Digesting the 2008 New Media Institute: Part 1

Last week, HM spent three days in DC for the New Media Institute.  As NBPC’s interactive and design partner, we’ve been there since the beginning three years ago in Boston.  This year, in the wake of Obama’s victory, the mood was a little different: excited; a little amazed.  Attendees from other countries congratulated us Americans for doing the right thing (implied: for once).  And everyone wants to know two things:

1. What was it about Obama’s web strategy that helped him win?
2. What does this mean for the web?  (And: How can I take advantage of it?)

We heard a great answer to the first question from Judith Freeman, an Obama campaign strategist and co-founder of the New Organizing Institute.  The interactive strategy wasn’t based in a one-to-many communications paradigm, where the campaign’s top dogs disseminate information and calls to action to the masses.  It also wasn’t based in a lower-tier, peer-to-peer approach, where the masses communicate with each other in some feverish cloud of messaging whose collective wisdom never bubbles up to the leadership.

Instead, the campaign adopted a multi-tier, anyone-to-anyone strategy.  They wanted a local organizer’s ideas to be able to percolate up the chain to the national strategists.  They wanted Latinos across the U.S. to be able to form an ad-hoc “Latinos for Obama” group, and to have an online space for this group to share their ideas and enthusiasm.  They wanted mobile phone aficionados to feel connected through their iPhones.  They wanted national, brand-name staffers to communicate as directly and personally as possible with individual voters.  And they wanted everyone, every last person, to fund the campaign.

In technological terms, the campaign was outrageously ambitious.  Judith Freeman was able to look back on the election season and synthesize an approach, but it was clear to technology watchers that one key to the campaign’s success was that it built adaptation into its core strategy.

Think about this: if you start a two-year political campaign with any well-researched, beautifully-implemented, and expensive set of interactive tools, those tools will almost certainly be completely outdated by Election Day.  Twitter was not a year old when Obama announced his candidacy.  The iPhone wouldn’t hit the shelves for four months.  And yet, by the time the campaign entered spring 2008, Obama was tweeting like a madman, and by the fall he had a (pretty sick) iPhone app.  And everything looked fantastic, too–the Obama campaign brand translated across platforms, screen sizes, and interfaces.

The lesson for the rest of us?  Have a strategy.  Make explicit plans to express this strategy through your visual identity, your technology platforms, your user interfaces, and your communications.  And give yourself a framework to adapt to changing trends.

(Also, make sure someone’s paying attention to those trends.)

Now, what does this mean for the web?  Our not-for-profit clients don’t usually have, say, a hundred million dollars to toss at their problems.  Projects are generally funded by grants, which mean that there’s a hard cap on the funding, and often on the timeline.  It can seem that there’s no time and no space in the budget for strategy and research–just get it done!

This can lead to a technological panic response: your project needs all of the free, or cheap, tools and platforms you’ve read about in the last few months (never mind those from a year ago), because you need to show that your organization is on the cutting edge.  You need a blog, a Twitter account, and a Drupal site.  Stat.  You also need a new logo, and a hundred other things you haven’t had time to think through.

The best salve is a strategy.  Don’t get bogged down in technologies, products, or design elements until you’ve put some basic goals on paper–and made everyone in your organization agree on the goals.

1. Our project is about X.
2. We are trying to reach Y.
3. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when we see Z.

The point of  your project, your audience, and your measure(s) of success.  These are what you use to build a design and technology strategy.  These are what you can look to when you feel the need to adapt your approach or reconsider an initial decision.

Set aside time at the beginning of a project for everyone involved to consider these points–and if you don’t have the answers in front of you, do research.  You probably won’t be able to carve this time out of your project schedule if you didn’t put it at the beginning.  It may seem like an unnecessary delay and expense to put your people in a room and make them think, but it will pay huge dividends over the course of the project (or, you know, presidential campaign).