An important aspect of any knowledge management strategy is to establish an environment of continuous sharing, collaboration and knowledge reuse. During the democratic primary and the presidential campaign the Obama team leveraged email list gathered partly through their internet site and their push for campaign donations through the mail, including list harvested during Obama’s run for the United States Senate. The emails were leveraged (and are still being leveraged) to push out information and knowledge to supporters, solicit donations and to solicit additional email list of people that want to get involved, partly enticed by the possiblility of winning certain promotional items identified by the Obama email (see example - http://www.pic2009.org/page/invite/tickettohistory).
The Obama team would utilized these email list, determine where in the country these supporters live and dispatch teams to these locations to mobilize these and other supporters to get out the vote for Barack. This process was repeated (reused) all over the country. This created a “grass roots” effort to gain support and votes for Barack Obama. The emails served as a vehicle to build organic Communities of Practice (CoP) for Obama, to disseminate knowledge and build support for the Obama campaign and subsequent presidency. This strategy empowered supporters to hold their own functions (lunches, dinner parties, other special events) to showcase Barak Obama’s message and to talk about the issues.
Through targeted email marketing, development of communities as vehicles to share knowledge, and creating and executing a repeatable process, established a foundation to a knowledge management strategy that was able to expand. I will post more about this iterative expansion of the Obama Knowledge Management Strategy as we continue this dialog. I look forward to all thoughts and comments.
Happy New Year!Labels: Barack Obama, Communities of Practice, CoP, Knowledge Management Strategy, Knowledge Reuse, Knowledge Sharing