PM’s chief of staff reveals party’s digital edge
Katie Telford shares how online strategy gave Liberals upper hand in 2015 campaign
WINNIPEG— The Liberal party took time out Friday from celebrating the fact they won the last election to hear about how they actually did it.
Katie Telford, the 2015 campaign’s co-chair, pulled back the curtain on the Liberal’s new-found digital and data-driven operations at the party’s policy convention in Winnipeg.
“Research, analytics and pathways. We would do the research, hear the analytics and determine the pathways in (a) meeting, multiple times a week, for months. And even more during the course of the campaign,” Telford, now chief of staff to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, told party activists.
“How healthy was a riding organization, what patterns could we see, what insights could we glean, did we need to change course? Right up until the last week of the campaign, we kept testing ourselves and testing our theories.”
If this sounds like inside baseball, well, it kind of is. But the Liberals are taking their data operations extremely seriously, and credit their digital game for helping them move from third-place opposition to a commanding majority mandate.
Telford said the Liberal HQ spent days poring over data harvested from ridings across the country, informing decisions like advertising buys and visits from Trudeau.
“Some of us had the pleasure of spending time debating every metric. From eyeballs on Facebook versus YouTube videos, to ratios to door knocks to phone calls, from radio ad buys against TV ad buys, and which baseball game more Canadians might be watching,” Telford said. “We spent our days and many nights talking about numbers and turning each one of them into a meaningful element of the campaign.”
The capability is relatively new for the Liberal party. According to Star columnist Susan Delacourt, the Liberals have developed a system called the “Console,” a sophisticated program to map riding-by-riding data. The Console is an answer to the Conservatives’ Constituent Information Management System (CIMS), which was partially credited with that party’s dominance over the last decade.
According to Delacourt, the Console tracked voter outreach efforts in all 338 ridings, down to how many doors were knocked on. The Liberals then categorized ridings into five tiers based on how winnable they believed them to be.
Now, the Liberals are already turning their attention to how to use that data to win in 2019. Tom Pitfield, who served as chief digital strategist for Trudeau in the last campaign, said there will only be two ways to reach voters under 44 years old in 2019: the Internet and at the doorstop.
“The reality is that digital and data campaigns will never replace the importance of a strong ground game and good instincts, but it can’t just be seen as a compliment to traditional campaigns either,” Pitfield said.
“Today, 25 per cent (of voters under 44) are cell (phone) only, and 42 per cent no longer watch TV, or are light viewers. If we’re going to remain competitive, we clearly need to find new ways of reaching our supporters.”
Pitfield said that the Liberals thought of the “virtual world as a campaign in itself,” to find and turn out voters, identifying nearly one million voters over the course of the campaign. And with other parties investing in technology and experimenting with new content, Pitfield said the Liberals will need to continue to experiment with new ways to connect with voters.