To:

Secretary Clinton

 

From:

 

Teddy Goff

 

Date:

October 26, 2014

 

Re:

 Technology/digital priorities and status

 

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Dear Secretary Clinton,

 

Thank you for inviting me to deliver this memo. These pages are meant to provide current thinking on the technology and digital priorities of your campaign that may serve as a framework for assessing its performance, as well a status update on the planning and development process as I see it. PRIORITIES

 

The most important functions of your digital team in my estimation (and in this order) are:

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Raising lots of money;

 

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Creating and distributing excellent content, for both supportive and persuadable audiences, on social and paid media and in videos; and

 

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Recruiting, engaging, and organizing volunteers and prospective volunteers.

 

Many people have suggested that these are principally technology and analytic challenges. In my view, they are principally creative and tactical challenges, with technology and analytics required to provide efficiency and amplification. But the fact remains: a great piece of content has the ability to drive action or earn social virality even without tools to support it, whereas a great technology infrastructure has no ability to make bad content effective. My point, of course, is not to argue against innovation, but to urge you to prioritize the right kinds of innovation. It’s important to remember that the job of entrepreneurs is to look five or ten years into the future, predicting faraway consumer trends. Campaigns, on the other hand, exist for less than two years and earn precisely zero votes — and stand to lose many — for being out ahead of consumer preferences. Your task is not to disrupt the market, but to make it as easy (and, from the campaign’s standpoint, as useful) as possible for people to engage with you in the ways they already know and prefer. The question, then, becomes how to do that. I would suggest the following objectives for your technology and analytic product suite:

 

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Performance and stability: This is a relatively mundane but critical topic. You stand to raise more incremental money from building a high-performing website and email delivery tool — along with an airtight system of backups so that crashes, when they do occur (as they will), do not affect the user experience — than you would from virtually any attention-grabbing product you could develop.

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Quality of engagement: Digital tools and digital media obviously create profound new opportunities to engage ordinary people, disintermediated by reporters, major donors, etc. Everything you build should in some way serve to deepen and improve the relationships you build with those supporters and voters. Of note, this should apply to programmatic decisions

 

in addition to technology decisions; for example, the launch itself and subsequent major announcements and initiatives should be made as "digitally-first" as possible, with an eye toward engaging the grassroots rather than working exclusively through traditional channels.

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Ease of use: In 2012, Quick Donate raised an estimated incremental $115 million by reducing the barrier to donating to a single click. Evolutions since then, both in hardware (like improved iPhones and Android devices) and software (like changes to the YouTube and Facebook platforms), afford the ability to make donating and other actions (sharing content, signing up to volunteer, etc.) even easier, in many cases not even requiring a visit to your website.

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Optimization and personalization: Your campaign will have an unprecedented ability to deliver unique experiences to individual voters and improve those experiences based on data. This applies both to paid media — where, more than ever before, you should be able to serve persuadables with the exact message, cadence, and formats most likely to move them at the lowest cost — and to your core digital program, which should be able to provide an even higher degree of personalization and optimization.

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Cross-platform accessibility and compatibility: In 2012, we were relatively rudimentary in our ability to create mobile-friendly experiences and connect those experiences — and the data they generated — to the desktop and offline campaign. You should be able to make major advancements in this area, meaning not only that users whose mobile devices are their primary touchpoint into the campaign aren’t frustrated, but also that you’re able to take advantage of new categories of data, like real-time location information, to further improve your programs.

 

STATUS

 

I have been kept apprised of the work being done by Eric Schmidt’s group and others working directly and indirectly with your team. On the whole, I am comfortable with where we stand and confident in our roadmap to launch day and beyond. In summary:

 

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We have selected a team of developers, unaffiliated with Eric, to build the front-end of your website — a relatively simple process that does not need to have begun yet. These are former employees of mine in whom I have the highest confidence. They are apprised of what Eric is building but not dependent on it, having identified commercially available products for all mission-critical functions in the event Eric’s group is delayed or otherwise derailed.

 

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We have instructed Eric’s team to build the most important products in their portfolio — specifically, the back-end of the website, the ability to accept donations (along with associated features, most importantly the ability to store credit card information), and the ability to acquire email addresses — first. Given how much time remains between now and launch — and, again, the availability of alternative solutions — I believe there is effectively no chance that these core functionalities will not be in place in time for launch.

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Eric’s team is also developing products that are not, strictly speaking, critical for launch, but would be extremely useful to have as early in the cycle as possible. Chief among these is the system that consolidates data from disparate sources to allow you to develop more complete user profiles and therefore more effective programs. I shared the concern, voiced by many, that the initial scope for these products was overly ambitious and unrealistic; they have since been cut down to a much more manageable size, without sacrificing core functionalities. (Of note, many of the problems that stifled us in 2012 have since been tackled by private companies with whom we have relationships and whose tools we can license rather than attempt to replicate.) I am cautiously optimistic that the most important of these will be