Since July, Revolution Messaging has been tasked with overseeing social media, online fundraising, web design and digital advertising for Sanders, sending a steady stream of text messages, emails and issue-based ads urging supporters to donate or volunteer. The team also nurtures and helps grow the communities on Sanders’s already popular Facebook and Reddit pages.
“After seeing the immediate response the first few hours after [Sanders] said that he was running for president, nothing would surprise me,” Tagaris, who heads up the email fundraising team for Sanders, told Yahoo News after the third quarter fundraising numbers were revealed.
The effort is not all that different from the scrappy, ultra-efficient operation that Goodstein and many members of his current workforce ran for Obama’s campaign in 2008. But to equate the two campaigns is to overlook both the way Internet use has evolved over the past eight years, and the unique personality of Sanders as a candidate.
Since the 2008 election, the economy has migrated to Internet-based services, the mobile industry has exploded and a generation of young people weaned on the art of personal branding is more skeptical of pandering than ever. It’s these pivotal changes in the digital world and the people who live in it that explain Sanders’s appeal and the passionate response his campaign has been enjoying.
Goodstein recalls that when he joined Obama’s campaign in January 2007, the iPhone had not yet been released and text messaging was still something people labored over on their flip phones. Now, he says, more people are comfortable donating money online, ad gateways have become more sophisticated and news breaks much quicker. Even organizing large rallies has become cheaper and easier to do on the fly.
“It’s a different world,” he told Yahoo News. “We’re excited that we achieved the millionth contribution a lot quicker [than with the Obama campaign], but it’s also because the Internet has grown up.”