Case study: Obama fundraising website production process

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1.

Kyle Rush is a website engineer.

He joined BarackObama.com in June 2011 to design the Obama website for the 2012 U.S. election.

(pictured in the June 2011 Obama website)

In addition to publicity, the main purpose of the official website is fund-raising.

Obama raised 690 million dollars in the last election. This is a big number, but as the US economy has been on the rebound for the past 4 years, the election is bound to be more capital, with a record of $1 billion trillion in the team's estimated capital needs.

A website that raises 1 billion of dollars, never in history. Kyle Rush doesn't know if he can do it, but he knows he can't win the election without money.

2.

The 2012 U.S. election is now over, and Obama narrowly defeated Mitt Romney. He eventually raised 1.1 billion of dollars and became the highest-paid (and most expensive) presidential candidate in history. In the second place, Mitt Romney, he raised 1 billion dollars. )

Of these 1.1 billion dollars, the line raised 410 million, online raised 690 million. BarackObama.com a Web site alone, creating 250 million of dollars in donations.

In 6 months time, barackobama.com shared

* 17,807,917 visitors, 81,548,259 times page access

* 4,276,463 Contributions

* Contribution conversion rate of 24% (per four visitors, one person will donate)

How did such splendid achievements be achieved?

3.

It is no easy job to make a very large, experienced, and persuasive website that can persuade people to donate money and be able to deal with them safely and quickly.

Recently, Kyle Rush wrote an article, revealing a lot of insider, from a technical point of view summed up BarackObama.com's production experience. Let's take a look at how Obama's technical team did it.

(pictured in the May 2012 Obama website)

The site's production team, starting in the second half of the 2011, is the first front-end engineer to join, Rush the web's appearance and user experience.

Initially, the site was on a team-purchased server, and the operation and donations were fairly smooth. However, as competition intensifies, the situation becomes worrisome. By May 2012, Mr. Romney's fundraising for the first time was more than Obama's for the month.

The campaign headquarters decided that the website must be revised to try to get donations. As a result, the technical team began a large-scale expansion of full-time front-end engineers from 1 to 14 people, of whom 6 were specifically responsible for making fund-raising pages.

4.

The first decision made by the technical team was to use static web site Builder Jekyll to replace dynamic Web pages with static Web pages and speed up the page opening. The faster the Web site should be opened, the better. Amazon's sales are down 1% per 100 milliseconds, according to research.

The second decision is to put all the Web pages on a CDN and the service provider is Akamai. It is the world's largest CDN provider, with a total of more than 50,000 servers deployed in the United States to achieve the desired speed of access. Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters can download the Hogne Web page in 20 milliseconds.

The third decision is to make the background of the donation into an API call. This is because 23% of visitors use mobile devices, so multiple front-end (web-side and mobile-side) must be deployed. With APIs, you can have different front-end communications in the same way as in the background, passing information in JSON format.

The fourth decision is that the background is developed in PHP language and placed on Amazon's EC2 platform.

The fifth decision was to develop two backgrounds to avoid downtime. Once a system stops working, it automatically switches to another one at once. This is important because downtime not only affects morale but also has huge economic losses. Because donations are pouring in every minute, the highest record is 3 million dollars an hour, you can't let it stop.

5.

After the initial completion of the new Web site, the use of webpagetest.org to test, the results are encouraging.

The original page is not loaded after 4 seconds, the new version can be seen in 1 seconds. The speed of access to the entire platform rose by 60%, and the conversion rate of donations increased by 14%.

The next step is to fine-tune the details of the page, with a total of 240 A/b tests, that is, at least 240 iterations.

The adjusted page, the visual effects and the user experience have been greatly improved (click to see the big picture), the contribution conversion rate has increased by 49%.

With the election of Mr Obama, BarackObama.com has carried out 1101 front-end deployments.

6.

As it turns out, the whole development program is very successful and the fundraising mission is completed without a minute downtime.

Kyle Rush felt the need to summarize and leave a record. In addition to the above development process, he mentions the tools used by the front-end team: Version control GitHub, A/b test Management Optimizely, code compilation Codekit.

Kyle Rush concludes by saying:

"I am absolutely certain that this is the best development environment I have ever experienced." We are constantly adjusting to the incredible increase in the conversion rate of donations. The whole team was very satisfied. But, most happily, January 21, 2013 Barack Obama is still the President of the United States!

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Author: Ruan Feng