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Barack, the Students, and the Grassroots

Update: I should note that I jumped the gun a little with this review. SFBO has not officially launched yet. I just happened to key into their prelaunch because I read the Barack the Youth Vote blog. The Obama campaign has contacted me to say they are aware of a lot of these issues and appreciate the feedback. So let them know what you'd like to see in future iterations in the comments, and bear in mind that I'm reviewing a beta product here.
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This is part of a running series of campaign youth website reviews. In previous installments I reviewed John Edward's OneCorp and Mark Warners's Youthroots.

Co-opted by the campaign months ago, Students for Barack Obama launched their new website this week. After their impressive emergence via FaceBook and demonstrated ability to turn Facebook energy into bodies on the ground, I was looking to see something equally impressive.

What I saw was basically a funnel. The new SFBO website is - mostly - a directory that allows visitors to find a local chapter or create their own chapter where none exists. Whichever option you choose, the site will funnel you into MyBarackObama.com, the campaign's social network organizing vehicle. Aside from links to the official Barack Obama FaceBook group and YouTube page, almost every link on the site directs the user into the main campaign website. That's not necessarily a bad thing - when I interviewed Tobin Van Ostern, one of the founders of Students for Barack Obama, he indicated that FaceBook wasn't scaling sufficiently as an organizing tool to accommodate the group's needs. Now that SFBO are an official part of the campaign, it makes sense to integrate their operations with the larger campaign infrastructure. But there's a lot missing here.

The site is sparse, to put it mildly. Highly functional is probably the best descriptor. Don't come here looking for a lot of photos (aside from an intro slide-show), or any sense of a larger Obama student community. Information is not being pulled up and aggregated from within the student chapters, and chapter specific pages are purely utilitarian. This is an atomized community and this is a highly utilitarian tool. Aside from links to the student chapter directory, there is little other content aside from a student specific news feed, links to FaceBook (the official Barack page) and YouTube, and a generic campaign video. The site is basically a new skin laid over the Barack Obama for President website. Every navigational link will send visitors to the general campaign website - and not to a page that is relevant for or specific to student supporters. Once on the main campaign webpage, there is no going back. There is no clear way to get from the Barack Obama webpage to the Students for Barack Obama webpage.

This is a bizarre combination, and one I hope will soon be fixed. By funneling all student supporters to generic campaign pages, the Obama team is missing an opportunity to speak directly to young voters about the specific issues that concern them. It's missing an opportunity to have a conversation with its supporters. Furthermore, without a prominent link to SFBO on the campaign page, it's unclear to me how new students will become involved in the campaign - especially if there isn't already a chapter on their campus. It's not difficult to Google SFBO - but why throw up an unnecessary barrier to entry for supporters who, in campaign group-think, are infamously fickle?

Moving down to the tactical level, in future iterations of SFBO, I'd hope to see content bubbling up from within the chapters onto the main page. Let the campus organizers use the news feed to promote their own events. Pull up blog posts from within the chapters, spotlight good work, etc. I'd also hope to see a lot more about best practices or organizing suggestions, and the ability for chapter leaders or members communicate with and learn from each other. None of that seems to be available at the moment. Currently, the only organizational aid I could find (after being directed to MyBarackObama and poking around) were some generic organizing guides that would be of minimal help to a young supporter. The only information pertinent to campus organizers seemed to be a brief blurb about social networking, but most students are likely to possess knowledge of FaceBook far beyond what the campaign can offer in 150 words.

Over at Barack the Youth Vote, Joshua Gorman, who occassionally blogs here, had some similar views. He also raised some very pertinent questions:

Another issue closely related to this topic and especially relevant to Barack the Youth Vote is: what is the Obama campaign’s strategy to reach out to the wider population of young voters who are not students? While student networks are a solid, reliable, and invaluable base to build upon, the fact is that there are far more young people of voting age who are not students than those that are, and they need to be reached out to and engaged just as much as students.

Joshua is on the money. I've laid out what I think is missing on the new SFBO website, but Joshua points to a larger problem that all the campaigns - not just Obama - need to deal with. Young voters are comprised of a lot more than students. What about all those who have been priced out of college? Or opted for the military? Or are out of college and beginning careers and families . . . what is the Obama campaign's strategy for reaching them? And how will he deal with the incredibly creative grassroots groups out there who aren't officially part of the campaign. Groups like Barack the Youth Vote or 1 Million Strong and their new Endorse Barack campaign.

What is the relationship between the Obama campaign and these unofficial efforts that are bubbling up from the grassroots?

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April 22nd, 2007 5:52am
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We shall see

Submitted by Josh Koenig on Sun, 2007-04-22 12:38.

I think this will be interesting to watch over the Summer. Obama has, largely without effort, become the favorite of many Millennials who are looking for a Presidential Candidate as a means for engaging the political process. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this, as I think there’s a bit of an inevitable collision between the indigenous youth interest and the campaign.

Lackluster, students vs. nonstudents~

Submitted by Joshua Gorman on Sun, 2007-04-22 13:16.

I was pretty disappointed when I first checked it out. The new SFBO webpage, part of the larger Obama campaign website, currently lacks the youthful creativity and grassrootsy characteristics that I would expect to find. Yes, it’s functional, but in an extremely minimal way. I haven’t checked in on the inside scoop/timeline yet, but the only explanation that makes sense is that they were rushed to get something up for the scheduled SFBO phone conference with Barack, so they rolled out the current version with the bare minimum and are now working on taking it to the next level. At least, as an Obama youthroots supporter, I would hope so.

As Mike pointed out, there’s not even a way to access it from the campaign’s main page, so there’s clearly a lot of work left to be done (there’s not even a link to a group blog yet). This is the same issue with “Camp Obama” page, the campaign’s upcoming summer volunteer trainings…there’s no way to find it unless you’re connected to one of the inside networks.

I’ll be speaking with Michael Whitney, one of the co-founders of Generation Dean, later this week so I’ll be sure to inquire more about their own website compared to SFBO’s emerging site. The other week when I was talking with Joe Trippi, he shared that he had given the young people running Generation Dean almost complete autonomy with creating their website and running their operations. While he admitted this often led to many arguments with his Communications Director, he really believes that this “youth ownership” contributed largely to the creativity and vitality of Generation Dean’s success.

Speaking of Generation Dean, the group first started as Students for Dean before taking on the more inclusive language of “Generation.” I’ll soon be learning more about the finer details regarding this switch and how successfully it appealed to student and nonstudent young voters, and I won’t be surprised if, even if it’s not by Obama’s official campaign, we’ll eventually see a “Generation Obama” of some sort as an active player in the campaign.

It’s a hard call regarding outreach to students vs. nonstudents. I don’t have the stats, but students turn out more consistently to the polls than non-students, and they’re also easier to reach and organize as a whole. Using the directly targeting language of “Students for…” ensures a relatively strong and stable base amongst the youth voting bloc. But at the same time, there is an untapped source of creativity and new voters within the larger nonstudent youth population (i would even argue that there’s a ‘responsibility’ to reach out to this larger group of young Americans). Using the more inclusive language of “Generation” strikes me as the most strategic way to reach out to both groups simultaneously, though tactics & strategies for reaching each group will differ in some ways and overlap in others.