Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform

http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/

by kylerush • 14 years ago

335 158 14 years ago

kylerush.net

ckluis• 14 years ago

Simplifying the donation form seems like such a big, duh, but glad to see it was tested.

Great results (speaking from the management/tech side)

benbunk• 14 years ago

How many pages is Jekyll serving?

kylerush11• 14 years ago

We had roughly 500 donation pages generated by Jekyll.

ccarpenterg2• 14 years ago

This is a very good example of UI optimization: http://cdn.kylerush.org/kr/images/contribute-before-after-sc...

justjimmy3• 14 years ago

Would love to know more about the reasoning and discussion behind going from a 1 page process to 4 steps. (ie: The typical purchasing mindset vs. donation mind set)

kylerush11• 14 years ago

Thanks for the interest! I am planning to write another blog post on all the UI optimization soon.

kevinconroy2• 14 years ago

If it's anything like the non-profit space, the multipage checkout, if done right, can allow you to psychologically hook the donor in and yield higher completion rates. (Clicking a donation option is much lower commitment than typing your name and address as a starting point.) It also allows you vary the checkout steps based on what the donor selects. You can then treat a $10 differently than a $500 donor to optimize conversion rates for each cohort.

ericcholis• 14 years ago

I've approached this problem myself for an ecommerce platform. In certain use-cases, less pages/steps doesn't always mean more conversions.

For this instance, the large photo background of Obama in action evokes more emotion than the formal portrait. Also, it's a very simple and clear call to action. In this case, the donation amounts are their add to cart.

It's also very important to understand how users got to the donation page. From the article, it would appear that most of the "sell" was done via other media (social, email, traditional links). After their A/B tests, I could assume that they are leaving the sell of "why" up to the users. This allows the designers to focus on conversions.

Lastly, the four steps aren't traditional "checkout" steps. Each step focuses on very specific information, eliminating clutter and keeping the user's attention. Too many elements on one page can be a bad thing.

untog• 14 years ago

The rationale I've heard before is that people are put off my large forms because they see the amount of information they're going to have to input.

If you split it up it looks like less, and by the time the user realises that step 3 has 10 fields they've already progressed through two pages and feel "invested".

ihodes• 14 years ago

Four steps is better for all sorts of purchases. Each bit of informations entered is a bit of effort invested in the process, making each additional step more difficult to quit (sunk costs). Making the first steps easier (and, especially, putting the payment info at the end) means the user is eased into the process. People also like seeing progress, hence the 1-2-3-4 thing (though that can also be daunting; seeing that there are many more steps to go: test this). Of course, while I think this is solid general advice, test/whatever for your own situation.

Big forms are scary. No one likes forms.

ccarpenterg2• 14 years ago

In the first UI the users are overwhelmed with all the information they have to fill out in order to make the donation. In the final UI the process has 4 steps.

webbruce• 14 years ago

It's all about heavily reducing a users options and guiding them

vbl• 14 years ago

I can't speak for them, but we do know that big forms are intimidating and tend to induce the feeling of, "Ugh, I don't have time for this now."

Even though there are technically more steps, they are unambiguous, digestible and feature a clear sense of progression. User usually don't mind multiple steps as long as they make sense within the context of the goal at hand.

dccoolgai• 14 years ago

First of all, congratulations and thank you for doing the work you did to re-elect the president. Your write-up there is really interesting. I have a couple questions:

1. According to FEC reports, Blue State Digital made millions of dollars working with OFA... With that in mind, why is it that the campaign tech team had to build the redundant donation API? You would think for millions of dollars BSD probably should handle that, no? I only ask because in all the post-election stories a big theme is the "we decided to do it in house"...which makes sense...but begs the question - If you were "doing it all in house" then why was this third party vendor making so much bank?

2. Since we have you here on HN, can you tell us (very generally) what you and the other OFA Chicago Digital/Tech/Analytics people are going to be doing now? Going back into politics? Forming political/non-political startups?

ceejayoz8• 14 years ago

Re: #1, there was a lot more involved to the OFA web presence than just the contribute.barackobama.com pages.

jdotp3• 14 years ago

Blue State had multiple roles on the campaign, not just processing payments.

Many of us are joining startups, some are starting startups, and others are yet to decide.

alvaromuir• 14 years ago

Congrats on amazing work.

luigi2• 14 years ago

Can you describe how you set Akamai to host the site? I'm familiar with using S3 to host a static site, and using a CDN to host assets, but it's not clear to me how a CDN can be set to host a full static site. Did contribute.barackobama.com just mirror something like contribute-s3.barackobama.com?

And why Akamai and not Amazon Cloudfront?

kylerush11• 14 years ago

Our Devops team configured Akamai so they would have specifics for you (@scottvdp).

With most CDNs you have what's called a pull zone that points to your origin server on a different domain. So when the user requests something like cdndomain.com/whateverpage the CDN looks for the file at pullzonedomain.com/whateverpage and then it serves what it gets back from the pull zone.

Akamai has more advanced configuration options than Amazon Cloudfront. One example of this is that our payment processors did not actually live on contribute.barackobama.com, only the static files did. So we used Akamai to setup a reverse proxy to POST the donations to a different domain. Without this reverse proxy it wouldn't have been possible because the same origin policy forbids cross domain, client-side POST requests.

jdotp3• 14 years ago

Akamai GTM is the feature you are asking about.

harper2• 14 years ago

In regards to Akamai and not Cloudfront - Akamai had a different offering than cloudfront. JdotP mentioned in this thread that we used Akamai GTM, it allowed us to do a lot of fun failover management which cloudfront didn't offer. It also allowed for SSL.

delano• 14 years ago

It's pretty cool that Jekyll played a role in the campaign.

brown9-22• 14 years ago

This is fascinating, thank you for the writeup.

I have a question about the donation API though, I feel like I am missing something:

We settled on a very simple solution of turning the hosted platform into a REST API. The only big change was adding JSON as an output option instead of HTML... We consumed the newly created donation API using JavaScript on static HTML pages which were served by our CDN (Akamai).

What operations did this API handle? Were donation submissions being sent from the user's browser to this API?

By the way, I think there might be a bug with your PJAX code on kylerush.net - when you click links to other parts of the site or to read other articles, the page title displayed in the browser stays as the initial title from the initial HTTP request.

kylerush11• 14 years ago

The API was quite simple. Essentially it just processed a donation. It had some other functions to it that involved saving a users payment information to their account as well.

Yes, the donation submission was an POST request executed with JavaScript (AJAX) from the user's browser.

Thanks for noticing the bug! I'll have to check that out.

patio112• 14 years ago

Friendly advice: your rate just got another zero or two added to it. (This goes to anyone who can write a similar case study, too.)

Radim• 14 years ago

Uhm, what did I miss, what is his rate now?

seiji• 14 years ago

You didn't miss anything. Some people just enjoy injecting their pet causes into threads kinda irrelevantly.

bhousel• 14 years ago

That was kind of condescending, wasn't it?

tptacek• 14 years ago

If you're looking for ways to make things sound condescending, you'll reliably find them. Even in comments that say "you're awesome, don't forget to raise your rates".

ssharp• 14 years ago

It's condescending for an authority on digital marketing consulting to think your portfolio and talent is enough warrant charging 10 to 100 times more? I think it came off more respectful than arrogant.

tomkin4• 14 years ago

I see a lot of concern for integration with API, hosting, etc. but what I don't see is disgust. Disgust because to become president of the US, you must participate in this monumental financial circus of who spends what. Is this what people want? To know the best candidate will need to raise over a billion dollars to compete? Campaign costs should be in line with needs. Remember when Color got $40 mil for doing basically what other startups manage to do with a couple thousand dollars? Why would HN readers champion this kind of spending? The reasons are probably in line with the SuperPAC reasoning, which is "in order to change the game, you must play within the game's rules". Sure. But when do you say enough is enough? In Canada, our candidates spend on their campaign, but dollar-for-dollar, they are getting more done with less money. Somehow.

alevans4• 14 years ago

It seems to me that disappointment in the current state of campaign finance reform and interest in how a campaign dealt with the current reality are not mutually exclusive.

brown9-22• 14 years ago

Not to defend the current campaign status quo, but when comparing the US to Canada it is worth pointing out the population of the US is ten times that of Canada.

tomkin4• 14 years ago

True, but my problem is that democracy is supposed to be about everyone, and when you start eliminating people based on their propensity to generate millions of dollars you eliminate a lot of potentially great leaders.

unreal37• 14 years ago

The US 2012 election is expected to have cost over $6 billion when all is said and done.[1] Canada's election cost $45 million.[2] The difference is 90% less per captia. Americans spend a lot more proportionally.

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/10/2012-election-spendi... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in_...

crikli• 14 years ago

Or you could view this as a fascinating case study regardless of all that. I'm personally horrified that Obama got re-elected but this post is cool as hell and I'm absolutely fascinated by this work and appreciate that Kyle took a few hours to compose all of this and share it.

tomkin4• 14 years ago

Kyle and the team who worked on the campaign are awesome. And if I could have voted for Obama, I would have. My criticism isn't to do with any specific person. The campaign spending just seems out of line with other countries.

ceejayoz8• 14 years ago

I just like to consider it a stimulus package that comes once every four years, paid for privately by America's wealthier residents.

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

During the campaign some TV news person tweeted something like 'A billion dollars in contributions, but where does it all go?'.

I replied, 'To pay the salaries of you and your colleagues.'

It's the circle of life.

ISL• 14 years ago

A solution is to try to find ways to change the game.

An independent-reasoning educated populace is one way to fortify against manipulation.

Reply written in the NYC Public Library reading room. This inscription is out front:

"The City of New York has erected this building to be maintained forever as a free library for the use of the people. On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27954/27954-h/27954-h.htm

charleshaanel• 14 years ago

Wow +1000 on this if I could.....

gyardley• 14 years ago

Although Canada has been blessed with a twenty-year streak of good federal governance, I wouldn't say Canadian politicians get more done with their campaign spending.

I would say that their spending is strictly capped at the national and local level by Elections Canada, which means the major political parties simply aren't allowed to get into an advertising arms race. Without the caps - who knows?

Practical, but that sort of tight restriction on free speech is a very, very hard sell down here.

tomkin4• 14 years ago

For me, being a citizen and being able to become president under fair rules is important. The whole idea of democracy is that you get to elect a leader and that leader could even be you. You might be a good leader - the best even, but it won't mean a whole lot of you can't generate 1 billion in campaign contributions. Something about that doesn't seem right. Plutocracy is more appropriate - and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way. Sincerely. How is it democratic that a smart, progressive, informed person can't run against someone less informed?

sneak• 14 years ago

Canada only has 35 million people. That's fewer than California.

gdubs2• 14 years ago

This misses a key point, which is that the Obama campaign relied heavily on small donations from _individuals_ in contrast with the heavily superpac funded Romney campaign which pulled from a small set of extremely wealthy donors (admittedly conjecture based on being an avid political news junkie). So, we're talking about crowd-sourcing a president; this is an encouraging direction, even if one finds the overall amount spent to be distressing.

gjs278• 14 years ago

Obama had the same superpac corporate support that Romney did. The whole emails asking people to donate $3-$5 was to bring his average donation rate down.

tterrace• 14 years ago

Kyle, great post. You said the final donation was made via an XHR POST, did you guys have a plan B for users without JavaScript or were the numbers small enough to ignore?

kylerush11• 14 years ago

Yes. It was very simple. We just put the URL to the vendor hosted platform's POST endpoint in the donation form's action attribute so that if you didn't have JavaScript the form would POST like a normal form.

clarky073• 14 years ago

At the risk of sounding like a troll, honest question here. Why wasn't the CVV part of this page? Seems like a lot of headaches and bad press could have been avoiding by just actually including it (and you know, less fraudulent donations).

Great work by the way with the optimizations. As patio11 noted, add a 0 or two to your rate and point people to this blog post.

ceejayoz8• 14 years ago

> Why wasn't the CVV part of this page?

Checking CVV isn't required, but may result in a higher transaction fee for the merchant. The campaign likely made a choice of "fewer fields = better conversion".

clarky073• 14 years ago

It's 100% certain that it would be less conversion. It's also nearly certain that they were accepting illegal foreign donations. In this case, conversion probably shouldn't be the deciding factor... (Note I'm sure the OP had 0 say in this, just wondering if there is an explanation other than better conversions)

EDIT: To the downvotes, see my comment below http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4843963

This isn't just about Obama, it's about all of the campaigns. Obama was just the most visible and highest raising, with a higher likelihood of attracting foreign money. It's also not just the CVV, but many many things that aren't being done (that aren't required yet but should be).

gideon_b2• 14 years ago

I love this: the $1.1B Obama campaign uses nearly the same stack as my single page personal website.

joering22• 14 years ago

Thanks for the write-up.

Too bad that there were no checks in place to determine who is actually contributing. For that reason, many non-citizens were able to contribute, some from questionable places, and even Osama ibn Laden had posthumously donated, receiving congratulation later from Barrack's wife thanking him for his donation [1].

Since Romney was rejecting contributions that could not be confirmed as of where they came from, this race in terms of fund-rising was skewed from a get-go. Imagine a marathon where everyone runs on their feet and you -- against the rules -- are using a bicycle. Guess who's gonna win?

[1] http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obama-accepts-osama-bin-laden-don...

For those who hate googling:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10...

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/10/08/exposin...

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=76534...

ceejayoz8• 14 years ago

Nothing in those articles reliably supports (i.e. beyond a couple individual anecdotes) the contention that a) the Obama campaign had "no checks" or b) that Romney was rejecting unconfirmable contributions.

joering22• 14 years ago

hello there, google hater!

how about this one? http://joshuapundit.blogspot.com/2012/10/obama-campaign-bust...

gideon_b2• 14 years ago

The IP address and name are irrelevant. Should US citizens living in Pakistan be disallowed from making campaign contributions because they have arab sounding names?

The only thing that matters is whether the donations come from a US credit card. As far as I can tell all of these farcical contributions came from US credit cards.

enraged_camel• 14 years ago

Why does it not surprise me that someone who coded a newsletter for Drudge Report - a conservative cesspit of a website - is sounding like such a sore loser? Hmm.

(All the websites you linked have a similar conservative slant. I mean, the Washington Post? Seriously? Some people have no shame.)

king_jester2• 14 years ago

> Too bad that there were no checks in place to determine who is actually contributing.

Why is this bad, exactly? Political leaders in the US undertake actions and policies that can affect the entire world, esp. in regards to military action, so why wouldn't some people abroad want to donate to a campaign? Also, given that there are several million non-citizen residents of the US, they deserve just as much input into the political process of the society they are a part of.

glomph• 14 years ago

Its bad if the law states that it isn't allowed and the other candidates are following this law.

eisa01• 14 years ago

As a US citizen living abroad I had to provide a scan of my passport before they accepted my donation.

I'm sure you can donate money if your intent on bypassing all the checks, but that's negligible in the grand scheme.

rynop• 14 years ago

How much did the infrastructure cost - roughly? I know your not gonna give it to me, but breakdown of CDN vs AWS costs would be sweet to know.

trotsky2• 14 years ago

When running numbers like the A/B conversion improvements, how do you model or isolate external factors like "conversion rates increase as election draws closer". Is it correct to assume that no one is willing to continue to run original, unoptimized pages for some percent of visitors as a baseline?

patio112• 14 years ago

Within any one particular A/B test, the changes in the true propensity to convert over time don't matter, since you're randomly apportioning folks into the alternatives, such that the only difference in the samples is whether they're exposed to A or B. Over the course of an A/B testing regimen, this doesn't apply, and you should be skeptical of results reported like "CR went from 10% to 15%", but a string of winning A/B tests is virtually statistically certain to be driving true wins and clients love hearing the change-over-time thing, so even if you're getting a tailwind from the environment one tends to report the numbers anyhow.

It is a poor allocation of resources for most clients to continue to run original, unoptimized pages just to be able to satisfy one's curiosity as to what portion of an improvement observed over, say, 6 ~ 24 months is due to one's own effort and what portion is extrinsic to the business. There's both a direct financial cost to maintaining old code branches and a regret cost of not giving them the best you're capable of serving. Round numbers: to add one sentence of clarification to this blog post, Team Obama would have had to give up ~$5 million in donations.

trotsky2• 14 years ago

I suppose it is a fair thing to say that when listing the sins of marketing, reporting accurate increases in metrics that one cannot be sure they are responsible for would appear rather low on the page.

sakri• 14 years ago

Kyle is right up there with whoever filmed the 47% video. Thanks!

jdotp3• 14 years ago

Yeah, that dude is amazing. :) Come hang out with me Kyle. :)

kylerush11• 14 years ago

You tell me when and I'll be there:)

tonetheman• 14 years ago

Cool stuff

akamaka• 14 years ago

Thanks for posting this fantastic write-up! I'm looking forward to reading more.

Does anyone know if other team members from the campaign have publicly discussed how other aspects of the online campaign worked? (Such as analytics, ads, CRM, social media, etc)

luigi2• 14 years ago

This Quora board has been compiling all the articles and interviews with members of the Obama tech team:

http://www.quora.com/obamatech

iblaine• 14 years ago

Who do you have to know to go from CSU Fullerton to a job like that? Wow.

zaidf• 14 years ago

The wrong lesson from this would be to immediately try and get your sites' performance to similar numbers. But what isn't explicitly stated in this post is that at the root of it, these guys first figured out which metrics matter for their goals. Only then did the optimization pay back. In their case, a few seconds can make decent impact because of volume. Someone with 100 uniques/day may have a better metric than load time to optimize.

kevinconroy2• 14 years ago

Completely agree.

There are always a thousand things that you can prematurely optimize (page load time, HTML, conversions, etc). The trick is figuring out what the highest ROI thing is for you to optimize right now given your specific point in time. If you get 100 visits/day set metrics around sign up, retention, or whatever is going to build you up to 1K/day. Then figure out how to get to 10K/day, and so on.

scottmcleod• 14 years ago

Thanks for the writeup

danso• 14 years ago

Wow, all of that with Jekyll as the CMS generator. I've been using Jekyll to generate static sites and have been proud that mass traffic rushes don't bring them down...but I haven't used it for anything that generates real revenue

nckbz• 14 years ago

Very nice write up! :) It's really nice to see A/B testing promoted, as well as, a case for static sites integrated with web services. Those are the types of technologies I'm really looking forward to seeing grow in our industry.

mldriggs• 14 years ago

So what're you doing now that the campaign is over?!? :)

faisalchohan• 14 years ago

I do not agree to it. Has any one seen the Obama campaign spending on software and infrastructure. They spend half a million dollar on Microsoft software (the highest spending), and then all the highlights of the campaign are coming from Open source software.

What was the benefit of spending on Microsoft software. Why it is always that money is spent on Microsoft and benefits are highlighted of using open source software.

stupandaus• 14 years ago

Reading this write-up after having read Nate Silver's post[1] today on how the Republican party has a harder time getting Silicon Valley talent leads to an interesting thought. Going forward the party that can successfully target the younger, smarter base will have a SUBSTANTIAL advantage in developing better systems. Assuming there is not some ceiling on how much better technology can impact efficiency, these systems will translate to exponentially more effective platforms for the party with the brightest youth.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/in-silic...

buddhaofdoubt18• 14 years ago

You could also argue that Republicans will slowly peel off disaffected or disenfranchised talent as technology in politics becomes less of a cottage industry for seasonal fruit pickers and they have the lawyers to push against the true ceiling you're talking about... the legal hurdles and the stagnation of innovation that comes with winning and scaling.

naterosenberg• 14 years ago

Kyle, amazing post! You mentioned that the 60% speed increase led to a 14% donation increase. You used webpagetest.org to measure the 60% speed increase. How did you measure the donation increase? Is there some sort of A/B tool for CDNs to help quantify the impact of speed improvements on CR?

kylerush11• 14 years ago

We used Optimizely (https://www.optimizely.com/) to conduct most of our a/b testing. Optimizely works on the client level (browser), not the server level (CDN).

Optimizely is the best a/b testing software I've ever used. It's flexible and easy to use. I suggest you check it out.

sshconnection• 14 years ago

Seems a little dubious to claim that the increase in donations was a direct result of increased speed. The nature of the election cycle seems like more donations would take place as campaigning ramped up and the election date drew nearer. Were those kind of external factors accounted for in your analysis?

Still, very interesting writeup and congrats!

kylerush11• 14 years ago

The increase in performance that I mentioned is directly due to the performance increase. We built identical pages on both platforms and tested them against each other at the same moment in time.

The only difference between the two pages was the page load time. Because we removed all other variables (time, appearance, functionality, etc.) we can say that the 60% performance increase lifted conversions by 14%.

tlear• 14 years ago

I am curious where this will lead the next election, I think it is quite possible that 2billion mark will be broken as everyone is looking at this an will be getting ready for the next round in 4 years. It is quite depressing actually

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

There were a couple comments about the legality of foreign donations, but I wonder whether foreigners can volunteer for a campaign.

Some causes are worth the hassle.

lindstorm• 14 years ago

Before and After Optimization - http://cdn.kylerush.org/kr/images/contribute-before-after-sc...

maximveksler• 14 years ago

A tech* question:

How did you implement the fail-over to a different amazon region when one fails? I'm interested in common approaches to this SPOF and what have been done in this case.

*seeing the discussion that is going on around this post, it almost feels off-topic to post a technical question :)

msinia• 14 years ago

Great writeup, thanks for sharing.

I've some questions to further understand the optimization process.

- In general, how did you measure improvements in conversion? What metric were you using? Something like LTV or the % of conversions each variation got?

- How exactly did you verify that the new version had a 14% larger conversion rate? Did you run an A/B test with both?

Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform

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