Barack Obama plugs into a political Facebook

[T_i_B]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5041725.ece

With ten million early ballots already cast, the United States seems to be heading for its highest election turnout since the 1960s. If so, it will be because of unprecedented levels of enthusiasm from young people and minorities, who normally stay at home. This is not down to chance. Headlines may have focused on Barack Obama's fundraising prowess (he has raised well over half a billion dollars), but that was part of a ground-breaking political network that defeated the mighty Clinton machine, and now looks poised to capture the White House.

Mr Obama has amassed an army of volunteers, many of whom have never before been politically active. He has achieved this by making it easy for supporters to get involved through his my.barackobama.com website, or MyBO as it has become known. This looks and feels like Facebook, which is unsurprising as one of the social networking site's founders, Chris Hughes, is a senior Obama adviser. Once someone has logged in, they can meet supporters in their area, organise their own fundraising drive, or publish comments and suggestions. As with Facebook, users can invite friends to sign up, so recruitment for the campaign proliferates at local level. Peers recruit peers in their own language.

During the primaries, Mr Obama used a database called the Donkey (a reference to the Democratic Party's symbolic animal and also a nod to the nature of campaigning work) to manage volunteers. The system allows the campaign team to record the preferences and efforts of every regional co-ordinator, field director and individual volunteer. This was extremely effective in identifying and rewarding the most dedicated volunteers.

This sort of campaigning can be decisive. Research by Donald Green and Alan Gerber, of Yale University, shows that face-to-face contact can increase turnout by 5 to 10 per cent. In Woodbridge, Virginia, a town of just over 30,000 people, I was part of a small team that knocked on 100 doors and spoke to about 50 people. When we got back to the local headquarters we found that about 7,000 other doors had been knocked on in the area on that day alone. A similar effort was taking place in 40 locations across the state.