I'm a political junkie. I'm also as you know a CRM pundit and a technology/gadget freak. All in all, a well balanced collection of damaged neurons and synapses. As a result, I'm doing some preliminary work on the fundraising that's gone on around the primaries and Campaign 2008 which satisfies my political addiction, my technology lust, and my CRM-trend-watching voodoo rites.
I'll leave the story on political junkiehood to another time and place and git doooown. Like you're really interested in it...
Let's take a look at how Hillary Clinton raises funds, Barack Obama raised funds and Mitt Romney brought home the turkey bacon (health conscious).
|
Campaign |
Total $$$ |
# of Donors |
Avg. per donor |
%Maxed donors |
Poll % |
|
Clinton |
$26,000,000 |
50,000 |
$520.00 |
74% |
32% (Dem) |
|
Obama |
$25,000,000 |
100,000 |
$250.00 |
49% |
30% (Dem) |
|
Romney |
$21,000,000 |
30,000+ |
$700.00 |
48% |
11% (Repub) |
To interpret this in my fevered minds fashion, please play this tune and you'll get an idea of what I'm thinking....
What is clear (sort of) is the following:
Clinton Campaign
This is "old school" and by no means taps into the social networks and communities that are at this point at the center of the political version (not the government version) of constituent relationship management. While its kind of amazing and wonderful that a female candidate for President is now the "machine candidate" for the Democratic Party, at the same time, her approach is reflective of a woeful ignorance of what's going around her - not unlike many of the large corporate entities that are trying to ignore the winds of the empowered customer. What's notable about this particular campaign is what's NOT going on. The donors are the machine (Pink Floyd refrains should be echoing here). The average donation is $520 and 74% of all donors are maxed out, it's easy to see that this has a "shoot your wad" feel about it, rather than momentum. Interestingly, its never the money here. If you remember correctly, the political commentators saw Barack Obama's fundraising success for its momentum, not its dollar amount - though that was undeniably eyebrow arching too. In fact, they made a point of saying that Hillary was no longer a lock and the poll numbers above (as of April 16) make that clear. Barack Obama is closing the gap because he has the boosted perception due to the social networks that he's engaged. Traditional approaches, given the prosumer driven empowerment that the web 2.0 world engenders are dangerous now - especially in something as volatile as a political campaign. Entrenched politicians and traditionally focused companies - beware and be wary of not being willing to engage your constituents at the levels that they want to be engaged - or you'll have Hillary-like unexpected difficulties.
Its possible for her to recover certainly. Machine politics and hide-bound traditional means aren't dead; they're just damaged badly. Some adjustment...who knows? Engage the constituents.Engage the constituents. Engage the constituents. There are lessons of CRM 2.0 thinking that are indisputable no matter what "vertical" you carry them into.
Obama Campaign
Take it too the grassroots, engage the constituents, make them partners and BOOM!!! You have as Arlo Guthrie called it, a Moooov-MENT! The approach he takes is simple. Tap into the empowered human being a.k.a. business consumer, prosumer, person. He does it with MyBarackObama.com as one of his key tools. its social networking, community based, and viral activity at its best. Here's a couple of screens to look at.
This is smart stuff. Really smart. His community raised money and drove momentum by engaging itself in the activities and having the tools available to make it a seductive process. Look at these screens. I mean, LOOK AT THESE SCREENS! They are chock full of what you need to engage the most passionate advocates of your cause or company to do what has to be done to engage more advocates. The byproducts are 100,000 people giving $25,000,000 to an inexperienced but incredibly attuned political leader. Moved him from a freshman Senator to a phenomenon.
The question for him remains can the social networks he's engaging and his intelligence overcome the more traditional machines? That's always proven hard. One thing that businesses do as poorly as most political campaigns is to institutionalize the great momentum and drive they create. They let the tsunami wash over them rather than capture and direct the energy that has been achieved.When it is institutionalized, the power is incredible. Look at Skype. Its not the 300 million downloads that occurred virally - it was the 54 million customers who used it and the continuous desire by the Skype-meisters who owned the company pre- Ebay (Prebay?) to feed and capture the requirements of the customers and meet them that made them a $2.6 billion sale to Ebay on $11 million in revenue in 2005. Meaning there were repeatable capabilities for providing the tools to the users that allowed them to utilize what they needed to remain advocates, rather than be a one time download.
While Hillary's anointment has been slammed to the mat - at least for now, Barack Obama has a chance to pin her - but that ain't guaranteed. He won't if he just gets caught up in the coolness of the moment and the movement. While TOTALLY cool, it needs to be captured and fed, not just going.
Romney Campaign
This may, in its own right, be the most interesting of all - though probably the shortest term. But there are major lessons for those of us interested in constituent relationship management in the political world and at least some real proofs of short term success.
Look at his numbers. On the one hand, he has the least maxed out donors of the three candidates. Romney has seen his momentum with the $21 million raised this quarter take him from 8% to 12% and back down to 11% in four weeks. The low maxed out numbers are a little deceptive in that he has the highest per donor contribution so there is a lot shorter path to tread to get to maxed out than Barack Obama has per donor. But his success and his higher donor amount indicate a couple of things that I would take note of if I were you - but, of course, I'm not so do whatever you want. Here's the slightly weird sounding but totally sensible combination that I'm talking about here, people.
The formula is LDS+SFDC=$21,000,000/30,000
Church of Latter Day Saints a.k.a. LDS
Romney is a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints a.k.a. LDS a.k.a. the Mormons. His daddy George was a governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate in 1968, chairman of American Motors and very, very wealthy. Thing is, what many might not know is that the Mormons are a long established almost 1.0 tight knit social network that has the benefit of a long history and deep peer ties from Mormon to Mormon.
Think that's irrelevant? Nope.
First, take a read of this article in the Guardian on the Romney/Mormon fundraising activities. Combine a zipcode with heavy Mormon penetration and money poured from those area's open spigots into Romney's buckets. In fact, the Guardian notes that Romney, in Provo Utah zips got TEN TIMES what Bush got when it came to dollars.
Here's an anecdote that illustrates the point.
Years ago, for reasons long ago and far away, I had the opportunity and need to hook up with the LDS folks. One day, I was meeting with a Mormon bishop, who like many other Mormon leaders was incredibly well placed and highly successful in business. This guy was an attorney at a law firm so big they organized continents along the lines of the CIA with "desks." This guy headed up the Latin America "desk" and thus all operations for Latin America for the law firm. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned to this bishop two unrelated matters - one business/political that required me to find a very significant financial services skillset and another personal that involved a medical situation.
About 30 minutes into the conversation and after I had mentioned both things, he asked me to wait a minute and left the room. He came back about 15 minutes later or so, and had with him two names, phone numbers and addresses. One was for a pretty famous financial services guy and the other for a very prominent and best in class physician. He told me to call both and they were already briefed and expecting my call. I thanked him, kind of stunned really, and that was that. I called, they responded and the things I needed were done. Just like that.
Point is, that he had access through that well established social network to leaders in fields that had nothing in common with him except that they were Mormons. He decided he liked me (oh, I blush) and he then went ahead and "tapped" the social networks - just like Romney did to raise money.
But what Romney did and what I haven't seen in evidence with Barack Obama, though he may have, is to operationalize the penetration. To do that he used salesforce.com's Campaignforce.
Salesforce.com a.k.a. SFDC (I know they don't like that, but anything to make the formula work)
If you remember, a few weeks ago (late March) I did a piece on the Politics Online conference and salesforce's then early beta Campaignforce. Well, about a week ago, they released a late beta of Campaignforce that is pretty damned robust and well-filled out. It focuses on donor management and events planning and a well oiled version of pipeline management among other things. For features and functions and a generally good article, read Erika Morphy's take on it in CRMBuyer on April 10.
You can't underestimate the value of this to CoMITT (so clever...) - the organization of the Romney campaign. They customized the service in partnership with a company I never heard of called Theikos, who apparently did a good job. It gave the Romney campaign the means to institutionalize and direct the fundraising efforts and can be seen as one of the positive reasons they have such a high per donor contribution and a low max out rate at the same time. It can't be ignored in fact, that this kind of tool, which at this point, only salesforce.com is providing, genuinely works and has a clear, identifiable, if not measurable (though maybe it is. I just don't know) benefit.
It also reflects salesforce.com's interest in verticalizing its offerings and their savvy in understanding that there is a clear difference between operational CRM in politics and operational CRM in the government agencies. So, you go, salesforce.com
If you want to read their April 18 press release (which I'm quoted in so read it, dammit), here's the link.
Romney's campaign isn't necessarily headed to the final four, much less the big show. But so far, they've been the best organized and smartest about not just tapping into established social networks, but focusing that effort and capturing what they need to know to get results. Smart stuff. Which is not something I ever thought I'd say about this campaign.
Pulling It All Together: Republicans + Democrats + CRM 1.5 + CRM 2.0
Okay, so what does this all have to do with business and CRM?
Same principles for different purpose.
I've spent the last few years saying that CRM is the attempt to take the art of life and create a science of business from it. That holds here totally. Ultimately what we're seeing with the results of the three campaigns to date is the incredible luminescence of the empowered constituent/customers. When campaigns (or businesses) both understand that and are willing to cede control to the community and then work with (collaborate for the buzz word) the community to generate results. You get them. You don't get slammed to the mat unless you decide to make like this community of humans who are able to communicate instantaneously and productively don't exist.
But they do. The lesson for business and the lesson for political institutions is the same. Listen to the social customer and they'll love you for it. But don't ignore them and don't cross them.
Do I think what I just wrote is scientifically valid primary research?
Nah.
But think about it. You don't have to be a political junkie to find it interesting or draw lessons from it....or am I hallucinating.
Just a great piece Paul. Am going to send it to Ireland's Political Bloggeratti!
Posted by: Paul Sweeney | April 23, 2007 at 11:04 AM
Hey Paul,
I also read about the MySpace impact of certain presidential candidates, Barack has more than 900k friends as of April 11 on his MySpace acount. John Edwards is a distance 2nd with 17,807.
This will be an extremely "digital" election since 25% of voters get their infomation on candidates from the internet. Talk about empowerment....how about NetPowerment in all facets of their lives.
Power to the People empowered by the web.....Power to the Customer empowered by the web!
Mikee
Posted by: Michael W. Thomas | April 22, 2007 at 10:37 AM