over 400,000 blog entries, and post over 200,000 campaign events for other supporters to find and attend. Additionally, volunteers created more than 35,000 Obama for America volunteer groups utilizing BSD’s online tools.

Obama for America supporters made more than 3 million phone calls online in the last four days of the campaign alone, on top of the millions of calls made through Blue State Digital phonebanking tools in the weeks prior to the election.

Furthermore, people spent more than 14 million hours watching over 1,800 Obama campaign-related videos on YouTube that garnered more than 50 million views. All of this content taken together created a healthy positive feedback loop for the campaign.

As President Obama’s constituents used the BSD tools, they accrued points, which served as subtle inducements to deepen their involvement. This degree of commitment is evidence that for its users, a BSD-enabled site is as much a social experience as it is a fundraising and activation tool.

The Obama Internet team made full use of the powerful, easy-to-use administrative interface to create, manage, and publicize special fundraising and advocacy campaigns and promotions. Such programs are easy to create and track using the BSD management dashboard, which enables authorized staff to control the look and feel of landing pages, create new fundraising and action campaigns, produce an outbound email fundraising program, manage a community content and blog program, and carry out other initiatives with the click of a mouse.

Statistics are tabulated automatically, so that the campaign’s program managers could monitor performance on a continuing basis and modify promotions to maximize response and results.