Blogging Herstory: Telling Hillary Clinton’s story — and ours.
Hillary Clinton’s personal hero, the great Maya Angelou, put it best:
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
That was the guiding principle behind The Feed, our beloved campaign blog. It was also our greatest challenge.
Unlike most presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton launched her 2016 bid with nearly universal name recognition. She’d been a public servant for 30+ years and was voted America’s most admired woman in 20 of them.
In that time, she’d come to symbolize many things to many people (some of them fair, some not at all.) Even her supporters were split: to her millennial fans, she was a meme-sparking international badass. To their parents, she was a trailblazing former first lady and U.S. senator.
Few could hold a candle to her resume, but in many ways, decades in the public eye had created a gap between “Hillary” the persona, and Hillary the person. It was easy to tout all the posts she’d held or causes she’d championed (and we did!). The hard part was conveying the why behind the what.
We wanted people to know the Hillary all of us had come to know and love: the young law school grad who’d gone to work for the Children’s Defense Fund instead of a big firm …the working mom who wrote her law firm’s maternity leave policy because the men at the helm didn’t think to do it…the candidate who cares deeply about individual people she meets and remembers their names and stories long after (I witnessed this one myself!).
We wanted to show the world who Hillary was and what she valued — and why we were so proud to count ourselves among her supporters. That meant telling the story of us. In a little over a year and roughly 700 blog posts, The Feed became an effective vehicle for doing exactly that.
Our blog was never designed to change hearts and minds (there were plenty of tools better-suited for persuasion.) We knew our core audience would be largely supportive and somewhat niche: a mix of superfans who couldn’t get enough Hillary-related content, along with more casual supporters who wanted to keep up with the campaign.
Reaching that first group was especially critical. It’s no secret that the Internet wasn’t exactly a safe space for Hillary fans. Professing support for HRC meant diving head first into a current of snarky pundits, misogynist trolls, conspiracy theorists and more. It’s no wonder so many took their support underground to closed-group havens like Pantsuit Nation.
It was our job to bring these supporters into the HFA family, to give them meaningful stories that they wouldn’t find elsewhere — and most important, to give them content that they’d be proud to share with their friends and family.
Those stories were told from and many perspectives and took every form we could think of — from policy explainers and listicles to infographics and quizzes. When formats worked (i.e. vintage photo essays) we used them over and over. When they didn’t (i.e. supporter vignettes), we retired them.
We didn’t have the time or runway to make The Feed a regular web destination people would visit regularly, so instead we followed the playbook of outlets like Buzzfeed and Upworthy, relying solely on social media promotion to get our content in front of people who followed the campaign on Facebook or Twitter.
We borrowed their strategies to optimize our content — from leveraging trending topics to more granular decisions like share images, layout, and optimizing for mobile.
The 13 months of The Feed were an experiment by trial-and error. There were as many hard lessons as wins. But by the end we’d built something truly meaningful, and we saw its power both quantitatively and qualitatively.
In the home stretch to Election Day, The Feed was racking up 2 and 3 million unique visitors a month, simply unheard of for a campaign blog. And that engagement helped to fuel online donations and galvanize early voters.
But to me the most powerful outcome was the shift we saw in how the Internet reacted to Hillary. Supporters were taking on the trolls, proudly sharing our content — and proudly declaring their support for all of social media to see.
And despite our heartbreaking loss, we’ve seen that pride in our candidate and campaign live on. We watched it grow and thrive in supporter-driven groups that have spun up since (shoutout to Nasty Women Serve!). And that is the best feeling of all.
Hillary for America’s content and creative team included Logan Anderson, Kat Kane, Danielle Kantor, Sam Koppelman, Paola Luisi, Brian McBride, Samy Nemir Olivares, Lauren Peterson, Marcos Saldivar, and Kajal Singh. Our rock star interns were Samira Baird, David Berezin, Maz Do, Sydney Jean Gottfried, Elif Koc, Sophy Passacantando, Camille Peterson, and Amanda Robinson.
