To: ! Secretary Clinton!

From:! Teddy Goff!

Date: ! October 26, 2014!
Re: ! Technology/digital priorities and status!

!
!
!
Dear Secretary Clinton,!
!

Thank you for inviting me to deliver this memo. These pages are meant to provide current
thinking on the technology and digital priorities of your campaign that may serve as a framework
for assessing its performance, as well a status update on the planning and development
process as I see it. !

!
PRIORITIES!
!
The most important functions of your digital team in my estimation (and in this order) are: !
!

Raising lots of money;!

Creating and distributing excellent content, for both supportive and persuadable audiences,
on social and paid media and in videos; and!
Recruiting, engaging, and organizing volunteers and prospective volunteers.!

Many people have suggested that these are principally technology and analytic challenges. In
my view, they are principally creative and tactical challenges, with technology and analytics
required to provide efficiency and amplification. But the fact remains: a great piece of content
has the ability to drive action or earn social virality even without tools to support it, whereas a
great technology infrastructure has no ability to make bad content effective. !

My point, of course, is not to argue against innovation, but to urge you to prioritize the right
kinds of innovation. Its important to remember that the job of entrepreneurs is to look five or ten
years into the future, predicting faraway consumer trends. Campaigns, on the other hand, exist
for less than two years and earn precisely zero votes and stand to lose many for being out
ahead of consumer preferences. Your task is not to disrupt the market, but to make it as easy
(and, from the campaigns standpoint, as useful) as possible for people to engage with you in
the ways they already know and prefer. !

The question, then, becomes how to do that. I would suggest the following objectives for your
technology and analytic product suite:!

Performance and stability: This is a relatively mundane but critical topic. You stand to raise
more incremental money from building a high-performing website and email delivery tool
along with an airtight system of backups so that crashes, when they do occur (as they will),
do not affect the user experience than you would from virtually any attention-grabbing
product you could develop. !
Quality of engagement: Digital tools and digital media obviously create profound new
opportunities to engage ordinary people, disintermediated by reporters, major donors, etc.
Everything you build should in some way serve to deepen and improve the relationships you
build with those supporters and voters. Of note, this should apply to programmatic decisions

in addition to technology decisions; for example, the launch itself and subsequent major
announcements and initiatives should be made as "digitally-first" as possible, with an eye
toward engaging the grassroots rather than working exclusively through traditional channels. !
Ease of use: In 2012, Quick Donate raised an estimated incremental $115 million by reducing
the barrier to donating to a single click. Evolutions since then, both in hardware (like improved
iPhones and Android devices) and software (like changes to the YouTube and Facebook
platforms), afford the ability to make donating and other actions (sharing content, signing up
to volunteer, etc.) even easier, in many cases not even requiring a visit to your website. !
Optimization and personalization: Your campaign will have an unprecedented ability to deliver
unique experiences to individual voters and improve those experiences based on data. This
applies both to paid media where, more than ever before, you should be able to serve
persuadables with the exact message, cadence, and formats most likely to move them at the
lowest cost and to your core digital program, which should be able to provide an even
higher degree of personalization and optimization. !
Cross-platform accessibility and compatibility: In 2012, we were relatively rudimentary in our
ability to create mobile-friendly experiences and connect those experiences and the data
they generated to the desktop and offline campaign. You should be able to make major
advancements in this area, meaning not only that users whose mobile devices are their
primary touchpoint into the campaign arent frustrated, but also that youre able to take
advantage of new categories of data, like real-time location information, to further improve
your programs.!

!
!
STATUS!
!

I have been kept apprised of the work being done by Eric Schmidts group and others working
directly and indirectly with your team. On the whole, I am comfortable with where we stand and
confident in our roadmap to launch day and beyond. In summary:!

We have selected a team of developers, unaffiliated with Eric, to build the front-end of your
website a relatively simple process that does not need to have begun yet. These are
former employees of mine in whom I have the highest confidence. They are apprised of what
Eric is building but not dependent on it, having identified commercially available products for
all mission-critical functions in the event Erics group is delayed or otherwise derailed.!
We have instructed Erics team to build the most important products in their portfolio
specifically, the back-end of the website, the ability to accept donations (along with associated
features, most importantly the ability to store credit card information), and the ability to
acquire email addresses first. Given how much time remains between now and launch
and, again, the availability of alternative solutions I believe there is effectively no chance
that these core functionalities will not be in place in time for launch. !
Erics team is also developing products that are not, strictly speaking, critical for launch, but
would be extremely useful to have as early in the cycle as possible. Chief among these is the
system that consolidates data from disparate sources to allow you to develop more complete
user profiles and therefore more effective programs. I shared the concern, voiced by many,
that the initial scope for these products was overly ambitious and unrealistic; they have since
been cut down to a much more manageable size, without sacrificing core functionalities. (Of
note, many of the problems that stifled us in 2012 have since been tackled by private
companies with whom we have relationships and whose tools we can license rather than
attempt to replicate.) I am cautiously optimistic that the most important of these will be

completed in time for launch; if they are delayed, I have no reason to believe they will not be
ready shortly thereafter, long before potential challengers in either party will have been able
to build anything similar. !
We have begun to work with an app developer with whom I have worked in the past; I am
very confident in their ability to deliver on-time and according to our specifications. I have also
reviewed the product plans and believe strongly that it will be perceived as innovative by
consumers and reporters, a secondary objective that cannot be dismissed. This app can and
should be ready in time for launch.!

!
Finally, here are the areas where I would encourage you to push for speedier progress:!
!

Organizing tools: As I argued in my previous memo, its important to deploy an organizing

platform early in the campaign, before too many field organizers will have been able to
develop their own homegrown systems for communicating with volunteers. This has not been
a priority for Erics group, but should be an early one for your in-house technology team.
Coming to a consensus on the goals and basic contours of this product (or products) would
be a good first step. !
Hiring: This is obviously a highly sensitive process, and carries with it the risk of leaks. Still,
hiring excellent candidates into key positions is of the utmost urgency, especially because
your department directors, once identified, will then need to recruit a full team of middle
managers who are themselves crucial to the campaign. I would encourage you to select a
CTO and Digital Director before the end of the year, leaving them 2-3 months in the new year
to build out their management teams. As for whom to hire, it is always fashionable to
disparage people with political experience as lagging behind their private-sector counterparts.
There is, of course, some merit to the view that the private sector has expertise that the
political world lacks, but in my experience, the reverse is also true (for example, few private
companies target consumers as efficiently as the 2012 campaign targeted voters). While its
helpful to pull from startups, creative agencies, etc., for the junior and mid-level talent who will
do the day-to-day heavy lifting, it can be very dangerous to fill your senior ranks with political
newcomers who lack any background in the unique particularities of a campaign. In particular,
I would advise you to fill highly specialized positions like Director of Analytics, CTO, and
Director of Engineering, all of whom will have to be fluent in the nuances of niche services
like the voter file; Digital Director, who will need expertise in direct-response marketing (not to
mention political messaging), a skillset not common in private-sector digital departments; and
Email Director, who should not have to relearn years worth of established best practices; with
people who have faced the kinds of challenges your campaign will inevitably face.!
Partnerships: Working relationships with Google, Facebook, Apple, and other technology
companies were important to us in 2012 and should be even more important to you in 2016,
given their still-ascendent positions in the culture. These partnerships can bring a range of
benefits to a campaign, from access to talent and prospective donors to early knowledge of
beta products and invitations to participate in pilot programs. We have begun having discreet
conversations with some of these companies to get a sense of their priorities for the coming
cycle, but would encourage you, as soon as your technology leadership is in place, to initiate
more formal discussions.