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 CounselAdvisory 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 m. 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, t 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. 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. If you want to do campaigns, thats the problem. Sometimes the hill people think theyre good at campaigns. I know im n