Dashboard
Obama for America
Dashboard is a revolutionary online platform, designed and built exclusively for the volunteers of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Referred to as our “online field office”, Dashboard provides a community space alongside a powerful set of tools to enable our supporters to do their best work.
The homepage of Dashboard is tailored to the user, depending on their role within the hierarchy of the organization. The Obama campaign was built around the “Neighborhood Team Model”, and the interface and user experience of Dashboard is a direct reflection of that.
While team leaders and field organizers needed to make use of more admin-like functionality, every user of the site can use the Call Tool, or join Groups. Because the Neighborhood Team Model is geographically-based, each member of Dashboard is automatically placed onto a team with their real life neighbors.
Groups are an extension of the traditional group seen on BarackObama.com. Users can join national groups such as Women for Obama to get strategy messages and events, or they can create their own public or private groups around whatever topic they wish.
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The landing page where a user can learn about, browse, and create groups.
Team Leaders and other senior roles throughout the organization needed a powerful set of functionality in order to manage the thousands of volunteers pledging their support every day. This shows a CRM-like feature that allows a manager to keep an eye on new supporters, activity levels, and whether or not they had been personally contacted by someone at OFA.
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The people management page, where leaders can manage their teams.
Purposefully, OFA is a tight lipped organization. We had refused to even confirm the existence of Dashboard before launch (excepting the handful of battleground states in which we had soft launched). So when we publicly rolled out the app, we had a fun time watching the press try to explain just what Dashboard was, and why we built it. It was anything and everything.
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MSNBC explaining the Obama campaign’s new “secret weapon”.
Dashboard had a remarkably steady growth rate, which accelerated very rapidly the closer we got to Election Day. By November 6th there were several hundred thousands of users, a large percentage of which were active on a daily basis. The most encouraging metric however was the fact that, among all OFA volunteers, those who used Dashboard were noticeably more productive than those who didn’t. That is success.
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A very unfortunate picture of the President, from when he personally appeared on Dashboard to talk with our supporters. That was a great day.