Lessons Learned From the Obama Campaign
Now that I’ve been back in D.C. for a few weeks after the PRSA 2009 International Conference, I finally find myself sitting down to reflect on a couple of the sessions I attended. This is mostly because I wanted to be able to do so thoughtfully, and not rush through my posts.
The first of these was “President Obama and the Citizens’ Campaign: Lessons Learned,” which was conducted by Mike Smith of Mike Smith Public Affairs. Leave it to a PRSA conference all the way across the country to be the place where Mike and I finally met “in real life (IRL),” even though we both live and work in the D.C. area. Ain’t that somethin’? (By way of disclosure, you should know that Mike’s firm was a sponsor of #shonalitweetup, which was a ton of fun that weekend.)
Since Mike graciously agreed to have his presentation, President Obama and the Citizen’s Campaign, reproduced here, I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow description. I will tell you that his presentation was standing room only, at least until the latter half of his session. When it came time for the workshop part of his program, he broke us up into four groups to discuss an assigned topic, and report back to the entire room. There was a beeline for the door when he announced this; I kid you not. C’mon, PR peeps, where’s your sense of adventure?!
What was Interesting? Well. . .
- It was interesting learning about Mike’s experience as a citizen journalist during the Obama campaign. There were some great examples about building communities and letting them run (which is a concept that, in my opinion, nonprofits know how to do particularly well).
- Actresses, no matter how well trained they are on messaging, can sometimes let blatant honesty shine through. Mike gave the example of an interview he conducted with Anne Hathaway where she admitted she doesn’t know anything about Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
- One of the most interesting parts of the program was when we were put in breakout groups (I’ll get to that later).
