The audience roars its approval as she steps up to the makeshift stage in the upscale 1920s inspired bar, Monroe. The dark lighting and classic celebrity glamour of the lounge belies the primary purpose that gathered over a hundred millennials early Thursday evening. Yet Stephanie Hannon, standing in front of the crowd with a casual confidence, embraces the ambience:
“This campaign has been seven days a week since Christmas,” evoking groans of awe and sympathy. “But its a joy to be back in my hometown, even if is for just 24 hours.”
The Stanford (and Harvard Business School) alum buzzes with sincere energy as she explains that working for Hillary for America (HFA) is analogous to working at a company. Comparing to her time at Google, Stephanie discusses building products for the campaign while working with a strong thirty-nine person team of product managers, data analysts, engineers from frontend, backend, security, infrastructure and more. Like Knights at the Round Table, these individuals work tirelessly to achieve their quest to get Hillary Clinton elected as the 45th United States President.
Their most recent adventure, Super Tuesday, gives us a glimpse at the day-to-day. Electing a president is hard work, and every single minute is spent trying to get people to their polls and caucuses. Knocking on doors, phone banks, and events are all invested heavily in but none of that would be possible without the technology.
Stephanie faces unique challenges when developing the tools that drives this work: the campaign is heavily data-driven. The CTO mentions that many of the employees are from Optimizely and the data science team is constantly working on lists: who they are trying to activate, the persuasion target, the get out the vote target, etc., which is only one part. HFA also uses third party companies such as MassMailer to help with other aspects of the campaign like mass mailing voters. Finally, once the users are engaged, the HFA website needs to make accessing voter information or providing donations as seamless as possible. With Super Tuesday, most of the focus was on donations, and so once users are engaged, the campaign attempts to get them to donate, save their credit card information, consider making a recurring payment, and if they have done all that, then convincing them to invite all their other friends to start the process.
Even despite all this great insight into the inner workings of HFA, it is clear to the gathered group that this work is just a sampling of the technology and efforts put forward.The CTO’s one-year anniversary with the campaign is just around the corner (April 6th) and there are still eight more months of driving the technology efforts to go!
Stephanie discusses this drive and her passionate efforts to give potential voters a glimpse of the real Hillary Clinton. Working with channels such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter, Stephanie describes how she just wants everyone to see what she sees in Hillary: “She is warm, she is funny, she is whip-smart, she’s quick, she’s..
“Amazing!” A young woman calls out before cheers burst out from everyone present.
“Yes, she’s amazing!” Drawing on her own background, Stephanie explains that as a woman in computer science, she, like many others, learned deeply the importance of finding role models. When Stephanie was deciding in March of 2015 to work for the campaign, she emphasizes that the decision relied simply on getting to know Hillary Clinton independently and evaluating her as a person.
So addressing this question “Why Hillary? Why did I choose her?”, Stephanie recounts
“I read and read and read and read. I tried to learn about her. I didn’t know she had worked on the Children’s Defense Fund right out of law school. I didn’t know she had made that choice. I heard her Beijing speech in 1995 ‘Women’s Rights are Human’s Rights’ but I didn’t know how controversial it was or how many people she had to stand up to to make that speech to a 180 countries. I didn’t know about her quest to […] I’m just saying I read about her. I read and read and read and then I met her.”
The personal insight into her decision process connects with the crowd. Leaning in closer, they hear Stephanie’s conclusion: Hillary Clinton is a role model.
And that was enough for Stephanie to “give up everything and move to Brooklyn and I don’t regret a single day of this amazing adventure.” Her life experiences prompt Stephanie to leave her listeners with two valuable lessons that her professional choices thus far epitomize:
“Pick work that you are passionate about […] and do things that scare you.”
A role model herself, Stephanie Hannon leads the quest to get Hillary Clinton elected as the 45th United States President and she has this writer following her journey.
