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Executive Briefings

Published June 2004

Behind the Scenes: How Political Campaigns Learn

  Emily Hollis

It was one year ago today that Howard Dean formally launched his campaign for president, building support and funding rapidly via the Internet, and becoming a real contender in the primary race. Dean's voice helped changed the focus of the primaries, but what about his thousands of volunteers behind the scenes? How did they learn what needed to be done to run a successful campaign, and what can chief learning officers discover by taking a closer look at how political campaigns learn?

There's no question that Dean got much of his early support via the Internet. This is the first presidential race in which the Web played such a strong role. According to David Austin, president and chief operating officer of ContextWare, the Dean campaign "got" technology better than many political campaigns, making it a perfect organization for technology-based learning. "What we did is we had a discussion with them around piloting a program in their Virginia region to actually help them with the training and the coordination and management of volunteers at the state level," said Austin. "The intention was, should they have been successful in Iowa and New Hampshire, which as we know with months of retrospective they weren't, we would have looked to roll it out at a national campaign level."

ContextWare's software serves multiple functions. As an authoring tool, it helps organizations "capture processes and the activities associated with those processes," said Austin. It then links those in a Web environment to resources that help workers, or volunteers, accomplish those activities. As a portal, it takes the authoring activity and exposes it in a secure Web environment for users to interact with. "The proposition to the Dean campaign in the Commonwealth of Virginia was essentially to capture their volunteer processes, the things that they thought were most important for volunteers to do, to map those processes out in detail, along with the materials and assets used to complete those processes and then make that available to the volunteers at large to essentially train themselves and become familiar with what it was they were supposed to do," Austin explained.

For example, a major activity for volunteers is registering voters. Like most processes, there are best practices for getting voters registered, Austin said. "We would capture that process and the subactivities associated with registering a voter, we would link specific activities, such as review campaign guidelines, so there would be an asset called 'campaign guidelines' that would be linked to that activity," Austin said. "Voter registration regulations would be linked to the section that talked about rules and regulations. Our notion is that everything should be a click or two away from where you need it to be."

As with any business, political campaigns experience specific challenges. "How do you quickly organize, train and help volunteers to become effective at the jobs that you want them to do?" asked Austin. "In the traditional political and campaign model, training is all done through face-to-face interaction, and while it can certainly take place in groups, what ends up happening is your very best managers in the campaign, who are also often volunteers but tend to be campaign operatives and have been in the party for a while, are out there doing that training."

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