Adapt or Disappear

After years of election night “hand-wringing” and “pacing”, and maybe even the occasional campaign contribution, perhaps its time to take our collective involvement in our Town campaigns up a notch.  

In the past, most discussions indicated that many engaged in politics the same way a gambler participates with spectator sports.  Choose which candidates we wanted to support and maybe contribute to their campaigns or PACs, and hope those we trusted with our money could work their magic and win. There have been occasional good results, but unfortunately, too few to brag about. And, like the gambler, we could only shrug our shoulders and think, “Oh well, maybe next time.” The difference between our limited involvement and the gambler’s was being content to sit on the sidelines, unwilling to do more than give money. Should we question our past actions and offer the skills and expertise we might possess to positively affect the outcome of a race?

In the ABG offices, there’s agreement that we should think independently and not just go along because of party affiliation and start to think more like the business people we are. The time for this has never been more crucial. Gone should be the resignation to merely “hope for the best” and blindly trust others to manage our investment in their candidates. Gone also is our willingness to acquiesce to their requests for money, without an accompanying expectation of accountability. Of course, the candidate and their message will always be the most important ingredients for the success of any campaign, but lets stop playing the role of blind party loyalist, and started thinking and acting like a businessperson.

  

Let’s insist on getting a substantial return-on-investment from our political contributions. This is especially critical for those contributing to Super PACs – previously an unaccountable black hole rarely if ever offering any accountability beyond an email saying how “they” successfully utilized our financial input.

ABG offers the following suggestions to those who are interested in doing the same.

1. Invest in campaigns that take social media seriously.

Media consumption has fundamentally changed in the last few years. Too many in the GOP, for instance, cling to the same old strategies that have become less and less effective. More and more television ads blindly aired in October right on up to the November election are increasingly ignored by most voters and frankly are a waste.

Today’s campaigns must also have a twitter presence in particular to attract young voters in addition to a commitment to build a strong following on Facebook. Former Democratic Supervisor candidate Bob Bernstein had a good jump with Facebook in the Democratic Primary election over his opponent. Monitoring tweets, originating tweets, and re-tweeting enables candidates to respond in real time to current events, and to shape the media narratives that swirl around them. 

In political campaigning, the quicker a response, the better, and providing the appearance of seemingly being more engaged with the voters. Immediate responses are perceived as a candidate being more “in touch” with the electorate. Many of the Democrats are doing this and the results are apparent. This type of media involvement might turn the tide for Republicans by engaging a younger voting audience.  

Old media models are no longer building large audiences while Facebook (as one example) is now almost mandatory. An allocation of resources away from the old methods and towards a new one is imperative for better results and donors should demand it!

2. Invest in campaigns that use cloud technology to organize data.

Prospective donors should hold their candidate accountable for a campaign that leverages “cloud computing” software to organize the “Get Out the Vote” (GOTV) efforts, fundraising, or other campaign activities.  

Cloud computing enables large numbers of computers to share information in real time over, thus relying on shared resources to achieve coherence and balance. President Obama’s campaign utilized a cloud service called Amazon Web Services (AWS) during the 2012 presidential election.  

Amazon Web Services helped facilitate the raising of hundreds of millions of dollars, coordinate millions of phone calls and thousands of volunteers over the cloud network, which simultaneously reduced expenses, duplication, and other inefficiencies associated with traditional bricks-and-mortar campaign operations. There is a level of office to office coordination that has never been able to be done before.

The “cloud computing” technology is only a small portion of how to enable campaigns to capture information, respond to current events, tweak the candidate’s message, and monitor the pulse of voter sentiment – all in real time. In a local campaign in Greenburgh, however, much of the work would be scaled down by a smaller geographic area by either communities, villages and even streets.

3. Invest in campaigns that analyze data carefully, and make intelligent decisions accordingly.

Republicans coined the term “micro-targeting” during the Bush years, taking the technological lead in predictive modeling. Yet through the last two elections, that lead was relinquished to the Democrats, who better utilized this new technology and data mining.

These same campaign donors should also ensure that campaigns invest in technologies to mine data on individual voter preferences and to map relationships between persuadable voters. Donors should force campaigns to provide accountability for their donation. Accessing this information enables a campaign to select the best method of communicating with particular voter groups, and craft individualized messages that speak directly to their interests. 

The Obama campaign leapt ahead with this in 2012, and the GOP must follow suit if they plan to be more competitive. Data mining provides vast amounts of facts about voters as individuals and demographic groups. Utilizing this information can develop authentic, dynamic, and responsive messaging platforms, rather than promoting those that are based on long-held perceptions or intuition, which results in static messaging and voter disconnect. 

Businesses that invest in data-mining technologies consider it the best way to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Every campaign should adopt the same mentality. Mr Feiner has found his own data mining technique and exploited it. Our best advice to any donor: as a businessman, technologist, and one who now demands a good ROI on his campaign contributions, we’ll now be an active part of the solution, by participating in campaigns and PACs that maximize our dollars to utilize technology to better target and inform voters. Those that participate with us will do well. Those that don’t will either quickly learn to adapt or disappear. Speaking of disappearing, we hope they adapt. We deserve A Better Greenburgh.