Bayh went home just 20 times in the last 2 years for which records are available -- including just 7 trips home in '08. The NRSC has signaled it will also challenge whether it is appropriate for Bayh's wife to be sitting on corporate boards, and to be raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process.
From Politics Magazine:
The second annual Campaigns & Elections’ Politics magazine Reed Awards were presented this evening in Washington, DC to political and public affairs professionals at the top of their game. “Becoming a Reed Award finalist is tough. Actually winning a Reed Award is only accomplished by the most impressive creative political and public affairs talent in the world,” said Jordan Lieberman, publisher.
Judges for this year’s Reed Awards, sponsored by Aristotle, included: James Carville, Eleanor Clift, Adam Conner, Ben Dworkin, Ron Faucheux, Julie Germany, Taegan Goddard, Peter Greenberger, Shane Greer, Mike Hennessy, David Keene, Kevin Madden, Mark McKinnon, Bernie Morton, Terry Nelson, Grover Norquist, Christine Pelosi, Mark Penn, James Pindell, Tom Rath, Larry Sabato, Santo Santoro, Bill Schneider, Con Sciacca, Steve Scully, Bob Shrum, Michael Smerconish, Princella Smith, George Stephanopoulos, Roger Stone, Chuck Todd, Christine Todd Whitman, Robert Traynham, Joe Trippi, Mike Turk, Suzanne Turner, Amy Walter, Juan Williams, and Judy Woodruff.
Our award was for the Best Use of New Political Technology, which was based on our innovative use of Victory VOIP on behalf of the Republican Party of VA. Learn more about Victory VOIP here.
Note: This is the 3rd in a series of articles about the Scott Brown campaign, where we served as part of the online team.
While much attention has been paid to the successful moneybomb for Senator Scott Brown (which generated over 1.3 million dollars in 24 hours), there was another online initiative that we considered more innovative and worthy of discussion. We're referencing the initiative hosted at http://thevoterbomb.com.
The Brown voter bomb was really a function of our desire for the campaign website to contribute to the campaign's GOTV efforts. In any election, the only poll that matters is the one taken on Election Day. So despite some encouraging polling results, we had every reason to believe that a strong turnout effort from the Beacon Hill machine, aided by Organizing for America and the SEIU, would give Coakley an election day bump. It was critical that we focus on turnout and making sure our supporters came out to vote.
This effort had already begun, to some extent, by running targeted ads on local news websites, Google, Drudge Report, RedState, and other conservative news websites. These ads were intended to drive people to sign up as local volunteers or participate in our call from home program. We thought, however, that we could do more with the resources at our disposal.
Thus was born the "voter bomb." The idea was to communicate to our supporters the importance of not voting alone. We wanted each Scott Brown supporter, as enthusiastic as they all seemed, to be thinking of who can they could bring to the polls with them. With no endorsement stronger than that of a neighbor, friend, or relative, what better thing could they be doing?
The Prosper Group quickly built an application that would allow individuals to “pledge” to bring friends to the polls. To participate, you had to be from Massachusetts and indicate your home county. The “pledge” was limited to no more than 20 individuals out of a desire to emphasize the importance of contacting personal networks, in contrast to our call from home program that was assigning random individuals to volunteers. In addition, we wanted it to feel easy with a low barrier of entry. The idea was for our supporters to think, “I can bring Ted from work” or “Sally from my church group” or “Ralph, my neighbor." It appears that we were successful in this regard, as the average pledge was to bring 6 additional voters.
We tracked the results by county with the idea that some individuals might be motivated to compete with each other. We also publicly tracked the total pledges statewide, similarly to the public tracking of donations for the moneybomb. To increase the social nature of the voter bomb, we allowed comments on the page and incorporated a Twitter stream of the hash tag, #masen. We had many comments from supportive individuals encouraging each other not to vote alone. Every comment made reinforced the community feel and encouraged others to join in the effort.
Campaign Manager Beth Lindstrom announced the voter bomb website at “The People’s Rally” just a few days before the election and we made it our highlighted action item on the campaign website’s home page. We then further promoted the site by hitting Brown’s email list of MA voters as well as John McCain and Mitt Romney’s lists in MA.
Roughly 4,800 individuals participated with a total of 32,000 voters pledged, a handsome total. The race, however, ended up well outside the realm of recount world, so the voter bomb ended up getting far less attention than if the election was decided by just a few thousand votes.
Our effort was the product of a few days of rush work. If we had more time to plan and coordinate, we think we would have improved the program by asking voters to report back in on their pledges, sending reminder robo-calls to our volunteers or finding ways to coordinate our online advertising with the effort. We may also have been able to push our effort in targeted communities where high turnout was essential.
Overall, it’s important for those of us in the online community to understand that the success of our online efforts should not simply be focused on dollars raised. We’ve mastered that- mostly. To some extent, we’ve also mastered the art of turning online activity into earned media and turning website volunteer sign-ups into voter contacts. But our concept of the voter bomb was designed to show the Political Departments that our efforts can equal real votes on Election Day. We feel confident that we were successful.
One of the things I love about political campaigns is how fast they move. In the case of Scott Brown’s US Senate campaign, things could not have moved faster- or come together so unexpectedly (and so well).
The Prosper Group had been hired to develop the website for Scott Brown in September- back when the campaign was not flush with cash and needed something together quickly. We worked furiously over a single weekend and launched a website for Scott.
In the meantime, the campaign had been promoting a microsite (aptly named www.redinvadesblue.com) talking about a “moneybomb” to take place on January 11th. Originally, the hope was to raise perhaps $80,000 or so to help buy some additional radio advertising in the final days of the campaign. For a few weeks, individuals could visit the site and pledge certain amounts to contribute on that day. On the 8th, we had just under 1,000 pledges that totaled around $79,000.
But now, with the campaign already raising over $300,000 in one day, we thought we could do better than $80,000. However, it was our contention at The Prosper Group that we couldn’t accomplish that without setting a public goal, which had been left out of the Red Invades Blue campaign to that point. We needed contributors to be able to join in on the excitement of reaching that goal together. The campaign leadership, however, had long felt that by alerting the Democrats to our online fundraising success, we might “wake them up” and encourage a barrage of negative attacks on Scott (which, of course, they eventually did with reckless abandon). This below the radar strategy had served the campaign very well.
On
Sunday, January 10th we had new ammunition to take to the campaign
leadership- a Public
Policy Polling survey that had Scott Brown up 1 point. Our case was that in essence “the cat was out
of the bag” and nothing was going to stop the Coakley campaign from waking up
now. Rob Willington, the campaign’s new
media director, agreed. The proposal was
to set the goal at $500,000, something we felt confident we could reach, but we
thought $1,000,000 was within reach.
Despite some hesitation from some other advisors, the campaign’s
leadership agreed to let us set an audacious public goal and see if Brown’s
online supporters would help us meet it.
We worked feverishly the night of the 10th to build a splash page with a graphic of Massachusetts that donors would turn from blue to red by helping us reach our goal (see website). In addition, a video of Scott talking about the moneybomb was added.
We went live at midnight and started recording contributions at 12:01am on the 11th. Just after 4:00pm we had already blown past $500,000 and had reset our goal to $750,000. By dinner time we had pushed past $750,000 and were trying to decide if we wanted to upgrade the goal to $1,000,000. Our decision was to see if our online supporters would call for it first. After all, this was their movement and we wanted it to be their goal as well. Several influential Twitter followers called on the campaign to move the goal post, so we announced the decision on Twitter at 6:30pm and reset our graphic for $1,000,000.
From the @scottbrownma Twitter feed:
I see a lot of people are pushing for $1M... I agree, let's roll!#masen #41stVote #Victory
Brigadiers, We Are Going To $750K, let's roll! http://bit.ly/4ScpOw#masen #tcot #41stVote
Senior Citizens are calling our office b/c they heard about "the bomb" but are not online & want their checks to count #masen
It appears Cape Cod is next on our map, let's get to $500,000 before midnight! http://bit.ly/4ScpOw #masen #41stVote #tcot
I was just informed that we have raised $403,429.12 TODAY! You are incredible http://bit.ly/4ScpOw #masen #tcot #41stVote
Today we are trying to raise $500,000 to finish strong and win#masen please help us reach our goal http://bit.ly/4ScpOw #tcot
TODAY: our moneybomb to raise $500,000 today, will you help?http://bit.ly/6bY7bT #masen #41stVote #tcot (please RT&Blog)
By 7:00pm we started to see individuals giving multiple times to help reach the goal. The excitement among our supporters was off the charts, and they were determined to succeed. Incredibly, just a short three hours after we announced the new goal, the website showed a red Massachusetts once again. The grassroots had spoken.
But, honestly, that wasn’t the best news to come out of the moneybomb. Due to the success of the
moneybomb, the contributions kept coming and put us on par with the millions
being dropped into the state by the DSCC and the SEIU. We raised another $1.3 million on the 12th
and had a day at $1.7 million in the same week.
In retrospect it appears to me that the moneybomb could not have come together any better. Any earlier and it may have been less successful or had the negative effect the campaign was worried about. Any later and it would have been too late to spend the money raised. I’m also fully convinced that without the public goal we set, the campaign may have raised just a few hundred thousand dollars and been unable to raise the money we needed in the final days to win. Setting a goal (and surpassing it) opened the floodgates to more support online as the moneybomb went viral. The campaign's motivated supporters spread the word and insisted we could win. This was definitely "the people's moneybomb."
NOTE: Props should be given to Patrick Ruffini and his team at EngageDC, who put together the iContribute system the Brown campaign was
using for online donations.
By: Kurt Luidhardt and Kristen Luidhardt
Note: We've just returned from Massachusetts, where we helped coordinate both Senator-Elect Scott Brown's online efforts and his GOTV phone program. This is the first post in a series about the Brown campaign.
Truck owner, Wrentham resident, and State Senator Scott Brown is now the giant-slaying US Senator representing the dark blue state of Massachusetts. Much of that was accomplished because of a smart online campaign that helped fund his efforts, generate volunteers, and engage supporters. As a quick overview, here’s what the Brown campaign did right online- from the start.
They understood that big “Mo” doesn’t come automatically.
The curse of Obama’s 2008 campaign (for online strategists) has come in the form of candidates and campaigns who think that a sharp website and a Facebook page should somehow automatically generate online momentum. In contrast, just as it did for Obama, it took Brown months of tireless campaigning with little result (both on and offline) to create the inertia needed to generate $12 million in donations, over 100,000 Facebook supporters, over 10,000 people enrolled in our “Call from Home” program, over 215,000 email subscribers and 7,529 text message subscribers.
The Brown campaign invested early by immediately putting someone in charge of new media. Serious time and money was invested in online efforts even when results seemed few and far between. Many campaigns would have cut out this expense when it didn’t show immediate results. The Brown campaign knew better and the rest is history. Consider, on December 1st, 2.5 months after the campaign started, the campaign website had just 700 visitors. But by the first of January, that number had begun to grow to over 3,000 and would eventually reach nearly 180,000 unique visitors on Election Day. Massachusetts residents were by far the most likely to visit the website- over 261,000 unique visitors were from Brown’s home state.
They respected the "web guy” and didn't stick him in the basement.
From the beginning Rob Willington, the campaign’s new media director, was put in a position of leadership. He wasn’t relegated to a stuffy office in the corner of the campaign headquarters. Instead, he was consulted on key campaign decisions and allowed to lead campaign initiatives online.
They understood that social media is called SOCIAL media for a reason.
While the campaign of Attorney General Martha Coakley used Twitter (and actually posted more Tweets), they were far less likely to be interactive. Instead, Twitter was used to promote press releases and media hits. Brown, on the other hand, used replies and other tools to actually engage voters online. It led to far more Twitter followers and far more voters who felt they were being engaged in conversation vs. being talked at. The campaign's Twitter following was also key to spreading the buzz of the campaign nationally.
Content is King, and they created a lot of it.
In order to keep people engaged, the Brown campaign created regular content- specifically making good use of online video. Over 59 videos were used to supplement the messaging of the campaign. They were often issued quickly after an event or an embarrassing comment by Coakley, including one where AG Coakley said that the extent of her foreign policy experience was that “she had a sister who lives overseas.”
They understood their audience.
Many candidates want to use up a lot of real estate on their website to explain issue positions or show off press releases. The Brown campaign, however, understood that a campaign’s website is primarily visited by supporters and other friendly individuals. This principle was only magnified due to it being a Special Election with a shortened timeline. Therefore, the website design focused on interaction, highlighting web video front and center and dedicating the bottom half of the home page to a Twitter stream, links to social networking, and a plug to join the Brown Brigade, the campaign's Ning network. As the campaign progressed, so did the website design. The Brown campaign added a tell-a-friend feature to educate supporters on how to vote absentee, encouraged contributions, created a call from home program, provided information about local Brown offices for phone banking, and even initiated a first-ever Voter Bomb.
Although many factors contributed to the election of Scott Brown, the importance of online strategy and social media cannot be ignored. We are proud to have been a part of the team as both a web and phone vendor, and a part of such a historic election.
Rob Willington also contributed to this article.
But then every once in a while you get to see and do something historic.
I didn't know it when I built a website in October for Scott Brown, Republican candidate for US Senate in Massachusetts. In fact, I thought that perhaps I had as much chance of becoming US Senator in MA than Scott. Even though he was everything a candidate (and future US Senator) should be, this was Massachusetts. Only 11% of the state is registered Republican.
But now the Scott Brown mania is literally overwhelming. I can honestly say that I have never been a part of a more exciting campaign. The volunteer centers are packed with MA residents waiting in line to make calls. The Brown campaign can't print yard signs fast enough to hand them out. As a result, so many people have made their own signs that a local news station actually did a story on people going to Kinko's and other office stores to do it.
And as for our world, we've helped Brown raise millions online and have opened up envelopes with letters from old ladies with $5 bills in them. I'm so overwhelmed by how Brown has captured the imagination of normal MA residents and inspired them to put one of their own in office.
We've also helped the campaign by bringing in 210 VOIP phones for volunteers to make calls from. I'll post some pictures later, but it's about as wild as I could ever have imagined.
But most importantly, victory is in the air. We are going to win this thing. We are going to put a Republican in office in Massachusetts. Not a liberal Maine Republican either... an honest to goodness regular guy who has the common sense to help lead our country.
Count me reminded why I started doing this stuff 10 years ago.
The Republican Party of Virginia is a client. My company, in partnership with Victory Solutions, provided VOIP phones for 9 of the Victory Centers in VA. We are going out next week to install 9 more. A little promo below:
While I'm out there, I hope to stop by and see my other VA clients- Rich Anderson (website, email), Tim Nank (website, email), Ed Scott (website), Jim LeMunyon (email), and Virginia HRCC (intranet).
End advertisement here.