Project Narwhal: Obama’s Digital & Data Game Changer
One of the standout memories I have from the early part of the previous decade was in 2012, when I was vividly following the re-election campaign of President Barack Obama in the U.S.
Anemic growth, the fiscal cliff, a tepid economic recovery, the rise of the tea party, partisan gridlock had taken a significant toll on a popular pathbreaking leader.
Media coverage on key issues, the polling of battleground states all suggested an unpopular leader who was getting usurped by his challenger, Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
And yet, President Obama’s key campaign brains trust – David Axelrod and David Plouffe – through the entire 12 month period of polling rarely betrayed any sign of anxiety around the re-election prospects of their candidate. How come?
The difference turned out to be the level of data they possessed, backed by enhanced voter registration, an extraordinary organizational ground game and digital infrastructure.
In this issue, we delve into a variety of aspects that got this expansive operation to click and distill the key themes that were responsible for it’s success.
Key Themes That Made The Difference
Technology Infra: Cloud, Stress Testing and Load Management Is Paramount
Key Lessons: Plan and Invest In Infrastructure and Simulate Game Day Scenarios !
The biggest technological success from Project Narwhal were twofold:
Infrastructure
- Planning tech infra needs and putting more resources into it upfront
- Maintain a clear continuity plan to handle traffic management, outages and heavy load
- Frequently stress test the applications and data centers for unforeseen spike events
- Multiple data centers, distributed servers and back-up in different zones
Strategy/ Organization
- The strategy of connecting and converging offline and online data in real-time
- Enabling a culture of experimentation
- A new portfolio – Chief Integration Officer – had the CTO, CIO and CAO (Analytics) roll under
- The extensive use of digital communication as a fundraising tool
Talent Model: Diversity & Creativity Are Key Attributes, Political Experience Was Not A Priority
A Creative Talent Strategy That Contributed To An Operation 4X That Of The Competition
Field Organizing: A Huge Scale Play and Micro Targeting Of Behaviors
When mobilizing an election campaign, real estate matters. And, data indeed reveals.
Nowhere was this more obvious that in the number of field offices.
The Obama campaign had 800 offices and Romney 300. Furthermore, in three of the key swing states (Ohio, Florida and Virginia), the Romney campaign lagged by ~55% !
The difference came down to how the Obama campaign harnessed tools and deployed social and video to increase donations, drum up enthusiasm and drive greater voter participation.
The standout story of the campaign was the micro targeting, by capturing door to door meetings on audio and video as well as the ability to predict consumer behavior such as voters who like to give online, voters donating through mail as well as ability to predict the number of volunteers.
The Campaign Dashboard Reflecting The Status Of Key Stages Was The Pivotal Point Driving Organizing Strategy
Field Organizing: A Responsive, State Wise Focus
All 8000 neighborhoods that were part of the Obama campaign operation were all linked into real-time with the Dashboard, enabling greater content customization at rapid speed.
Another key highlight is how – unlike the previous campaign in 2008 – all the data being captured was structured to mirror the organizing model on the field, increasing efficiency.
ANY voter sign up to the dashboard was contacted within a response time of 72 hours.
In major swing or battleground states, ballot test data were collected on nearly 30,000 voters or more than 1% of actual voters providing for in-depth view and greater sample size of resultant insights and mindsets by demography on hot button issues.
Also, in a first, no national polling was ever run by the campaign who instead chose precision polls by state once every three weeks and twice a weeks towards the home stretch and whose volunteers also ran 8000-9000 calls a night.
Digital Communication: A “Force Multiplier” Effect
Right from the time of his path breaking run to become the first black President, the Obama campaign has always been renowned for its communication chops, specifically on Twitter.
This time was no different, but it saw a force multiplier effect due to the vast amount of field data captured. The campaign reached and scored 50,000 twitter accounts by sheer affiliation.
Personalized emails were a huge success – especially, those with negative news encouraging recipients to donate. Strangely, unique garish colors in emails also drove better performance.
The campaign had recruited an 18 member E-mail exclusive team (!), with over 10,000 segments tested with close to 20 variations on subject lines (see next page for a good example).
A/B testing was used extensively – 240 times, resulting in ~50% donation conversion.
The most remarkable aspect of the communications for the digital team ?
No interference from the campaign management on content or messaging !
Creative and Personalized Messaging Provided A Huge Lift In The Fund Raise
Data and Analytics: “ We Are Confident In Our Data… ”
I distinctly recall through the entire 12-18 month cycle of coverage, the U.S. national media had the Obama campaign lagging the Romney campaign, or at best running within a highly surmountable margin of error by the opposing campaign.
But, what often struck me was the degree of confidence that Obama’s chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, reflected in his public approach to those predictions.
Reproduced below are key extracts from “Electing The President: 2012 – An Insiders View”, with Axelrod recounting to author Kathleen Hall Jamieson the thought process and considerations leading up to the election.
“ One of the confounding things about this race is we were never really behind in our own polling. The race kept trading within a very consistent band of 2 to 4 points ”
“It was always a 3-point race. It sounds preposterous, but we were always very confident based on the data and confident based on what we observed in the battleground states ”
The Campaign’s Quality Of Predictive Analytics Beat Various Public Poll Assumptions
Analytics Strategy and Culture: Flexible, Accommodative With Emphasis On Simplicity
Analytics ultimately underpinned the strategy around the core connecting goals of the campaign
- Fundraising: a wallet app was developed to make donations easier basis means tested messaging
- Measure voter enthusiasm through polling and real-time adjustment of support scoring levels
- Identifying persuadables and assigning a score on ability to influence voters
- Increasing registration by utilizing donor money and in-turn increase chances of greater turnout
But, it would also be important to point some of the cultural factors at play that made this work :
- Emphasis on accommodating smart analyst, rather than hard core engineers
- SQL-based environments were preferred instead of statistical analysis
- A free thinking atmosphere that allowed analysts to experiment
- A 100 strong centralized analytics unit – 50 in one location, 20 in major HQs and 30 across field offices
Intense and captivating read. I hope people realise the reading may be simple but deciphering it to present the way it is, is both a skill and art. Very well articulated!