A morning with Harper Reed

Last week I spent the morning listening to, and then talking with Harper Reed. For those who don’t know him he was one of the founders of Threadless, (one of the first practitioners of crowd sourcing) and then Obamas CTO during the 2012 election campaign.

In that later role he led the team that built the technology platform that engaged tens of millions of supporters and helped raise more than $1bn in donations.

He told an impressive story of building what was essentially a massive customer engagement system, with associated content management and donation platform, and then training and motivating thousands of volunteers to use it. One platform managed voter and supporter contact across channels as diverse as twitter, text, email, mail, outbound phone and even door knocking.

The marketing and mainstream commentators hailed this as a masterpiece of “micro targeting”, where small but coherent groups of voters were engaged on issues that most appealed to them.

Harper made two really interesting points, both of which had not been picked up by mainstream case studies.

The first was: this wasn’t really micro targeting, but actually micro listening. The volunteers who knocked on doors and called voters weren’t primarily trying to “sell” Obama. They were trying to listen to what voters needed from him, and what would motivate them to engage with the campaign. Every call, every visit was data captured using an app, and that data appended to the voters record. That listening informed messaging for that individual voter, and for cohorts matched to them.

The second point was one of integration. This was a tech presentation by a tech leader, aged under 35. Clearly he was proud of the work in channels like twitter, instant click to donate on text, and personalised emails. But he acknowledged that much of the heavy lifting with voters took place with old fashioned media, like phone, door knocking and above all in direct mail. Shock horror, paper and mail still have a huge role in this era of digital. And the insight I took from speaking with him: digital media may create the insight. Interactivity tells you in real time what voters engage with. But a real letter shows you value them and their opinions. And that changes minds, and generates money

Not what I was expecting to hear from a young tech guy. But a morning well spent

Written by Mike Colling, MD of MC&C