Head Tale

So today was a pretty big day in the United States as born and raised Brooklyn boy, Bernie Sanders went up against adopted hometown gal, Hillary Clinton in the New York primary in their ongoing battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination.

As someone who’s very interested in the use of digital technology and social media in politics, I thought this would be a good time to make a few observations about some of what Bernie Sanders’ cutting edge campaign has done in this area (as far as I can tell from a distance obviously)…

• First off, Bernie’s perfectly positioned to be the “tech savvy” candidate – he’s an outsider and has a young, idealistic base that favours a candidacy that’s going to try to maximize the impact of technology.
• Even something as simple as the fact that many young people are “cord cutters” who have neither cable TV, traditional newspaper subscriptions or landline phones plays to Bernie’s success with this group as an Internet-focused candidate.
• Sanders campaign and its supporters are effectively using online phonebanking techniques including hub site www.berniepb.com which tracks call rates to different parts of the country and shows calls against targets.
  
• I haven’t done any phonebanking for Sanders (one of the very few things a non-American *is* allowed to do to support a candidate in the US) but my understanding is that they have great videos to introduce the concept to newcomers and then have it set-up so that scripts are shown right on a person’s computer as they use digital technology to easily make calls.
• The campaign also have plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome to make tracking outreach even easier.
• Springboarding off the idea of phonebanking, Bernie supporters are also “Facebanking” – using Facebook’s existing search to allow people to search for other Sanders supporters.  As an example, “Friends of Friends Who Live in [New York] AND who have Liked Bernie Sanders Facebook page” then users can send these people a message directly on Facebook reminding them to vote or donate or volunteer or whatever.
  
• Sanders is utilizing YouTube to both livestream his YUGE rallies and archive campaign ads and other relevant clips.
• There are a massive amount of official and unofficial web sites, apps and other online tools that have been developed for different purposes covering Activism, Information, Phonebanking, Voting, Communication and even Fun & Games!
• His team is using a new tool called “Conversational Ads” on Twitter which allow micro-targeting by location and interest based on Twitter users’ past tweets
• Bernie Sanders’ campaign found a lot of initial enthusiasm on Reddit and that site (especially r/sandersforpresident) has become a major hub for the campaign for activism, information sharing and fundraising.  There are also Bernie sub-Reddits created specifically for every state to share targeted local information and strategies.
  
• Reddit was also the initial home for /r/grassrootsselect which is a sub-Reddit focused on getting like-minded candidates elected in down ballot races, a movement which of course now has a requisite web site and Facebook page.
• There are other specialty Bernie sub-Reddits such as r/codersforSanders where ideas such as this “Submit Your Own Video Endorsement” site were first proposed and led to something that’s really cool.
  
• It goes without saying that Bernie is using the Internet to crush Hillary Clinton in grassroots fundraising and virtually tying her in total campaign fundraising (Hillary is way ahead when you take into account outside money her SuperPACs raise) which means he spends less time off the campaign trail attending fundraisers and he can literally *cough* to ask for money to pour in!
• He’s also using the Internet to grow to scale very quickly, from only a few supporters at first to hundreds then thousands then millions.
• As well, fundraising online gives lots of opportunities for using counters and other short-term goals (eg. after a state victory) to encourage more people to give more money.
  
• Finally, the main online fundraising site that Sanders uses, ActBlue.org, allows people to quickly and easily donate to other candidates who are part of Sanders’ movement.
• I could go on and on about different uses of technology by the Sanders campaign but the final thing I’ll mention is that supporters are also using Slack, a hugely successful (Canadian!) project management web site that combines the best aspects of e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, company intranets and other traditional digital tools in a single place (while also allowing many sub-channels to exist under the umbrella of the main Slack channel).
• Oh, and he’s also the choice of tech’s elites with his biggest donor support coming from people who work at Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.