Lessons on community organizing from the Barack Obama Campaign

The March 2009 issue of Fast Company magazine has a great article titled, How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign. It is the untold story of how Chris Hughes, today only 25 years old, helped create two of the most successful start-ups in modern history, Facebook and My.BarackObama.com.

The article is a great story of how online communities can make a difference in your organization or company. It is a clear explanation of how Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign are both dedicated to the proposition that communities and the way we share and interact within them are vitally important.

The online community platform was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short. It allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another. MyBO also let the campaign reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages. Wow!

Here are some of the key points about community building that I pulled out from the article:

• Improving life digitally – At Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign, Huges was just, “Helping real people do what they want to do in their real lives.” In the case of the election, people wanted to be involved and help to make the change, they just did not know how. Barackobama.com and MyBO.com allowed them to connect virtually and in person. It provided them the tools to get involved and organize new communities.
• Make the organization all about the community – The rules were set from the top down. Obama was clear that he wanted the theme of his campaign to be about the community and wanted a nation of organizers. Having the online platform and tools was a critical piece to making this happen and supporting the rapidly growing community.
• Online communities are about being ahead of the game – When the campaign needed to turn to the community, they were already there. When heading to caucuses in Colorado and Missouri, they were surprised to see that the community was already half-organized. The online tools provided the support they needed to organize and prepare. They just had to be there to support the community (see above).
• Build around a commonality – Whether it’s a company or a campaign, you must build around a commonality. It’s only valuable if its real people and real communities, otherwise its just playing around online. In the campaign the commonality was Obama.
• Creating a new position in the organization – When you community grows as large and fast as BarackObama.com/MyBO.com operations also grows. Hughes put a new position on the campaign organization chart – New Media. MyBO became only one of their activities under this umbrella. They were also part film studio, part media outlet, part design shop, part analytical geek squad.
• People need structure. When creating an online community or holding a conference call or meeting, create an organized structure or plan for everyone to follow.

Hughes biggest lesson of the campaign: Trusting a community can produce dramatic and unexpected results. Click here to read the full article.

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