A big problem for fast-moving activist organizations is they rarely have time or resources to focus on campaigning infrastructure until it starts to hurt core execution and campaigns.
Brought in as Director of Online Campaigning and IT in 2009, my team redesigned and rearchitected the GetUp core campaigning engine in Rails for rapid response campaigning, action flexibility, and email blasting at “Obama-esque” campaigning speeds (an actual directive from the ED at the time).
We also solidified their ability to quantiatively campaign baking in
salient metrics and A/B testing.
Plus, novel for the time we did it (and especially Australia) an elastic cloud architecture designed to handle massive, intermittent “fireballing” of the site from massive popular actions and media atention . As a benefit, using cloud-first technologies, minimized costs during off-peak email blasts and TV media by backing off resources and doing right by our donors’ contributions.