Transcripts For CSPAN3 Digital Campaigning 20141016

Good afternoon, everybody. Im mark kennedy, the director of the graduate school here at George Washington university, and we welcome everyone here from George Washington university to our panel on digital complaints, 2012 and beyond. We give a special welcome to our cspan audience thats joining us. We also give a special welcome to those from the American Political Science Association that have come to all day seminars here in advance of their conference study tomorrow. At the graduate school of political management, we are very pleased that one of George Washingtons trustees, Mark Shenkman who is with us here today has funded a series of research an digital campaigning. As weve all seen, the world in all aspects of our life is going more digital and we want to make sure that our students are at the forefront of understanding how you apply big data for political success. So todays seminar is very timely. Im very pleased to be collaborating with this with the school of media and Public Affairs and frank sessna will be leading the conversation here. Frank has a great background, a multimedia platform to make sure that were highlighting the best innovations in sustainability and he is an Emmy Award Winning journalist prior to being the leader of the school of s and pa, he was with cnn and ap for 21 years. Please welcome to the podium, frank sessna. Thank you, mark. Good day, everybody. Welcome to George Washington university and the jack morton auditorium and the school of media and Public Affairs. We like to say we are the cross roads of the school of media and Public Affairs for where media and politics, communication, information meet, collide, explode, whatever verb you choose, they do it here and were very pleased and very honored to be a part of this event today. I want to thank you again for joining us at this digital campaigning 2012 and beyond discussion. This is the first of our fall events. We hope that you will join us for subsequent events as well. We have other ones upcoming on september 9th hosting a panel of journalists well be discussing covering the midterm elections. This will include professionals, journalists from roll call, mcclatchy, meet the press, washington post, all of them who just and purely coincidently happen to be alumni of the George Washington university. Please join us for that. You wouldnt want to miss that. We heard mark kennedy thank Mark Shenkman and i join him in thanking him. I would also like to thank paul wilson whose contribution helped make it possible to host the absa preconference which many of you attended today. Paul is a member of our National Counsel Advisory Board for media and Public Affairs. Hes the founder of Wilson Grand Communications and we thank him for all of his service to the school of media and Public Affairs. Id also like to do a shoutout to my colleagues, Steve Livingston and dave carp who are cochairs of this years absa preconference, so thank you to you both. I also want to congratulate one other colleague, professor Silvio Waisbord who is named the journal of communication. Hes stepping down as editor in chief of the International Journal of press and politics and his successor, Rasmus Nielsen is with us today. Please join me in congratulate is them. Now well go online. Well go digital. Id like to introduce our two guests today, and id like to ask them to come out as i do so. Zach moffit is the cofounder of an Advertising Agency that has served over 220 campaigns and organizations. Please have your seat. He was the 2011 digital director of mitt romney for president where he managed the campaigns Digital Strategy and will have a great deal to tell us about that. I would like to welcome michael slabe. Hes the managing partner of a new Company Helping to solve creative capital. I like that. In addition, he was the chief integration and innovation officer in 2012, obama for america, where he insured the implementation of technology across the campaign. So it would seem we have the two campaigns here, and im going to go and take my seat in the middle. Welcome to you both. I explained in addition to our cspan audience we have a number of students, graduate and otherwise who are here and faculty. So be very targeted in your comments. I want to start broad and then well come down and compare your campaigns. I know youll have complete agreement on all things, looking back. What three things would each of you say are the most significant Game Changers or strategy changers in this online world in your worlds of campaign. You want to go first . Sure. I think the ubiquity of social media has changed the way we communicate, the way citizens communicate with governments and i just think the fundamental nature of the communication landscape is different than its been in the past. We have a tendency to talk about social media through the lens of a network, very naturally because we see them as social networks, facebook has promoted this concept very heavily. I think weve advance today a stage where all Communications Functions like a graph where we are nodes in a graph and interconnected in all kinds of ways, whether we are individuals, we are campaigns, we are companies, we are Media Companies and our ability to understand the interrelationships and the power and the value of strategic indirect communication is as important as the value of strategic direct communication. Whats strategic direct and indirect . Direct communication is what i say to you. Indirect communication is what you hear about me from someone else. That can be done haphazardly at random which it will be done whether you like it or not, or it can be something thats part of how we try and build efforts around helping people engage with each other and the power of horizontal communication as one of the fundamental communications in the way media functions. Media used to be high arcual. Publishers reached an audience and everybodys roles in that system were fixed which is sort of boring and unexciting. I didnt think it was boring and unexciting when i was doing it. Its a little more complicated now. Ubiquity of social media. Cloud computing has changed whats possible in terms of our ability to build and manage our infrastructure. We talk a lot about the differences between our campaigns and the differences between our campaigns in 2012 relative to the application of technology versus the development of technology which is a totally different bag of cats. But the rise of ease and accessibility of cloud communication can really change things. One more. I have to do one more . No. Those two were good. No, i think the last one that i would say is still really important goes to the question we were having when we were back stage which is the modern Political Campaign hasnt changed that much since 1840 or 1896. We were having a political debate. But the idea of engagement and communication and the durability of the Strategic Value of empowering people to drive an Organization Forward is completely independent of Digital Tools, social media, email, facebook, twitter, whatever is going to be new next week, and that digital is a force multiplier for things Like Campaign and organization of any type needs to do well. It is not we dont because we have developed Digital Tools we dont now have digital outcomes and goals associated with the organization. Were still trying to win votes. Thats something thats easily overlooked. Zach, what are your top three . Michael is right. The premise for 2012 for us is we thought digital in 2008 had been a list building and fundraising exercise at scale. It did a lot of other things but that was the core competency at a digital level. A lot of things were alluded to but the audience werent there via facebook or twitter to go beyond that. In 2012 it was the First Campaign where you would have people who would vote for you but never went to your website but they interacted on facebook or twitter or maybe email but never having gone directly to your site. So you were trying to think about what does that experience look like and as a result that plays into the things that have changed the most, redefining your budget where you put data and digital at the center and fund as a result. I think the secondary component is actually even though weve become more advanced in technology, the role of a human is so much more advanced than ever before, like the staffing. When i look at the Obama Campaign i was never very jealous of the technology. I was always the vision, the ability to hire so many staff and to fund so many staff and to have that process is something that was really unique to what 2012 showed us. When we look post 2012, some of the things that are being missed, lean and mean does not mean lean and mean. It means were not doing stuff. Were going to cut corners and hope in five weeks that 1,000 gross ratings points get me over the line. I think that process has shifted. If anything the role of social media is more powerful at the local level and yet its all talked about at the president ial level. There are all these different elements to go through. I think budget, staffing as it goes through and i think how you leverage technology. I think this belief that democrats are ahead or republicans are ahead and this thing flips over 8 years and normally someone in power has a nice effect on that. I dont think its like that anymore. I think its the ability to take technology and leverage it and are you building for yourself or trying to glue pieces together. I think that will always be the challenge for campaigns as they move forward. Who is in power . The candidate, the campaign, the consultants, god forbid the public . Hopefully in some ways its all of the above. I think the capacity as zach said the local smaller races, smaller and challenger campaigns to reach audiences that you may never have been able to reach without tools like this, operate at scale, some of the things that we were able to do that sort of shouldnt scale, its too personal, its too much about one to one communication, sort of shouldnt be able the work at the scale that we were able to do except for the capacity to engage and drive a ladder of engagement via the internet. Thats the only way you end up with 2. 2 million active volunteers doing the exact same thing a volunteer has always been doing in a Political Campaign. I think more opportunities to engage and listen and get more information in more places is good for voters and citizens. I think the transparency and the discipline thats required of candidates is good for them as candidates. I think any time theres something new, consultants are going to benefit and find a way, but thats part of the system, too. I agree. I think that the challenges are different. Digital has allowed the apparatus of the campaign to be choken up. Theres a lot of Younger Generation of people to be involved earlier and had their voices heard. I think that probably three president s before michael and i it would have been a whole different role in a campaign. It just wouldnt have been a possibility. So our experience, theres no such thing when someone says theyre a social media expert. It just means they really like it. There are some things that make sense relative to the brand or the client or the campaign, but there is just kind of like the separation that this constantly evolving and just when you think youve got your hands around it it continues to evolve and its no longer in this lock box of this is the way it has to be. I think thats empowering and president ial campaigns if you didnt have social media the role of technology would be the same 8 to 12 states and people wouldnt get to participate. Its kind of like extended the ability for people to participate. It hasnt changed where the candidate goes. If people can it moves dollars. Social media and fundraising as a whole, thats why it started there. Its so easy to track that. You can see the conversion as youre going through the process. The use of social media. I look at marco rubio after the 2013 state of the union when he drank the water bottle. Thats a specific moment but a generational model. If he was an older candidate, no one would have talked about it. It completely changes the conversation in a matter of seconds. Something that social media allowed him to do and change the conversation. Ann romney had that moment with us when hillary rosens comment occurred in 2012 and she was able to cut through the clutter. I can promise you having being there that was not where we started the communication. It was the last thing we did but it changed the entire conversation. Thats where social media as leveled the Playing Field and allowed people to have followup conversation. Probably wouldnt you coming to you actually. Thats okay. What zach said about investing early is really important and institutionalizing the values of engagement and Relationship Building as an essential part of the campaign so that digital becomes i used this phrase before but it becomes a force multiplier for the things youre trying to do relative to Building Community and empowering people to participate in a process. That means that digital is going to drive whatever rules are present in the campaign. The tools that we use and zach uses are the same. I always think its sort of funny. Its not like we invented fusion and didnt share. Were using them differently and applying them differently. The constraints around our campaigns were very different in 2012 so how restaffed, budgeted, the time we had to plan was a wild advantage for us that i think gets overlooked a lot. In terms of coming to us and where you start, you start early with building relationships and you have to start with a premise that you are willing and interested in engaging in sort of a humble way as a participant in a process with others. Are you suggesting that a politician is going to engage in a humble way . Yes, if theyre going to do it well. I think we continue to see traditional candidates thinking in Traditional Communications terms one way, how can we use these tools to broadcast to another audience. You think something fundamental has changed . These are not broadcast tools. If you use them as broadcast tools they will be only marginally effective. If youre using them as a mechanism for communication building relationships, they can become something greater. If youre interested in using facebook as another version of the channel 7 news its going to be boring and people would see through it really fast. We almost tell them we will help them set up their Facebook Page so its tagged the right way and has the right images but after that we say we cant respond for you. The worst thing that will happen is you respond and they go to the supermarket and they talk to a person and they say i have no idea what youre talking about. If youre running for lets say recorder of x county, youre talking 5,000 votes each way, plus or minus 300 votes. You only need 15 volunteers, 30 volunteers to make a huge difference and thats what the tools have done. They have leveled. What people like michael and myself can do is help you eliminate your wasted time. What we do is learn from our mistakes and hopefully we can help you take the most of your time and be as efficient as possible, but at a certain point if were the ones having a conversations that will come through quickly and as soon as that comes through youre in a very tough spot. What zach said before, the investment thats required is largely human, that if youre going to participate in these conversations and be engaged and were using these tools and these networks, its a huge commitment of time and energy. You need to be prepared to engage and respond in a dialogue. You need to be prepared to create content on a constant basis. That is a people have a tendency to say its the internet, its free, its social media, its free. Using the tools is free. Using them well is a talent and means a team that you are going to staff and resource appropriately to do this well and maintaining relationships with millions of people at a National Level means a big team. Is that a dramatic departure for candidates in the way theyre going to engage through a campaign, or is it merely an evolution . Retail politics always has been about a conversation if youre going to do well. If you knock on someones door and you give a stump speech, theyre not going to stand there with you for very long. Is it merely transferring whats been done anyway or is there something fundamental here . Being able to do essentially youre talking about being able to do retail politics at a distance. Instead of talking to a voter you can talk to millions of voters through a team, through platforms, that you are doing some of those same person to person and one to one Relationship Building scale. I do think one. Things that it does fundamentally change is pace. The requirement of producing content in a real Time Engagement and real time response we talked a lot about theres a phrase of Rapid Response in politics and Rapid Response is too slow. Real time response is this fundamental nature of twitter conversations an engaging with the press and is something that has to approximate real time to be effective is a genuine shift. Should candidates tweet . Yeah. They have to. I think you have to but i think you have to be careful that theres risk reward and you have to be cognizant of that. I wouldnt tweet late at night when youre angry. When people are mean at you at twitter thats when you wand to respond. You get horrible trollers out there. I think its hard for people to take that separation. Same with athletes, they dont treat them like people. Its hard because you get caught up. Lets go to 2012 where you both were firmly rooted and where you both helped redefine this whole landscape. Zach, im going to start with you and with thanks to my colleague dave carp for suggesting this question well go right to the fun stuff which is orca, which is the system that didnt work so well. A little background for the audience, this was a mobile optimized web application that was meant to be used as a get out the vote vice. It was supposed to enable volunteers at polling stations, right, around the country to be able to report who turned out and who didnt and target accordingly. Your candidate, mitt romney at one point said it would provide an unprecedented advantage which it did not do because it did not work. Why . I will take this in a couple pieces. The challenges for us at the very beginning and this is an example of how campaigns are structured. As the digital director we had no involvement in the process. You wash your hands. Not wash your hands of it. This is what happens and this is where i think the professionalism of campaigns are going. It was built out of the political shop. Something at the state level through the primary process had worked effectively. I dont think that sometimes even people on campaigns understand what its like to scale against a president ial model in the general. What you saw there was the short comings of professional project managers and technical managers to run a process. Everyone believed it was going to work as it went through. I think that the concept really was not just to turn people out which was a big part of it, that was to let us know the efficiency. If we have 100 people vote and we know who 40 of them are we can take our resources and talk to the 60 who havent voted. No one really knows what time of day people vote, if youre a morning voter or afternoon voter. That was data dependent that would have had the most valuable because that would go into the models of how you turn people out. The challenge became when you start to scale it hit this breaking point very quickly across the board. It is one of those huge frustrations that you have because i think so many of the Campaign Members said this is going to be a huge tool. No one goes into election day not believing, one, theyre going to win and the tool that they have is going to be amazing. I would use that was the back drop. That was the challenge for us. Campaigns have to undertake these audacious tasks because thats what they want to do to get that last little bit. The challenge unfairly had orca work perfectly it would have told us that we lost sooner. Unfortunately, what i think its done is allowed people who want to be frustrated with the process to be able to point to a culprit. That was always the take away and thats why i felt strongly even though it wasnt a project that we undertook, i wanted people to understand, they did collect 15 million pieces of data. The problem was it did not do what we hoped it would do. I think this is really i hope it never happens again that people dont understaff and underresource which is such an important task. There are people in the conservative side of things who say that this technology and this focus on technology somehow actually depressed the vote. I think that people thats their choice. I do not fundamental believe in that at all. I dont know how it would depress the vote and turn out less people. If that was the case, michael can talk to it probably better than i could, but then should barack obama have won by more in 2008 . Theres almost no way thats true. Just for what its worth. Zach and i were talking about this at lunch. This also reveals just how hard it is to build technology at scale inside an organization thats as messy and moves as fast as a Political Campaign and that the point zach is making about the right people to build the right kinds of things is really important. The technology seems to accessible to us, but creating it is actually really, really difficult. Theres a very big difference between using and consuming and applying technology and building and creating technology. Now that ive asked him what didnt go right in his campaign, what didnt go right in yours . This didnt go right for us in 2008. We had the exact same system, built differently. The parallels in this external realities of our campaign and their campaign were similar. No time to plan, very little time to prepare for the general election. It ended up having we ended up in 08 having huge resources but very late when building things gets risky. We built a system on election day to help use mobile phones to track who had voted early in the day so we could repurpose resources and it crashed miserably early in the day and no one has ever heard of it because we won. Its almost its four years later. The technology they built was undoubtedly better than what we built because it moves forward but they both failed because its hard to build things to scale at that pace in that kind of system and i think the reality that what we had in 2012 was we had a massive internal engineering operation to create and build our own technology. We also had a year to build and plan without an opponent. We had time to staff really early. We hired in the Technology Group very, very early in the campaign. We started spending money on engineers and product managers who werent from politics. How many did you hire . The technical groups that led was 125 people in headquarters. And you brought them in when . Harper, our cto, joined us in march, the 1st of april i think, just after the announcement. We hired as early as we could. On top of the technical infrastructure is a whole other layer of content and strategy and engagement talent in the digital team thats another 175. So were talking about 300 people, almost half of headquarters dedicated to this. The proportion, the raw numbers are not the important part. The proportion of commitment to this as a valuable strategic element and as an element thats going to drive all of the things the Campaign Needs to do. The Campaign Needs to deliver messages, mobilize people and raise money. Digital becomes a part of all of those things. You dont have money, mobilization and digital goals. Organizationally, this is baked into the foundation. It is a layer that empowers the rest of the organization. Is that how you were organized . No but i think because of the structured nature, the protracted primary, thats the problem. I think that you would always be it would be the greatest thing for a campaign to have a michael across the board, to always have the cto, person sitting at the table from day one. When you try to do is figure out how do we get these pieces to Work Together as seamlessly as possible. I think thats just difference between a challenger versus incumbency. Those numbers, when Rick Santorum dropped out, our Digital Department in total was 14 people. Our entire campaign was 87. Now, i would argue and i have often that republicans underinvest in human capital. I think that that is the detriment of our campaigns. I hope everyone in 2016 that they want to spend more on staff. The challenge is thats easy to say until resources bottom finite. We made it through a primary. Our model was going to every state down 8 points, send 2,000 points of television and win every state by ten points. It was rinse and repeat and we did it again and again. To the point that we had to probably cut back on staff. That worked fine when we were communicating with other people who had limited resources. That doesnt work against the president of the united states. When they have hundreds of millions of dollars its not the greatest tool. You made it through the primary but were looking up and seeing an incumbent. They werent meant to make sympathy for us and i felt no sympathy for kerry. For us, we became the nominee and we had five months. You say, okay, we can undertake six major projects. What are those six and how will each one come to fruition. You have a curve where i have lots of time, no money. Suddenly i have lots of money and no time. Once that changes, youre gone. The next thing you know you have conventions, debates and then youre electing. The whole process its hard for people from the outside. Im sure people who are mad at orca are mad at facebook when it goes down. They understand all the architecture of how facebook works. You have great sympathy for healthcare. Gov. Exactly. Whats the biggest threat to your perceived or technological advantage as democrats now . Technology doesnt stand still well. The continued investment in moving Technology Forward and continuing to build new products, new platforms, continuing to invest institutionally in the creation and advancement of technology and the training of a new body of talent. We both talked a lot about the need for talent and staffing. Theyve got to learn somewhere and theyre going to learn from those of us who have done this before and there arent that many of us so we need to do a good job of sustaining and Building Talent inside the party so that we can continue to that we dont have this incredibly tight ladder where theres talent at the top and then no one else. There are hundreds of thousands of elected officials. And continued investment in this is really, really important. There is a lot of the talent and Technology Inside the Democratic Party lives in startups and venders that we use. Same is true on the other side. There are pluses and minuses to this is the build or buy question for organizations and institutions is important and complicated. But in either case, this is us continuing to invest in the advancement of technology, that we havent solved the problem. We have defined a solution to the sort of ongoing application of technology to what were trying to do and that means continuing to do it on a regular basis. Zach, during your campaign you said, we buy advertising for people who dont watch tv anymore. What did you mean . One of the things that my company did prior to going in is we spend a lot of time looking for people who we define as off the grid. One in three voters one in three voters did not watch live tv over the past week except sports. Yes. That number has remained constant. Its pretty consistent. Weve seen this huge explosion that we just did this study with google this year. That is the first time that screen agnostics, people dont mind where they watch it is now over 50 . We got that 17 of the population are linear but 54 are in this middle bouncing around so their entire lives are fragmented. Really, they have dvr and the only time they see ads is during sports. Its the one thing you really want to know whats going on. People are off the grid who are not buying they are not buying the cable box. Thats a growing number of people. Its growing in democrat graph ins 35plus is the Fastest Growing area. Our argument was, if you want to go to election day onethird of the voters is 1. 2 million. Its 160,000 or less in the last four president ial cycles. Do you want to go to the polls believing that one in three people have not seen your tv messaging . Were spending as if theres three channels and everyone is watching it all the time. Were pretending its the 1980s. I believe that a lot of the tv buyers, thats how they see the world because it pushes through for polling. The question is, we know the number to move polling. We dont know the number to win elections. Thats the challenge were going through. We know how Much Television will allow you to move the polls. We dont know what is the right media mix to allow you to win. What is the right mix . Everyone wants to think theres one method. They should each have a different budget. I got budget of 10 of a television budget. But i should have got less money in northern florida where there were more senior watching television and more in Northern Virginia where im trying to get a different demographic. Thats how campaigns should be run. By district or state they should have different budgets. You have to be willing to commit and to have the type of staffing you have to make that. The single most impressive thing was obama did was buying television efficiently and take into consideration waste and to factor that into the Decision Making process. Thats something that post election is where i spent a lot of my time focusing on that. It gets the least amount of time talked about. Its scary as it comes to resources. With the resources you have, where did you buy and how did you take this very thing into consideration . The piece of technology that was driven by our chief analyst officer who is a brilliant guy, he and his team and a woman built a system which was the idea was to look at the world and buy television based on consumption, not based on the gross rating port is sacrosanct. The gross rating point is a statistical idea of how many people might be watching based on previous behavior. Youre not buying actual impressions. What we wanted to do is make tv buying more like digital buying where you are buying actual impressions or actual conversions, even better. There are increasingly data sets available about set top box data and whats being watched. Now how many people might be watching but whats being watched and how is that actually relating to peoples individual consumption of information and then tieing that to targeted voters. The other problem with traditional media buying is its very coarse, gender, age, thats about it and geo. The reality is, that is not nearly detailed enough to understand the people that were trying to reach and the relationships and stories were trying to tell. If we can go deeper into not just our people 35 and older seeing this but our targeted voters, what are they watching and trying to get to a level where we are looking and thinking about the individual and what their experience of the campaign is. What do you mean by that . What are you watching . You. I dont want tv. I watch everything on dvr. Right. I dont watch the only Live Television i watch is a crisis or a great game. Right . If you want to get to me and im a guy of a certain age and all the rest we wont ask. I wont tell. I dont count. In the world of television, i no longer exist once you are over 54. I just gave it away. You consume information from all kinds of sources. You just dont consume it from broadcast television. What we need to look at it is, are there a group of people like you that are important to us as target voters that we need to persuade . In a certain place and time in. Our goals around votes, who is going to vote for us in ohio that gets us to the vote goal that means we win ohio . What do those people look like and how do they consume information. One more and we will go to the audience. Can i take that one step further . If you understand this, it cracks open the entire resource conversation which allows to you have the resources to do what michael was talking about. Campaigns dont need more money. Most campaigns are strapped for cash. They have finite resources. I think that if we can crack this, it opens up other resources to do more engagement, more door to door knocking, things that should be done in a campaign. Its important that people understand what the television buying just how bad that is, because a dma was made to sell you tide, to sell you stuff. It wasnt to do political realities. Look at florida 13, this is post 2012, all this data, february of this year, we had almost 10 million plus put into broadcast. Florida 13, makes up 18 . 80 cents on the dollar is wasted before you start. Half those people arent registered. 10. 6 of the people are registered. You get ten cents on the dollar. Unfortunately, florida is a high absentee ballot vote. So you are getting 4. 7 cents of value on the dollar before you did anything else. We talk about this is the republican party. This is both parties. We are all lucky, because its a republican and democrat issue. No one gets fired for buying broadcast. So you are getting 4. 5 cents. Both sides did the same thing. But its this idea of disarmament, im not going to stand down until the other side down. Everyone is nervous about it. Are you on inside saying you should . Of course you are. We even gced a race. You get this last moment of saying, what if we do it wrong and then we get blamed . I got blamed for something i had nothing to do with. You cant change it that much as you go through the process. I say jokingly, but you are nervous, because if you are the one who made the decision that broadcast is not necessary and you lost, no matter what the reasoning was, that is the reason. I think thats the challenge. Its important for people who want to be a part of politics, is you have to realize the money you have to spent is the most important resource you have to do all the other things. Do you believe that that is going to carry on into the future as this realization that the audience and the access to the audience, to the voters has so changed and fragments . Yes. You do think so . I dont think television is a broken medium for it. It will for short run because thats what people know. Theres inertia there. If you look at ad spending relative to media consumption, the graphs are all kinds of hilarious. In terms of how brands buy versus where people are consuming information, they just dont line up. Its not because people are stupid. This is hard. Its easy to do the thing that you are confident in. You know that someone is going to watch the tv ad. Theres a muscle memory and a certain amount of inertia that has to shift. Theres a system and a whole theres a set of media buyers and people who get paid. Theres incentives that line up for the system to continue the way it is even though it doesnt make sense anymore. Its becoming more obvious that it doesnt make sense, which makes it more likely our campaigns in 2012 were very different in terms of how much we were able to spend in other places that werent tv. We still put a couple hundred Million Dollars worth of ads on tv. Before we go to that microphone, you were talking about money and resources. Id like you to talk for a moment about you use technology in your views in the most original, most effective, most digital way to raise the most dollars. I think most innovative is when you leverage your smart phone using the square application. We did a popup store at convention where we made people making a donation when they buy. The Host Committee had been a source of money that hadnt gone anywhere. Leveraging Technology Used in the marketplace, you see it now. You are using square. Its the same thing. We were a year and a half ahead of that. Thats one of the things is that campaigns have to be alphas of trying technology. The fec make it a restriction for using commercial applications. Its a challenge. But i think using square was an important example. Using data to find out more and to create look a likes. You create models of what your donors look like. Thats what you can do is you find by peoples purchasing habits or the way they spend their time. You create models of the people you should run your campaign to. It kind of makes you smarter. Thats where digital separates itself. When fundraising mail goes out, the best is your first day. You should get better every day. Thats the way to look at it. You are establishing a baseline and measuring against. This list is burn. Im going to this list. Its a different world view. Most effective . I think the thing we did really well in 2012 in particular was applying best practices from large scale ecommerce to making donation process as efficient as possible. Its not super sexy but its things like speed kills. The faster the system is, the more people donate. If at any point in the process there is any kind of lag, you are just introducing an opportunity for people to get bored. Speed matters a lot. We used to joke about making the process as easy so easy that if people tripped and hit their head on the computer they would give us money by mistake. Preferably more money. Ideally. And doing things like amazon and large ecommerce retailers have allowed you to save Payment Information for a long time. You can buy with you go on. I want to buy that. Shipped before you even had a chance to say maybe i dont need that. We like that idea. When people get inspired about something, we dont want to introduce barriers to participation. So things like save Payment Information, no one had done it in politics. We had to build this in to our infrastructure during the 2012 campaign. Its something thats been a best practice in ecommerce for a long time. Lets go to the audience and questions. Let me invite anybody from the audience to be the brave first person to go to the microphone. Lets see what happens. Theres a hand up. While shes making her way to the microphone you will get there first. Take the first question. When you come around, we will let you be number two. Hello. A little short. My name is brittany. Im in the graduate school of political management. Zac, you were in our summer class. My question is, someone who is young and interested in doing what you do, im always being told that you are young, you should be on hill. Thats great and i love my experience. Wanting to do what you do and especially wanting to do it in the 2016 campaign in some capacity, do you still recommend doing the hill or trying to get in the private sector in. Did you ever work on the hill . I would never work on the hill if i were you. I appreciate that. Was you. That would be my personal take. I appreciate that. If you want to do campaigns, thats the problem. Sometimes the hill people think theyre good at campaigns. I know im not good at hill stuff. So i think if you want to do campaigns and thats what youre passionate about, you have to do it. There are opportunities if youre doing things in d. C. , you can work at firms that are assisting campaigns. When youre here, youre safe. The lights turn on all the time. Theres food. Theres water. Airconditioning for the most part. You want to go somewhere where youre in the back of a Grocery Store many ohio being like, this is what its really like. If you dont go through that experience, thats one of the challenges with digital, i did ten years of toiling in the field before doing this. What was toiling in the snood. I ran victory programs across the country. Child care, door knocking, whatever it took. I ran the most efficient most efficient child care possible. It was all about relationships. Thats what the bush cheney model is like. If this is what youre passionate and you want to do, you have to go do it. There are ways in d. C. You ral want to get on a campaign and go do it. Youre making a huge commitment to do a campaign because its a different type of life. Michael, i would like you answer that but also keep in mind that we have a cspan audience and national audience, lot of people who arent in washington who would like to get in politics who are already using social media. I agree with zac. I never worked on the hill. Most people dont come to washington. So theres a big difference between campaigning and governing. If you want to work in government, work in government. If you want to work in campaigns, work in campaigns. Theyre not the same. Theyre not the same skillsets. There are some people who do both and do both well, but doing both well is actually pretty rare. And i think zacs point about being involved in a campaign at the field level and seeing what campaigns are really like is really important. I started in politics not working in digital. I had a career doing Graphic Design and Digital Development and sort of Digital Content and Strategic Communications all these kinds of things then i went and worked in politics and campaigns. I was a field director and volunteer manager and bunch of other pieces and i sort of put those two pieces together when digital campaigning became a thing. I think the advice if this is what you want to do, find a way to do it. There are campaigns everywhere all the time. Right . There are always almost if you really want to sort of be a campaign person, there are offcycle states you can work in. Many midterm cycle, like now, there are places anywhere in the country to get engaged in. There are opportunities to participate in the process everywhere. Both physical ways and digital ways. And i think increasingly we see good campaigns blurring the distinction, right . That we should just be talking about engagement. I think the idea that were talking about digital campaigning, this is probably the last time we should talk about that because the reality is right, if we think about the progression from 2004, i have a friend who worked on the Kerry Campaign who tells this joking story about the Campaign Managers sort of yelling about dont let the guys in the computer let us get in trouble. Then in 2008, joe reported directly to david pluth. That was a huge shift, right . Now its not subservient to communications but it was called new media because it was new. Now its not new anymore so we call it digital. Whats the difference between digital and communications . I dont know anymore. And so at some point were going to stop like having a digital director and having a Communications Director becomes redundant and strange and uncomfortable depending on their skill sets. This is just campaigning, right . That includes online and offline actions and we blend it in a seamless way. If youre here in d. C. , find ways to get engaged in campaigns that arent if you want to do campaigns, get off the hill and go work on a campaign. And hill experience is great. Thats where i started in senator durbin constituent office in chicago. That was my first job in politics was opening the mail for the senator. And it caught taught me a lot, actually. It was a very important experience. I didnt learn about campaigns until i started working on campaigns. Thank you very much. Lets go to the next questioner. Thank you. Hi. How are yall doing . How are you . Im student. So first off, thank you for your efforts because youve given me so so much great material to study and i really appreciate it. So my question now is im studying now sort of what ive called sort of self personalizing. So candidates using social media to either share personal details about their lives to framing policy or campaigning through a personal lens. Relating to their own story or own lives. I see a range right now of anywhere from some candidates doing zero up to 30 . This is me talking about twurn gubernatorial candidates. Do you see these kind of posts drive engage snmt is that something that you view as a successful strategy for the candidates or sit more of a detriment . I think its incredibly successful and i think its really important. The reality of most of the interconnectedness in the media landscape we operate in are driven by platforms that were designed for humans to have relationships with other humans. Right . These are not broadcast mechanisms. These are not designed facebook was not designed for national, Political Campaigns to build multimillion person communities. They were designed for people to stay in touch at college. Right . So the more human we behave in using them, the more effective we tend to be. Thats really uncomfortable for brands, Political Campaigns, being human, being fallible is also something we tend not to allow leaders or candidates to be, which is an interesting challenge between voters expectations and demands and the requirements of using these systems well in a personal and authentic way. I think authenticity and meaning and being humble and aware of your humanness and sharing that is something that these tools are incredibly useful for. I think doing that well requires a candidate to be comfortable with that kind of exposure, right . That kind of exposure is very different than being on tv everyday. These sort of scripted kind of exposure that we are comfortable with as leaders or professionals even. This is a very different kind of exposure for me personally than a different kind of any number of different conversations. You dont im not talking about my personal life. Im talking about some experiences and its this is a very comfortable public position to be in. If i Start Talking about something more personal, it changes the nature of this conversation completely. Right . And i think theres an opportunity there if we want if candidates want to build real relationships, being human is a great for that. Are you saying in response to the question that candidates that running for office because of these very trends will become even more personal, more invasive in some ways . I would love it if it became more human and that we allowed our leaders to be human, which we dont generally speaking. We expect them to be perfect sperltive entities that never make mistakes and never cuss, which is [ bleep ] ridiculous. Lets hope they have a video delay. I forgot about cspan for a second. They wont forget about you, michael. Its been a glorious, if short career. I think, you know, it really also you have to take into consideration is a comfort level. I think people know when youre faking it and thats really the challenge. I think all these things are true, but it has to be because thats where you want your campaign to go. And i think you cant kind of fake it and dip your toe in and walk back. Its kind of like, i always tell the campaigns we work with, if you dont really want to know what they say if you ask them a question, dont ask them the question. Theres no worse than asking a question and theres no feedback. Tell us what you think and nothing shared. Theres no followup and its just done. The committees all do quite well. Tell us the four most important things and never follow up with the four most important things because theyre working this fast turnover world. With candidates, a lot harder. And i think michael is exactly right about social media and these platforms. They build these massive audience. I look at the hilary rosem moment, within three days we had 100,000 moms for mitt and they became our best volunteers and were sharing their stories. To try to cultivate that and us to think about how do you change the image everyday to be someone else standing for you, how do you make that a greater part of the campaign knowing that that has probably no tangible effect at someone of the Strategy Team can say i know whats going on, for us to know that was so powerful for us for what we were trying to do recruit volunteers. Thats where the disconnect will always be the hard part of blending the coms director and the digital director. If you dont have that background and that skill set because it would be very hard to teach someone all the digital elements. People will come with different the reality of the Campaign Staff that youre going to put together is people will come with Different Levels and intensities of expertise, right . Yes. Did that answer your question . It did. Thank yall very much. Thanks. Yes. Go ahead. Hi, my name is also shannon. Im an undergraduate student and Research Assistant at the university of delaware and im studying Mass Communications and political science. And with that, ive noticed theres a kind of splintering of the definition of participation in terms of politics. Theres this old school kind of donating and volunteering to a campaign and also this kind of new communicative form where youre liking a candidate on facebook and youre sharing them and youre talking about them with their friends. So i was wondering as kind of coordinators of digital campaigns, as a person as a constituent myself, what are you kind of courting noting that theres limited resources. Which one do you think is more effective in helping someone vote for your particular campaign . Well, i mean, i think the more tangible if you look at them as continuum of tweeting something or liking it and giving an actual donation your address is being the other end. Thats the most easy to measure as you go through. This is really powerful because it goes to the point that michael opened with in saying youre reaching people indirectly. A third person value day tor to say i agree with this. Thats why the Obama Campaign saw this, sharing negative content in facebook didnt go very well. People are very tough on twitter. Can be very harsh and can but on facebook its very hard to do that. Its very difficult. So different contents. You have to look at each platform differently and communicate with people accordingly. Its very hard the president ial level because you do a post and get 10,000 comments in five hours to go through all those is a huge undertaking, right . Its a real challenge. But at the local level, its very easy to do. Its something that every Campaign Needs to do. That person can become not only a donor but much more and can become youve reached out. When someone donates or gives their email sa different expectation. They expect you to talk to them. On social, when you reach out and make that connection that is really powerful. I think thats hopefully where campaigns are going. Again, you answered little bit of the skill and resources, do you have enough sniem thats where you can use volunteers who arent on your campaign to do that outreach its a bit of a challenge. The tools are Getting Better to have these longer conversations and filter them and have better responses but you have to decide. Were in an era of big da and the a small content. We havent figured out ho crack answer all these questions. Someone might ask a thousands questions and we only want to give them six responses. We have to figure out where to put them. Thats a real challenge. Campaigns just dont feel comfortable, i dont think posting like incorrect answers or limited answers. I think the other aspect of the gradient that zac is talking about is really important, think about this a both and question not a neither nor question. We want to give people easy lowbarrier entry tasks that are simple for them to do to start finding their way into the community and becoming active. Right, Something Like a retweet or a like is easy to do. Do it at distance. You can do it mobilely. It doesnt require a lot of time or energy or commitment. Something like volunteering at your local field office requires a whole different level of commitment and you want to build peoples relationship over time. One of the great things about youre blending online and offline in this gradient. One of the great things about social and Digital Tools is it offers more low barrier entry opportunities to more people at a distance. It doesnt require people who want to participate in a campaign to come to an office. Which means their are whole groups of people who couldnt volunteer in the past who now can, single moms, for instance. Right, this is a group that overwhelmingly people look at our campaign and Digital Tools and assume its all college kids. College kids love to volunteer. Single moms cant. They want to participate so they can use online calling tools. They can volunteer from home. Im making big generalizations here obviously. But the opportunity here is give more opportunities to engage and participate in a relationship and you can decide the nature of your relationship. And whatever you decide is great. We want you be part of this in the way that makes you feel that weve enspired you to be and we want to keep deepening that relationship and have you be more active. All of the kinds of actions youre talking about are generally really talking about supporter actions. This is the other distinction i want to draw. The relationship between those things and voting. Most of the things were talking about are talking about ways we activate supporters, who we assume are voting for us, mostly, right . Generally speaking the people on your email list who are donating money to you are going to vote for you. So thinking about social in terms of those individual actions like retweeting and likes as activations for supporters and the voters that are getting touched that you need to persuade are the second circle beyond them. This is a really important strategic principle that became really important in the Second Campaign when we had this massive facebook audience of tens of millions of people was that meant the first circle might be tens of millions but the second circle was basically the entire voting age population in the united states. What is the opportunity to have you, who are interested and passionate and have decided you like the campaign, you want to be a part of uts, how are you influence the circles around you . Right . And thats where you Start Talking about voter persuasion engagement thats different from supporter activation. Thats good. Was there something that you did, whether you could point to, as the most effective way to get to that outer circumstance . We built a whole platform around this to try to help make sharing behavior better than random. Right . So you see brands and campaigns constantly talking about sharing things with your friends. And we use online tools for all kinds of things, whether its content delivery and sharing, whether its activations like donation or list acquisition or online Voter Registration, for instance. But if we ask you to share a Voter Registration with five friends, we dont mean any five friends, we mean your five unregistered friends in ohio. But you have to convey that. You have to say that. So not only because you have to provide instructions. Theres two ways to do this. We can tell you. Share this with your five unregistered friends in ohio which by the way you dont know which of your friends are unregistered or. Or you can tell us who your friends are and we can tell you which ones of them are unregistered. How many parking tickets they have outstanding. Thats less deriving of a voting detail. I joke. I joke. Thank you very much. Thank you. Another question . Yes, sir. Hi. Thank you. Phil howard, university of washington in seattle. Im wondering if you guys could look ahead and maybe talk about bots talk about . Bots. A growing number of Political Campaigns and democracies around the world that are using out mated scripts to solve the problems of volume of content or realtime is not fast enough. Are candidates in the u. S. Going to start using more out mated scripts, theyll lose that personal face to face interaction, but theyll solve lots of logistical challenges, right . I think out mating engagement is dangerous. The likelihood of it ringing false and inauthentic is incredibly high and the risk is very great. Using out mated tools for listening and monitoring and seeing conversations and being able to listen to your communities at scale are really important and there are great tools for this now. But my experience with out mated response, unless its something as trivial as thanks for your notification, well get back to you thats very clearly out mated f youre trying to impersonate personalization, youre in a very risky territory. I think generally speaking i think its not a good strategic decision. I think using out mated responses to gi people a sense that theres a process and that we heard you, were going to get back to you and set an expectation about when, thats fine. Thats clear lly auto mated. Its transparent to the user. You start thinking about the User Experience of that feeling comfortable. If you send a response that feels like a robot, even if or is discovered to be inauthentic in some way, youre running a huge rick of destroying a relationship. You agree with that . I do. I dont think it solves the content problem because you still are to decide what youre going to say beyond that component of it. Thats the challenges that out mated responses the risk reward is pretty not in your favor. It doesnt work well in politics. I mean, you have found n and what youre saying that there is if not a sophistication, certainly an expectation in the audience in the voting public that will sniff through this kind of thing and this conversation now is required and it cant be faked. I agree, yes. Another question. Sir . Hi. My name is israel and im from university of political science. My question is, they used to be very vertical and now theyre becoming more horizontal. Becoming more horizontal, im sensing that you lose some of your ability to be administering orders to soldiers. They can do things that perhaps youre against or you didnt think about plus you have to respond in seconds to whatever the other side is doing. So how do you keep control of your troops . This is a really great question. When we work with organizations, Political Campaigns or otherwise, we talk about a progression of how to design an organization thats going to be effective working in the world that were in. We think about the progression that goes values, drives strategy, drives tactics. Typically most of this conversation is centered digital conversations center around tactics. How do we use twitter . What about the email . How is Digital Media buying change. Those are all important and totally mutable and will change by the time the next election comes around. What is durable is who are we whand are we trying to do . If youre clear as part of the culture of the organization, part of how you on board people in the community, how you hire, how you recruit, how you on board staff, how you introduce people to who you are, people are joining your mission because they want to help and theyre going to theyre going if you are clear and vocal about who you are, theyre going to be joining you because of a shared sense of purpose and theyre going to work in line with where youre going. Are they professional, political communicators, not everybody is david axelrod. Thats okay. We dont need everybody to be david axelrod. We need you to speak to your friends in a genuine authentic way that is in line with me who we are as an organization, who we are as a community participating together. Organizations that end up with too much command in control tend to avoid the emotional and cultural work of getting values in mission correct. This is particularly egregious in brands who dont want to have that conversation at all. This is more comfortable, naturally comfortable in a campaign in some ways than it is in a corporate setting, but its where corporations go wildly off the rails. I think thats exactly right. I think the process you have to have is you can also start where michael is saying unfortunately become very militaristic by the end. They start to clamp down and actually stifles the creativity and to the detriment. Using the besh cheney example, we were very metrics and result driven in 2004 and as a party it became so numbers driven it became detrimental to what we were trying to achieve because you had a crypt that hadded to be done in a certain amount of time and you got that feeling as you went through. A testament to the Obama Campaign of allowing their volunteers that type of flex to believe the have more conversation. But also that comes with having the structure to have implement that because what youre talking about is how president ials do it. How do you do it when youre only six people is completely different, right . But i think that you have to have your north star. You have to know what you want to achieve and think about what tools you can provide to make them better at it. The command snot giving out enough information which is why people are going rogue. Were the ones holding it back and people make it up. Theres some legal components the one problem now with communications thats become very difficult, one person goes rogue, everyone tries to superimpose they speak for everyone. The campaigns are opportunistic. Republican makes a mistake the dnc will not let that go. This person speaks for everyone and this is the way it is. Thats on both sides. Thats why people are so controlling. But i hope that media understanding as it gets better, people know how to respond better. That started its less difficult to deal with now. I remember twitter in 2011 was so difficult because do we have to respond to everything . Do we need to deal with this right now . It was like, no. But you knew that because you had been using it for x amount of time. The campaign was working through it. The the tyranny of now. And i think its a challenge for the reporters too . Its the challenge for them they have to be first. They give you eight minutes to respond. We really havent gotten into the impact of sort digital campaigning on traditional media and the echo chamber and all of that. I mean, right . One level the day of the gate keeper is gone. But the day that the where the candidates need to gate keeper is gone. Candidates go online to announce their candidacy. They dont hold news conferences . Why would they . I could come up with all kinds of reasons. We have time for one more question from the floor. Shes been waiting. You get the last question. Sorry. Grab him afterwards. Thank you. Monica from harvard university. A lot of big Campaign Fundraisers so for big doe nurs, youre 1 million will get dwlou many minutes in tv. This is how youre changing my campaign. How do you sell digital . You say 1 million is this many responses to tweets. How do you do that for your big donors . Thats a great question. I mean, 1 million buys this many impressions in Digital Media is a more accurate piece of information than might buy this many eyeballs on television any way. I would argue with the premise of question. Generally speaking we tend to we overvalue this line item nature of fund raising that often we can provide too much detail to people. They want to believe that you have a plan for using resources effectively. That doesnt necessarily mean they want to know the relationship between a tweet and a dollar. This is talking about things that failed in 2008. We built a system around line item fund raising. We wanted people to buy we needed seven vans in iowa next week, youre going to buy one and then youre going to buy one and then someone bought seven, that was gone. Didnt work at all. So confusing, people didnt care. Not motivated to buy vans. So frustrated by us trying they didnt want to know. They didnt want to see the sausage getting made that much. But we thought it would be really compelling because it was going to fill this need of people understanding the value of their dollar. I think thats a more emotional need than it is a data. So when we think about donors in general, we have a tendency to think left and right brain, right . I think we need to think about them as data has a tendency to convince and emotion has a tendency to inspire and you need both. When we separate this into a purely roy discussion, people say thats interesting. Im bored. Ill give my money to somebody else. People see this content about some organization doing something amazing but are concerned are they having an impact . We need to treat people as a whole human in this regard. I think on the donor side, flip it. I think now donors who realize theyre investigations in digital are investing in infrastructure. Theyre seeing that theyre investing youre investing in a candidate and person. If your investing in a cause, a campaign to do more. You see your dollar the return on your investment will be not just like this measurable thing, its that im helping seed an organization. Im helping start these conversations as it goes through. But i would take that a step further when you look at the long tail when youre doing donations at scale. Trying to get a lot of people to participa participate. If we hit this one hot button item, thats how well raise a lot of money. Fast and the furious. Were going to do everything we could. Paul ryan came out aggressively against it. We sent an email out to everyone. Literally we all all of our email list and we raised x. That was okay. Five days later, we sent an email for mitt romney being, i can win. Here is how many phone calls i made. This is the path to victory and here is what your dollars could do and had 600 lift to the exact same audience five days later because he gave a vision. That was the biggest thing. Too often these campaigns are too tactical. They think people are paying attention just like they are. Thats one of the problems. We had to let our coms team stop writing your emails. No one in iowa knows what were talking about. It doesnt matter because its so reactive. You get so caught up on we got them on this one. They want to know where youre going. They want a vision and you need to provide that. Campaigns become so tactical to the strategic detriment and thats a real challenge. Fund raising is one of the things that will be interesting to watch right now. These campaigns saying the sky is falling. This is the way to go. Its all these shock tactics which are working. The question will be does that work at scale and can you bring on new people as youre losing other people quickly because youre turning off its easy to find when youre in the prospecting phase. When you get to the next phase that will be real interesting to see the scale theyre doing it to see can you replicate that. Im sure thats something i would be concerned if i was looking at how the committees are using the list. Zac, im going to challenge you both to a threeminute lightning round and calm ate day. In three minutes, ill ask you a couple of interesting questions, i think any way. One, prediction. What is the biggest single area where you think the technology will change or alter tactics or strategy in 2016 . Audiencebased television buying withv. You will be able to start the efficiencies you gain from television will free up the budgets to do everything else. What you will probably get to by 2016 is getting to literally set top type information. Yours . Active proximity based mobile community organizing. People being able to organize their own communities based on proximity in realtime. Okay. In 2016, what will the role be or will there be a role of course there will be, how change willed it be for the traditional journalists with candidates now capable of going via social media, via Digital Media to everybody, anybody, anywhere, any time . I think the whole spent a lot of time at the center last year thinking about this with the folks of the community Kennedy School that one of the things that journalism needs to reimagine is the value of being first. That its more important or less important . It is almost impossible unless youre talking about investive reporting for a reporter to be first. So if youre not first, what is your job . And reimagining that question is something that journalism has not yet done. I love that. Thats great. I think that, yeah, the role individual reporters will have a impact in 2016 mostly because theyre becoming their own brands and that will be interesting. The campaigns are going to have to figure out ways they are try to go around them but the marketplace will react accordingly. The media is not going away. Our challenge as consumers we have to understand how to take that information. Thats where the disconnect is people dont know what to do with this information, especially false information. Thats becoming a real challenge. Campaigns will continue to work with reporters, especially as they start to write longer, better pieces. That will be in their best interest. I think media is an important piece of graph we consume information, its different. The need for historical understanding is huge. Last question and the lightning round here. Will your client in 2016 be Hillary Clinton . So my company doesnt work for campaigns or candidates. When you are recruited from your company, will your candidate in 2016 be Hillary Clinton . I will not be working on the 2016 president ial campaign. If youre volunteering in the 2016 campaign, will you be volunteering for Hillary Clinton . If shes running, ill be volunteering. Im done. Your turn. I mean, we believe we provide a product and service and we would be willing to work with any and all republican candidates. The more of them the better. Unlike him, i dont take the hill larrys ill take the others. Fair enough. I would like to thank you both. I would like to thank mark and paul wilson for helping to make this event possible. Like to thank mark kennedy and the graduate school. And graduate students and of course abseff who is here in town attending this preconference and their gathering here. For our cspan audience, im frank sesno, youve been listening to a fascinating conversation from the jack morton auditorium and i would like to thank our guests here who have been unbelievable. Michael and zac, thanks to you both. Good luck and i hope that in all that you do, whether youre in politics or out, whether youre working with the candidates or merely volunteering, that in using these technologies and engaging people, you can put some meaning and some hope and some movement back into our political structure because its not good enough to just come here and talk about it. And thats certainly not i dont mean that in any insulting way, but what we need to do in this country is we need to get our communication and our citizens and our politics working again. And thats a big task. Totally agree. Thank you both very much. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you. [ applause ]. Fbi director james comey will speak at the Brookings Institution about technology, privacy and public safety. You can see it live at 10 30 a. M. Eastern on cspan. And right after that, tom freeden the director testifies on the u. S. Response to the ebola outbreak. Hell be joined by anthony fauci. This hearing held by a Sub Committee live at 12 00 p. M. Eastern also on cspan. Be part of cspans campaign 2014 coverage. Follow us on twitter and like us on facebook to get debate schedules, video clips of key moments, debate previews from our politics team, cspan is