RNC Chairman Reince Priebus Announces Data, Digital and Technology Changes To Kick Off Presidential Campaign

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus Announces Key Data, Digital and Technology Changes To Kick Off Presidential Campaign
 
WASHINGTON – The Republican National Committee announced important changes to expand the data, digital and technology teams as our party builds on our midterm successes. It was the first announcement of the presidential cycle made by new RNC Chief of Staff Katie Walsh and Chairman Reince Priebus.
 
“For the first time the RNC completely integrated our digital, data and technology capabilities to help us identify voters, volunteers and donors with great success in the 2014 midterm cycle. We built the first engineering and data science team that created voter scores, the API and important voter contact applications and our online marketing teams set records,” said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. “As we begin our road to the White House there are going to be new and bigger demands on our digital, data and technology teams. I look forward to working with my team as we expand our mission building on our successes from the midterms.”
 
The 2016 RNC Digital, Data and Technology Team:
 
JESSE KAMZOL will be our new Chief Data Officer as we look to expand our data operations to perfect the voter scores that provided us intel on the electorate much earlier and consistently than ever before – allowing us to make decisions to help influence the elections with our ground game. This also includes more resources for data enhancements, expanded analytics, and a new data hosting environment. Kamzol has spent nearly a decade working with political data within the RNC and in the field assisting countless campaigns with strategic data, last serving as Deputy Data Director. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a concentration in economics focusing on game theory.
 
AZARIAS REDA will be our new Chief Technology Officer leading the effort to expand the technology operations to help provide new tools like last cycle’s API and canvassing apps that allowed us to get more, better data in a more streamlined fashion than ever before. This will include mobile applications, new GOP.com features and continued build out of APIs. Reda has most recently served as the RNC’s Chief Data Officer. Before the RNC Reda worked at a tech start-up in Austin, Texas, LinkedIn in Silicon Valley and Microsoft Research in India. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a PhD in computer science engineering after moving to the States from Ethiopia as a college student in Kansas.
 
MINDY FINN will serve as Senior Advisor for Digital to plan the transition between midterm and presidential as we expand the digital operations including donor prospecting, building on the record breaking digital marketing from the midterms and working more with state parties and candidates on social media operations. Finn has led digital strategy for more than a decade, running a boutique consultancy where she advises political organizations and startups. A veteran of three presidential campaigns, she also worked at Twitter and was a founding partner of Engage.  
 
ANDY BARKETT will serve as Senior Advisor to the Chairman on Technology as we look to make key technological breakthroughs in a presidential cycle and beyond. Andy Barkett has more than a decade of experience working in strategy and digital engineering. He joined the RNC from Facebook, where he was in charge of dozens of engineers on six production engineering teams. He formerly worked as senior director of engineering for Livescribe, as senior management consultant for Nvidia and as a technical program manager for Google. He is also an active investor in America’s future generations and is an angel investor for multiple start-ups.
 
Building On 2014 Successes:
• Increased our modeling data points by 3800% resulting in 9.6 billion modeled data points
• Increased real time voter contact data points by 95%
• Increased voter information by 52%
• 11.7 million low turnout voters targeted
• 715 universes created
• 9.3 billion voter scores created
• Predicated Alaska and Colorado within less than 1%
• Refreshed the voter file more frequently than ever before
• 8 million Facebook friends collected to date
• New GOP.com helped us increase traffic by over 110% which translated into new registered users, more absentee and early vote completions
• Monitored 128 conversation topics on social media
• Created 250 social media reports, supporting Senate campaigns
• Increased social media reach from 225 million in 2013 to 2.6 billion in 2014
• Acquired over half a million emails through social media
• Over 17 million Get Out The Vote emails sent
• Over 400 ad creative tested on nearly 3 million unique voters

Where Do We Start in 2016:
• New GOP.com features
• Data enhancements
• New data hosting environment
• Expanded voter scores and analytics
• Online donor prospecting
• Multi-channel marketing
• Continued build-out of APIs
• Mobile applications