Our Philosophy

Blue State Digital’s work is grounded in six principles that empower individuals – be they consumers, customers, subscribers, members, or voters – to participate in actionable communities that provide value for them personally and deliver meaningful results for their sponsors.

1. Be Transparent: Consumers are savvy and can immediately recognize artificiality. To win trust and sustained loyalty, organizations and brands have to say what they mean, ask for what they want, and give their constituents a true voice.
2. Provide Authentic Content: Authenticity is the glue that holds an online campaign together. Organic content that tells your community's story honestly, makes use of real community voices, and shows what's happening behind the scenes is worth more than a hundred deliberately constructed "viral videos." So whenever we can, we try to develop content that tells real stories about the ordinary volunteers, supporters, and customers who make our clients' successes possible.
3. Make the Most of Moments that Matter: People aren’t motivated to take action just because you ask them to—they need to be mobilized around moments of opportunity, online and offline, both organic moments and those you create.
4. Cultivate and Invest in Brand Ambassadors: People who are passionate about a cause or a product will spontaneously evangelize on its behalf. Don't be afraid of that energy: respect it, and use it to your benefit, by empowering those supporters to speak for you and constantly creating new and more valuable ways for them to do so. Their voices are worth more in the marketplace than yours!
5. Test and Refine Everything: Every decision made about message, design, and user experience should be subject to rigorous testing. Tiny changes can have huge effects, so take nothing for granted; aspire to hear and respond to constituent feedback, to remove barriers to participation, to replace good messages with great ones.
6. A Bottom-Up Philosophy Starts at the Top: For this prescription to work, buy-in for its principles must come from the most senior members of your organization. The Obama campaign succeeded in creating a bottom-up movement because Obama himself – a former community organizer – fully understood and respected the potential in ordinary people, and was willing to empower them to work and speak out on his behalf.