November 14, 2012 – This document will serve as the “Exit Report” for Technology for Obama and was prepared by Jim Green and Rusty Rueff

On August 16th, 2011, Technology for Obama (T4O) was commissioned by Jim Messina, Matthew Barzun and Rufus Gifford to specifically achieve these major objectives:

 Create and organize a group of technology leaders who would provide visible, financial and tangible support of the President before and post the G.O.P. nomination of a candidate  Extend the organization to a large technology community for mobilization to support Chicago’s technology needs, and to excite, persuade, and ensure votes  Establish a significant relationship of influence with the fastest growing and highest visibility U.S. industry segment (technology) for broader campaign needs with small to large businesses.  Fundraise a minimum of $12MM (to underwrite the Chicago technology expenses)

Staff Director, Jim Green and Lay Leader, Rusty Rueff were chosen to lead this effort nationally. Steve Spinner served as a founder/advisor throughout.

Accomplishments

As of November 14, 2012 the following has been accomplished:

 163 of the “Who’s Who” of Technology Leaders, Entrepreneurs and Investors became active and visible as T4O National /Regional Co-Chairs and Partners. Notables include:  Aneesh Chopra  Bijan Sibet  Chris Sacca  Craig Newmark  Jeremy Stoppleman  Judy Estrin  Marc Benioff  Mike McCue  Reid Hoffman  Sean Parker  Shervin Pishevar  Troy Carter

 T4O Membership ranks grew to nearly 10,000  Regional T4O Leaders were established in Chicago, Austin, NYC, DC, NORCAL, SOCAL, Seattle, Boston, Upstate and for Battleground States Tech Youth; raising funds, holding T4O events, establishing visibility and supporting campaign messaging. For many of these people, this was their first time in political efforts. Weekly Regional Leadership conference calls were held to organize, inspire and support these leaders.

 T4O sponsored and organized 49 events across America – including the organizing of the largest Debate Watch Event in the U.S. on October 3, 2012. Highlights of these include:  Chicago HQ Day  Southwest by Southwest Fund and Friend raisers  NYC Social Media Week Fund and Friend Raiser  Silicon Valley Fundraiser with and Diane Greene  Northern California Debate Watches (4)  SOCAL Convention and Debate Watches  Virginia Surrogate event with Aneesh Chopra and Tim O’Reilly  Eight POTUS Tech Roundtables

Alongside the Dashboard tool, T4O partnered with Eventbrite’s open platform to establish a national scheduling tool and presence for our Regional Leaders. These stats were provided back from Eventbrite: 3312 attendees registered for T4O events through Eventbrite. The largest event was held in San Francisco for the first Presidential debate on October 3rd with 809 attendees registered through this tool.

 Ties and relationship between T4O and Chicago HQ Tech team were established – supporting the opening of the San Francisco Tech Volunteer Office  T4O published 23 national newsletters that received strong reviews and over nearly 60% open rate. Volunteer Stevie Jagutis edited and published each of these newsletters.  T4O published a weekly Co-Chair/Partner Digest with regular calls to actions specifically for this elite group  T4O Conference Calls occurred once a month with participation from campaign guests; Jim Messina (twice), Aneesh Chopra (when still CTO) and David Simas.  Social media efforts on yielded, across five different handles, nearly 3000 followers. Volunteers Josh McHugh, Garrett Law and Zach Cole kept our Twitter feed full and active.  A very highly influential social media group of 75 people was established as the T4O National Influencers, who took on social media messaging creation and dissemination missions, resulting in a daily national Twitter audience reach of more than 5MM. Catherine Bracy was asked to lead this group and did a magnificent job of marshaling and leading.  Special campaign messaging/initiatives were created (Thunderclaps on Voter Registration/GOTV reached over 1MM people each time) and were supported (POTUS Reddit AMA where T4O activated nearly 7MM Twitter Followers).  T4O supported campaign tech initiatives like Twitter PicSwitch where we had great success in reaching 900K+ Twitter followers: http://www.picswitch.com/obama2012  Our Battleground Tech Youth Initiative organized nearly 200 college youth who became Twitter Leaders in the key battleground states of Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio. Regional T4O Leaders Erik Christofferson and Rafi Ortiz organized volunteers to lead this effort.  T4O Merchandise was created and sold on the T4O site, at events and on the BO.com store  A standalone T4O website was built, published and kept current throughout the campaign by Austin, Texas volunteers Ben Cohen (Texas T4O Regional Leader), Jason Sugawa and Kate Donaho. Volunteer Katie Hirsch kept the site current (from her freshman dorm room at George Washington University). At the site, T4O covered live the DNC Convention and published those events also on Twitter and a T4O Tumblr site. T4O also covered live the first Presidential Debate from Denver, on the ground canvassing in Colorado and Wisconsin, and Election Day from Chicago HQ and other locations across the country. The weeks leading up to November 6th, the site was receiving over a million unique visitors a week.  The T4O video Innovator Series was created and launched with the video interviews of 24 national co-chairs/Partners by Shelby Bonnie, founder of CNET. These interviews lived on the T4O website and also on the T4O YouTube Channel. This effort was created by Jim Green, Executive Produced and funded by Rusty Rueff and Shelby Bonnie, and directed and produced by Lyn Graft from Austin, Texas. The viewership of these videos reached nearly 50,000 views. Launch of the Series garnered national Tech Blog coverage and this trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zswxnnP-2AQ&feature=plcp was also tweeted out by @barackobama.  T4O experimented with the youth vote in Virginia and led a GOTV “Tweet Up” with Aneesh Chopra as the host. The event drove more than 1,300 of an extended group’s followers in Virginia to click through to vote.barackobama.com and had a Twitter reach of 4 million over the course of the hour-long event. An infographic that details the results in included at the end of this report.  T4O pioneered a new fundraising and engagement initiative with successful execution of eight POTUS Tech Hours (with over 140 total participants)  Over $ 26MM has been raised directly or indirectly by T4O, exceeding our $12MM initial goal!

What We Learned To Carry Forward

These are meant to be a set of self-correcting observations that fall in the camp of “if we could do it over again” these would be ways to make us better. They are unvarnished learning.

 We would have started earlier – We didn’t get T4O off the ground until the September 2011 NFC Meeting. Starting T4O at the same time as the kick-off of the campaign and as an officially recognized affinity group would have given more runway and credibility to the cause.  We wouldn’t have waited as much as we did – We waited on a number things that had we moved faster and more independently, we would have gotten faster and greater traction. Examples: Logo development and approval (6 weeks), Contribution website development and launch (waited 3 months), Innovator Series (waited months for development and then over a month for approval after the videos were in the can and ready to go). Below are ways we think we could have mitigated these waiting periods.  Closer ties with Chicago Tech Team – Throughout the campaign there many moments when closer ties with Chicago would have given us approvals and support that were needed. In hindsight this effort could have been better with Michael Slaby, Harper Reed and Teddy Goff all being assigned as an “official” part of the T4O team. Had we created a Board of Governors (or something) where they felt invested in the success of T4O more deeply, things would have moved faster and more smoothly. Working with three different heads in the Tech group in Chicago was also part of it being harder than it needed to be, but we could have managed that better. Also, from day-one having a full-time person from the tech team assigned to T4O would have made a huge difference. Late in the campaign we were able to get Catherine Bracy in that role and she made a real positive impact. Had we had that earlier and with less internal politics we would have been stronger and moved more quickly.  Should have not charged for Membership from the beginning – We had good advice from Matthew Barzun to not charge or charge nominally ($5) but we thought we could gain enough attention at $25 Membership fee that it would be worth it. We were wrong. We wish we would have started from the beginning with Membership free and allowed for the top tiers of Chairs/Partners to carry the fundraising (which what ended up happening anyway). We also should have defined better a set of Membership Benefits that we could promote and use. There were lots of cool digital benefits (like badges, twitter picswitches, etc.) that we could have provided but didn’t get to in the time and with the resources available.  Established a defined understanding and agreement with the Chicago PR Team – We missed at significant opportunities to have propelled T4O within the Tech Community with PR. Each time we were told “No”, or we never got a response from the Chicago PR Team. By not being allowed to respond we were never able to keep our message in the forefront for the larger tech community to understand the advantages we had over the G.O.P. and the progress we had made.  Recognized the force of the Tech Roundtables earlier and used them more – Had we realized how successful these could be we could have probably done at least four more of these. To do so, we would have needed to have been able to schedule them out further in advance (if we would have had an ongoing 60 day visibility into dates we could have kept them full just by being able to lock in calendars in advance). Also, the President would ask in different roundtables for different “homework “ to be done. We were proud of the ideas that came out of the Roundtables that got implemented (e.g., White House Innovation Fellowships, and follow up roundtables with US. CTO and CIO that they did across the country ) but had we had a process where POTUS would have given the same homework assignment across all of the roundtables and we had built on that throughout the campaign, we could have created quite a bit of engagement and a body of knowledge for James Kvaal and others. Example would have been: had the President asked from the beginning and throughout each Roundtable: “I’m looking for the ten best technology related improvements for the country that could be implemented and yielding results by 2020.” We could have built on that and had a way of providing feedback to participants throughout the campaign and ultimately completed that list for the President to carry into his second term.  Recruited faster and better at the Regional Leader level – In hindsight, we could have gotten on a plane and spent a day in each Finance Region and probably have found an NFC Member who would have paired up with a younger and up and comer and we would have had a stronger leadership team. We waited for them to come to us and that was a mistake. We loved who we had but we got into places like Boston and NYC late and never cracked Colorado, Research Triangle or the I-4 Corridor.  Established one large “Tent Pole” event – While we had success at South by Southwest, had we thought about this from the beginning and picked one “tent pole” event throughout the cycle and built towards that, we could have progressed much of our awareness efforts. SxSW would have been one. Others could have been, Web 2.0, Disrupt, Social Media Weeks, TED, etc. This would have taken a great deal of pre-planning and coordination but had we thought about this from the beginning and recruited dedicated volunteers to the effort then we could have made a larger splash in one of these big ponds of credibility and awareness.

For Reference:

T4O Vision

To create a community and movement within the Technology sector that allows for supporters of the reelection of President Obama in November 2012 to feel engaged, active, enthused and connected in contributing themselves (time and treasures), and sharing, persuading others to join, contribute and vote.

The T4O Equation:

Identify Members + Persuade to Join and Share + Ensure Vote = T4O Fundraising

The T4O Activation Model:

CONTRIBUTE ENERGY AND TIME

JOIN SHARE CONTRIBUTE $ PERSUADE VOTE

Infographic that details results of November 3rd Virginia Tweet Up: