Connection Café: Team Obama ranked #1 most innovative by Fast Company

	Team Obama ranked #1 most innovative by Fast Company
	Posted by at Feb 18, 2009 02:28 PM CST Categories: Constituent Empowerment, NPtech, Social Media

The Internet has phenomenal power. That much we all know by now.

The true mystery lies in how we tap into this power and harness the vast WWW for our personal needs, whether they be to engage constituents, make money for a business, tap into a new demographic for a cause – the list could go on forever - and how to take what seem like highly successful anomalies and turn them into models to follow.

Fast Company’s list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” was recently released and its #1 innovative “company” was one we know all too well by now: Team Obama.

As many nonprofits and socially conscious organizations and businesses now know, the Obama for America campaign broke the mold this election season in almost every aspect: fundraising, outreach, grassroots efforts and particularly using the Internet and new media to do almost everything.

Numerous blog posts and articles have dissected the campaign and provided key strategic takeaways (see Transparency, stupid, Will Mobile Really Move People?and Learning From the Obama Campaign: Essential Reading for starters) but the Fast Company article visually outlined key milestones and tactics Obama made in his road to success. Almost all of which were dominated by the Internet:

February 2007: Launch of mybarackobama.com. a social networking site. Eventually this site draws over 2 million profiles and 35,000 volunteer groups. (To put those numbers into perspective for our 300 million, 50 state population in the USA, 1 in every 150 people in the country joined the site on average and an average of 700 volunteer groups were started per state.)

May 2007: A grassroots Obama MySpace page hits 100,000 fans. The campaign takes over this page and creates profiles on other networking sites, targeting key demographics where they spend their time such as BlackPlanet and AsianAve. Obama’s Facebook pages alone grow to 3.2 million fans (or an average of 1 in every 93 Americans).

June 2007: Obama Girl video is posted on YouTube, receiving 12 million views. The number seems monumental, but compared to the 110 million views the Obama YouTube channel receives, the number is dwarfed in comparison.

July 2008: Supporters launch an uprising on mybarackobama.com in response to a vote made by Obama. Obama writes a long blog to explain his reasoning. A notable point here: the Obama team realizes allowing supporters to provide feedback is crucial part of online engagement and that responses to these should be taken series. Rather than call a press conference or use a media opportunity to respond to these constituents, he responds in the space where they spend their time and in the informal format they prefer, a blog post.

August 2008: Obama makes the VP announcement everyone was anxiously awaiting by text message for the first time ever.

November 4, 2008: Team Obama sends out at least 3 text messages to each supporter who has signed up for alerts in battle ground states.

Overall online fundraising: Over $500 million, or half a billion (yes, half a BILLION), is raised solely online with vast majority of those donations under $100 each.

The true takeaways here are:

Obama embraced new, emerging media despite the fact that it does carry risks
All of the campaign’s online/new media activities supported one another and worked together cohesively.
Online efforts did not work in a vacuum for the team. In-person events and traditional media tactics also worked hand-in-hand with online efforts so that the two always maximized the other’s effectiveness.

Like the article stated, “the community that elected Obama raised more money, held more events, made more phone calls, shared more videos and offered more policy suggestions than any in history.” Organizations should take heed of this new model. While the power of the Internet can’t make everyone the next president, it might just help you achieve your mission at hand.

Team Obama ranked #1 most innovative by Fast Company

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