Engage is proud to announce that we’re delivering this technology to campaigns, organizations, and causes of all sizes — right now.

For this weekend’s Republican Party of Virginia convention, supporters of Pete Snyder for Lt. Governor can connect to Facebook and see which of their friends are among the 13,600 registered convention delegates. We then email them reminders about the big convention this weekend and highlight specific friends to contact — through Facebook or any way they choose.

Targeted sharing is the ideal tool for when personal contact to the right target matters. Whether you’re trying to mobilize people for a campaign or get people to out to an event, there’s nothing more influential than personal outreach from a friend.

The best part? It works even if you don’t have a predefined list of contacts for your supporters to reach out to. Using social data, we apply predictive modeling to your supporters’ friend lists to figure out who is most likely to be persuaded by your message.

Engage is proud to be driving innovation in politics and advocacy where it’s needed most — technology and data science.

(We also happen to think this is pretty cool.)

Let’s talk about what targeted sharing can do for you. I’d love to chat.

To answer that question for non-profits, I teamed up with Obama for America’s Michael Slaby to produce “From Politics to Public Policy: How Campaign Lessons Can Amplify Your Work.” The paper was sponsored by the Joyce Foundation, a leading foundation based in Chicago.

We designed this infographic to visualize the national impact the Voting Information Project had in 2012. On Election Day more than 600 websites had embedded polling location tools. After Hurricane Sandy, the Voting Information Project partnered with Mobile Commons to send polling location information to more than 243,000 voters in the New York and New Jersey area. Our work with the Voting Information Project helped more than 25 million, nearly 1 in 5, voters in the United States and overseas find the correct information they needed to vote successfully.

As someone who’s admired Engage’s work for years now, I couldn’t be more excited to join the team.

By now, most public affairs and communications pros have come to rely on digital and social media as critical components in nearly everything they do. After a few years, it’s easy to get the feeling that it’s always been this way. Nothing could be further from the truth, and this is one of the biggest reasons that I love what I do.

Which leads us to a very good question: what do I do? Well, I’m glad you asked.

I help people find new ways to use digital to solve problems and make a big impact. These problems usually involve politics and policy, but not always. Having led digital strategy for high profile elected officials and large national advocacy organizations over the past decade I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of what works and even more of what doesn’t. I draw on this experience in developing innovative strategies for top advocacy organizations, Fortune 500 companies, and elected officials.

We’re only beginning to realize the potential of digital in advocacy and government, and the team here at Engage is constantly searching for that next breakthrough. Traditional mediums like mail and broadcast are evolving at best, and in some cases disappearing altogether. Deciding what message/medium/tactic is most effective in the midst of such rapid change takes a special team that mixes creative thinking with a commitment to data and analytics. This is where Engage shines.

Don’t believe me? Put us to the test. Email me and let’s talk about how Engage can help you win. At the very least, we’ll likely buy you lunch and send polite follow up emails.

And while most of us don’t have access to a full-time analytics staff, A/B testing is within reach for any organization of any size. In fact, the Obama campaign used Optimizely, a web-based A/B testing platform, that you can leverage for your organization for as little as $19 per month depending on your site traffic.

What is A/B Testing?

In reference to websites, an A/B test compares two variables of an element — color, text, or placement — to determine whether or not a change in that element improves a desired outcome.

Here’s a quick guide to get started with A/B testing on your site.

Get started

Once you’ve set up your Optimizely account, you’ll need to provide your web developer or vendor with a snippet of code that will allow you to make edits to your site from Optimizely. That’s the last you’ll need to deal with code for optimizely.

Determine what you want to optimize

The key to worthwhile optimization is having a measurable outcome (like a donation) and a clearly defined goal (more donations). For organizations that are new to A/B testing, increasing email capture and donations are two of the most attainable goals for A/B testing.

Outline your experiment

Now that you know what you want to improve, identify elements on your site that you can tweak to improve the response. For example, if you’re optimizing for email signups, you could test the submit button text. Does changing “submit” on the button to “join” increase your conversion rate? Do more people donate if the button is red or blue? In order to get actionable insights from your test, you should find apples to apples comparisons.

Good A/B Test

Red Button vs Blue Button.

This test will reveal any difference button color has on conversions.

Good A/B Test

“Join” vs “Submit”.

This test will reveal how changing the text on the submit button will affect signups.

Bad A/B Test

Red “Join” button vs Blue “submit button.

After this test, you won’t be able to isolate the source of any change in performance.

Implement and run your experiment

Using Optimizely’s editor, you can easily tweak design and textual elements on your site and get the experiment up and running. The more traffic your site gets, the more data you’ll receive, and the better your A/B test will perform. You want a statistically significant outcome to ensure that the change in outcome you’re seeing is actually the result of the change in design you made.

While Optimizely will let you run multiple variations, for organizations that might not see much web traffic, it’s best to conduct one test at a time to zero in on the best design for your page.

Avoid the Frankenstein Effect

You should always make sure you test every combination before settling on a final design change. Photo A may outperform Photo B and a red background may out perform a blue background, but you cannot assume that Photo A on a red background will outperform Photo A on a blue background or even Photo B on a red background. In short, test EVERYTHING.

Next Steps

Testing shouldn’t stop at your web design. Look for other opportunities to conduct focused, measurable A/B tests. This could include testing email subject lines or online ad creative.

By far the best synthesis and summary of the digital keys to the campaign’s success is Engage’s Inside the Cave. I’ve seldom read a briefing so artfully — and accessibly — capturing the critical success factors that turn innovative tools into successful outcomes. Although superbly presented as a case study in campaign organization and technology, its essential lessons go way beyond the mechanics of procuring donors, donations and votes. This is what investing to control your destiny looks like.

[...]

Until the actual “Obama for America” codebase is freely available (and this is the subject of intense debate), if you want a blueprint, map or resource for your own organization’s digital marketing aspirations, read, reread and then circulate Inside the Cave. It will provoke the internal conversation and debate your business likely needs.

Over 3,000 people have downloaded Inside the Cave. Download your copy now.

That’s why I made this simple PHP script that will allow you to easily and automatically create test Facebook accounts for your Facebook Applications to help speed up app development and quality assurance testing. Note: the account will only remain active for 1 hour.

For more information, please see the Facebook Official Documentation:

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/technical-guides/opengraph/publishing-with-app-token/

How to use

Easy Way

• Download Files
• Upload to a Server (PHP must be installed)
• Change includes/facebook.php APP_ID and APP_SECRET to your application’s

Slightly Less Easy Way

• Include Facebook.php in your script
• Initiate the Facebook class
• Call the get_test_account($name) function

For a more detailed explanation, please check out our GitHub account.

I hope this helps some people out. It’s very straight forward, but if you have any questions feel free to message me at nick@engagedc.com or open an issue on Github.

DemoFork on Github

OFA was, far and away, the most sophisticated political organization on the planet. And Republicans needed to learn from them. So we set about gathering insights, data, and anecdotes from hundreds of news articles, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and presentations. Our findings have been collected and organized into a single slide deck called Inside the Cave, which you can download here.

The Cave is what OFA called the windowless room that housed their analytics team. Like digital in 2008, analytics came of age in the 2012 campaign. OFA’s analytics team had 50 staffers. By comparison, the Romney-Ryan campaign had a data team of 4 people.

Veterans of OFA have been surprisingly forthcoming in providing details on how they leveraged the latest in technology and digital strategy to make their campaign as effective and efficient as possible.

In 2016, Republicans can’t afford to fight the battles of 2012. We have to look forward to the future and start preparing now.

Inside the Cave is required studying for anyone involved in electoral politics. Download it now.

We’ve had the privilege of designing and developing several applications that use technology to inform voters and increase their participation in our democracy. Tomorrow, we’re proud to be working with Foursquare for the second election running to visualize the impact of America voting in real time.

When you head to the polls tomorrow, look for your polling place on Foursquare, and check in to get your exclusive 2012 “I Voted” badge. Your check-in at a polling place will be added to the Election Day map at election.foursquare.com. There, we’ll be visualizing polling place activity in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as it happens.

Foursquare has also partnered with Google to produce the “I Voted” app. Connect the app to your Foursquare account, and you’ll get information about where to vote and what’s on the ballot auto-delivered to your phone when you check in.

A huge note of thanks goes out to a terrific team of partners for making the “I Voted” project possible — Foursquare, Google, the Voting Information Project, the Pew Center on the States, and the New Organizing Institute.

Read more about what Foursquare has in store for Election Day. Then, make a plan to vote by finding your polling place. And tomorrow, check in… and VOTE!

Anyway, this is a really quick and dirty code project I threw together as an example for anyone interested.  Essentially, it’s a small PHP library and starter kit for the Google Civic Information API that works and displays some basic information.  You can check out other elements in the response for your own use at Google’s Civic Information API page.  Also provided is a working example and demonstration.

You can view the demo here, and fork the source here on GitHub.

Elections are coming in less than a week! If you don’t have the time to build your own polling locator or use this API, you could always just embed Google’s own Voter Information Tool on your site.

Working Demo and the source on GitHub