Tom Steyer 2020 - Designing and scaling digital organizing operations for a presidential campaign
The product team’s focus was to serve and empower people — supporters, volunteers, organizers and campaign staff, through custom innovative technical tools and programs.
MY ROLE: Product Manager, User Researcher
DURATION: 10 months; July 2019 - April 2020
KEY SKILLS: Product management, User Interviews, Quantitative & Qualitative Analysis, Design Sprints, QA, Program Strategy, Leadership/Team Management, Onboarding System Design and Testing
Customized Volunteer Dashboard; Digital Volunteer Action Example
Volunteer Personal Knowledge Base
Background & Goals
Tom Steyer launched his presidential campaign in July of 2019 and needed to quickly build and scale a national organizing program to reach and connect with voters and volunteers. The product team led the research, design, build and testing for critical digital tools and programs used by the distributed organizing team on the Tom 2020 campaign. We collaborated cross-functionally to identify solutions to increase efficiency of the field team’s ground work and empower organizers to better manage and engage their audiences both online and on the ground. Our broad goals during the campaign were to:
Support and scale organizing operations
Mobilize supporters to participate, vote and recruit friends
Train and mobilize volunteers to reach voters
Design & Development Outcomes
Volunteer Management
Distributed organizers can own anywhere from 5-10 states and manage between 500-1,000 volunteers. They are responsible for ownership over the communications and output of all volunteers in a series of states. Based on several rounds of interviews and brainstorms with individual organizers and their state teams to better understand needs as well as pain points, we designed and built a custom management tool (images above) which allowed organizers:
Access to their unique volunteer data only
A single platform login to track and record activity and updates
A way for consistent and customized communication with their unique set of volunteers
Volunteer E-Learning & Knowledge Base
We created a custom online portal that gave volunteers a single place to complete trainings, take action, talk to our team, join a community, track their impact and recruit friends to join. By designing and building virtual trainings and assessments, we were able to focus on accessibility so that any volunteer could complete a training and then take action immediately, from anywhere at any time.
Digital GOTV
To build off our campaign GOTV efforts, we wanted to incorporate a tool for our supporters to help them find their caucus/polling place, make a plan to vote, sign up to be a precinct captain and share with friends. This was built in the TeamTom campaign web app, so users could login at any time to check voting information and resources.
Digital Communication System
Using Intercom, we built a personalized communication experience for all of our web tools targeting website visitors, supporters, voters and volunteers through both a manual and automated messaging program. Because of Intercom’s robust API and integrations with other systems and apps we were able to seamlessly integrate the messaging flows into several other digital campaign tools.