How MyBarackObama.com Turned 2008 Volunteers Into Organizers

By election day in November 2008, roughly two million people had created a profile on MyBarackObama.com. They had planned something like 200,000 offline events, formed around 35,000 local groups and raised about 30 million dollars through personal fundraising pages. Those numbers get quoted so often that the interesting part gets lost: most of that activity was organised by volunteers who never spoke to a paid staffer before they started.

This is the story of how MyBarackObama.com, which everyone called MyBO, turned website visitors into local organisers, what it borrowed from earlier campaigns, and which of its lessons campaigns still ignore. I followed the site closely through that cycle, and the design choices look even smarter from a distance.

Where MyBarackObama.com Came From

The site launched in February 2007, within days of Obama announcing his run in Springfield, Illinois. It was built with Blue State Digital, a firm whose founders had worked on Howard Dean's 2004 primary campaign, and the effort was led on the campaign side by Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook.

That lineage matters. Dean's campaign had shown that small online donors and self-organised meetups could fuel a candidacy, as covered in our piece on how Dean rewrote online fundraising. It had also shown the weakness: enthusiasm online did not reliably become votes in Iowa. MyBO was designed to close that gap.

The Four Tools That Did the Real Work

Strip away the branding and MyBO gave every supporter four things:

• A profile and dashboard that tracked what you had done, from calls made to events hosted.
• An event planner that let anyone post a house party, phone bank or canvass, with RSVPs and a map.
• Group pages for neighbourhoods, campuses, professions and interest communities.
• A personal fundraising page with a goal thermometer you could share with friends and family.

Later in the race the site added a phone banking tool that served call lists and scripts to volunteers at home. That one feature turned a laptop and a mobile phone into a field office. Volunteers in safe states could call voters in Ohio or Pennsylvania on a Tuesday night without leaving the kitchen.

Why the Activity Index Mattered More Than the Social Network

Commentators at the time described MyBO as a social network for politics. That framing missed the point. The friends and messaging features were thin, and plenty of people never used them.

The part that changed behaviour was the activity index, a score from zero to ten that rose as you made calls, hosted events, knocked doors and raised money. It was visible, it rewarded action rather than talk, and it gave field staff a quick way to spot who was serious. A supporter with a high score in a key county was a likely candidate for a neighbourhood team leader role.

In other words, the site was a recruiting funnel disguised as a community. That is a very different thing from a page full of likes.

From Online Sign-Up to Neighbourhood Team

The campaign paired MyBO with an offline structure. Paid organisers in battleground states built neighbourhood teams, each with a leader, a data manager, a volunteer coordinator and a phone bank captain. Many of those people were first found through the site.

1. Someone signs up and hosts a small house party.
2. Their activity score climbs and an organiser notices.
3. The organiser calls, invites them to a training, then gives them a turf.
4. They recruit their own volunteers through MyBO events.

The email list, which reportedly passed 13 million addresses, fed the top of that funnel. For more on why email held up so well as the backbone, see what early campaign email lists taught everyone since.

A Typical Volunteer Weekend in October 2008

It helps to picture what this looked like on the ground. A volunteer in suburban Columbus might log in on Friday evening, find a Saturday canvass posted by a neighbourhood team leader two streets away and RSVP in under a minute. Saturday morning meant a 20-minute briefing at someone's dining table, a clipboard of 40 to 60 doors and a script that fit on one side of a page.

Back home, results went into the system so the next shift did not knock the same doors. Sunday afternoon was often a phone bank in the same living room, with eight or ten people on their own mobiles. A volunteer who did all three could log well over a hundred voter contacts in a weekend, and the dashboard showed it. That visible tally kept people coming back for the next shift, and the one after that, right through to election day.

The Myth That the Internet Won 2008

A common retelling says the internet won the election for Obama. It is a tidy line, and it is mostly wrong.

The economy collapsed in September 2008. The incumbent party was deeply unpopular. Obama had a large fundraising advantage after opting out of public financing. Any of those factors outweighs a website. What MyBO really did was make the field campaign cheaper, faster and larger than it otherwise would have been, and it did that by connecting online energy to door knocks and phone calls.

The campaigns that copied the look of MyBO in 2010 and 2012 without the organisers behind it got social pages with comment threads and very little else. The tool only worked because people were waiting at the other end to hand volunteers real work.

What Happened to MyBO After the Election

After the inauguration the operation became Organizing for America, housed within the Democratic National Committee. The plan was to keep the volunteer base active on policy, especially the health care fight in 2009. Results were mixed. Volunteers who had signed up to elect a candidate were less eager to lobby for legislation, and a list built for one election cooled quickly.

For the 2012 race the campaign rebuilt much of its technology in house and leaned harder on data and modelling. MyBO as a recognisable brand faded, but its ideas spread into nearly every volunteer platform used by campaigns of both parties since.

FAQ

Was MyBarackObama.com the first campaign social network?

No. Dean's 2004 campaign used Meetup and its own blog communities, and other 2008 candidates had supporter networks. MyBO was simply the largest and the most tightly linked to field operations.

Could anyone create an event on MyBO?

Yes. Any registered supporter could post an event, which is why the total ran into the hundreds of thousands. Staff did not approve each one in advance.

Does MyBO still exist?

The original site was retired. Its successor organisation changed names and structure several times after 2009, and the old address no longer hosts the 2008 tools.

The Lesson for Any Campaign Today

If you are building a volunteer platform, measure actions, not followers, and make sure a real person follows up when someone does something useful. MyBO's quiet genius was the phone call that came after the house party. Copy that, and the software matters far less. Browse more of our campaign history coverage for the other turning points that shaped how campaigns organise.