i started on the Biden campaign six months ago with 2 missions:

1. to scale, scale, scale and
2. take our team to the very edges of what’s possible with digital.

a thread, if you will, on what we’ve built since

The story starts when @jomalleydillon called and asked me to join the Biden team.

I had recently come off the Warren primary, the pandemic was in full swing, and I was heartbroken. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to dive back in. But this was a righteous fight.

https://twitter.com/k8thegr8est/status/1258892415055859715

So I started in May, partnering up with the one-and-only @Rob_Flaherty. I met the team and with that, 20 very talented and very tired staffers.

They were taking a lot of shit at the time from ~various~ Folks with Opinions. They didn't need the takes: they needed more people.

We immediately got to work. We started a number of round-the-clock planning sessions and infinite-scroll org charts of how we were going to build this fucking thing. But we also needed more smart people, fast.

Enter the beginning of a beautiful partnership with the DNC.

They had an incredible staff, led by @stevensonpj, who were fully set up and ready to plug in to help in every way possible.

I knew this because i’d built that team in 2018, and begged them to stay for 2020 and keep up the fight. We jokingly called our joint Slack channel...

Shortly after that, we brought on the DNC’s finest fundraiser, @_clarkekent, to oversee our grassroots fundraising team and fully integrate the DNC+BFP grassroots apparatus.

Clarke is the best of the best: strategic, incredibly smart, a great writer, and funny af to boot.

We audited our fundraising messaging: how could we build a relationship with supporters from the moment they joined so that they felt part of something bigger than themselves?

How could we express that we valued them, and the role they played in this, in every message we sent?

We built out the grassroots fundraising team like it should be, with every grassroots channel: ads, email, sms, web, social, our store, and recurring donors, owned separately, then optimized, to take our small-dollar fundraising to the very max of what we could raise.

We also doubled our testing+analytics staff, led by my forever analytics queen @molly_guz, and brought on my warren testing guru, @jewju_cohen.

We ran hundreds of tests. Some folks think testing leads to marginal differences. i'm here to tell you it leads to big fucking ones.

Our grassroots fundraising team then shattered every fundraising record out there: Raising $800M and bringing 5.7 million donors into our fight.

They broke the Dem record for most raised in a day ($21.5M), a month, ever, and raised more than half of the Biden campaign’s total.

Next up: Digital organizing. We knew that we needed an unprecedented organizing effort to reach voters during the pandemic and scale our program asap.

I pitched a never-before tried in a general distributed organizing model, and much to her credit, @jomalleydillon was game.

I had just come off the Warren campaign: I had seen the value of empowering volunteers to run their own programs, and the scale it allowed campaigns to reach.

That didn’t mean we had to throw our traditional organizing tactics out the window. We could do both.

We hired @JoseNunezIV, who’d come off Kamala's campaign, for a big, big job: standing up an entire national and states digital organizing program in 4 months.

Jose is brilliant, strategic, and kind: everything you’d want in a leader to build and innovate at record speed.

i knew this because he'd been on my team at the DNC in 18, too. i'd been biden my time to work with him again.

And build he did: Bringing a team and a program to life, with over 60 people on the national team and nearly 100 digital organizers in our battleground states.

We married two organizing models: community organizing and distributed organizing.

In states, organizing would work with in-state distributed teams to empower volunteers to take action from anywhere, without sacrificing the relationships built with organizers.

Non-battleground state volunteers joined our national distributed team: over 200K people in Slack, our virtual field office, making calls, sending texts + hosting events.

This crew was incredible, able to turn on a dime and talk with voters wherever they were needed most.

Working with our organizing team, we broke even more records: Nearly 700M voter contacts since July, and 128M voter contacts in the final 4 days of the election.

For comparison, in 2012 we reached 25M voters in the final 4 days.

Unprecedented scale, and volunteer-driven.

Last but certainly not least, @Rob_Flaherty and I completely reconfigured the digital-communications team, bringing on @akanani from the Pete campaign, to take the helm.

He quickly set to work and grew the team to over 100 incredibly talented creatives in record time.

We decided to run it off more of a publisher model than a traditional campaign one, with seven sub-teams ranging from Editorial to Audience Development to a never-been-tried-before in a presidential Digital Partnerships team, led by @cltom.

We built a 50-person video team and flooded the zone with all kinds of content, from big+sweeping stories to 6-second gifs (racking up more than 1.5B views), design full of creativity and luscious gradients, and so many posts, each tailored for specific channels+audiences.

Add that content with the reach of our partnerships with influencers, Occupy Democrats, Buzzfeed, Conde Nast and many more and we were ready to rock and roll. By October, we were outperforming Trump on engagement.

We'd beaten him at his own game. https://www.axios.com/joe-biden-twitter-facebook-engagement-trump-e74d2504-eec3-4fbf-8dac-b21fd0df0c7a.html

Now at the end of this short but also very long journey, the proof is in the pudding: each of these teams innovated, jammed and ideated, and broke records across the board.

I have never been more proud.

but now, i’m going to leave you with an ask.

This team of over 300 incredible digital staffers are starting to look for their next thing. They are battle-tested and brilliant, creative and full of "never done before? let's do it" spirit.

Hire them, and watch what they do in our space next: https://forms.gle/Yb9GKrKDyjbQa8Ds9

P.S. it wouldn't be a ~thread~ without at least one glaring omission.

here to celebrate @TessSimonds, our senior advisor for digital organizing on the coordinated and *truly* the GOAT.

Tessa was mission-critical, advocating and ideating to take our program to the max.

we stan this massively talented, full of new ideas, organizing genius!!