Rebuild the Party: Hard Metrics for Campaigns and State Parties

The new RNC team deserves an enormous amount of credit for open-sourcing its online strategy, starting with the RNC Tech Summit on Friday and now with brainstorming groups in six specific areas. I encourage you to visit the Ning site to contribute your ideas. Here's something I just posted in the Victory/Campaigns group. 

A big part of the Rebuild the Party plan as it relates to the Victory program and campaigns is the idea of applying hard metrics for new media to local campaigns. Specifically, the plan calls for:

• 5,000 in-district online activists (defined as people who signed up on your website throughout the course of the campaign, or gave their e-mail address to a volunteer) and $100,000 raised online per targeted Congressional campaign.
• 7,500 in-district online activists and $150,000 raised online per Congressional district in targeted Senate races (we make the assumption that it's easier to recruit for high-visibility statewide races).

With guys like Cyrus and Saul at the helm, we can be pretty confident that the RNC will "get it." Right now, I am less confident that consultants at the state and local level -- who are usually themselves at least 10 years removed from their formative campaign and thus working off yesterday's technology -- will "get it." Many of these consultants have never known a media mix that isn't 80% TV, or are path-dependent on mail and phones. To the extent they engage online, it's in hiring a low-level blogger to handle the Internets for them -- and paying zero attention to it themselves.

It's all well and good to suggest we'll simply train these folks. In many ways, there are financial incentives against "getting it" -- namely hefty commissions for TV and mail. It won't be as easy as just explaining the benefits of new media. We face powerful obstacles to change.

Instead, we need to rely on a carrot and stick approach. Yes, train the operatives at the local level -- especially the staff who are younger and more willing to change. But also impose hard metrics on new media recruitment the same way we already do for offline volunteer recruitment, doors knocked on, and volunteer calls made.

When I was at the RNC, these goals -- all part of the 72 Hour Program -- were a BIG deal. For targeted campaigns, these metrics for offline political activity were tracked religiously, so that laggards could be taken to task and high-performers singled out for praise. We need to take online metrics as seriously, especially since web signups are the most fruitful source of campaign volunteers and ground game activity.

In fact, the 72 Hour ground game focus was first institutionalized not because everyone thought it would be a great idea -- there are consultants who resisted it and resist it still because grassroots activity is not commissionable in the same way mail and TV is. It was institutionalized because the RNC said you had to do it, and created consequences for those campaigns and states that didn't (including a loss of support).

Right now, many traditional consultants are being told they have to get new media, but without the hard accountability metrics to back it up, there is little incentive for them to engage it in a substantive way beyond, "Quick! Let's get a Twitter account!"

Three quick points to close this out:

• First, we need to be very specific about what we mean by these goals. 5,000 e-mail addresses is very easy to get if you simply buy names or enter into a list exchange agreement with the RNC, the state party, or other group. We need to be clear that we mean organic online (or volunteer) signups ONLY. Campaigns may already have access to these other lists (though buying new lists should be a no-no) and can recruit off of them, but they shouldn't count towards the goal.
• With hard goals it's incumbent on the RNC to share best practices on organic list acquisition, including sharing conversion data on specific landing page designs, best practices for e-mail collection out in the field, and developing a list of techniques campaigns can use to grow their lists (e.g. petitions, polls & surveys, pledges of support, etc.)
• It's possible these goals can be modified district per district. For instance, a senior-heavy district might only have to recruit 4,300 online activists while a suburban tech-heavy area might have to recruit 5,700.

How else should we be holding campaigns accountable?