Engage-built tool was Gillespie’s secret weapon at the Republican Party of Virginia’s Convention

On Saturday, June 7, Virginia Republicans gathered in Roanoke to nominate their candidate for the United States Senate. With months of hard work, enthusiastic supporters, a strong ground game, and a state-of-the-art convention strategy, Ed Gillespie earned the nomination by acclamation.

The Republican Party of Virginia’s State Convention is a traditional political nominating convention, where Republicans gather to hear from party leaders, elected officials, and candidates for office. The Gillespie campaign wanted to make sure they were using modern technology in this traditional setting in order to emerge from the process with the nomination.

Enter Ground Control, a tool built by Engage and deployed for Ed Gillespie’s campaign. Ground Control gave them the ability not only to track delegates as they checked in with real time updates, but monitor who was undecided and who was voting for Gillespie, and how many weighed votes each delegate was worth in order to win the convention.

Each county or city is weighted according to a formula based on its population and electoral history. Then, the county or city’s total votes are divided amongst a set number of delegates. The votes are ultimately distributed evenly amongst each delegate who actually attends the convention.

In the weeks leading up to the convention, the campaign recruited Virginians to file to be delegates, and then identified delegates’ preferred candidate through phone calls, emails, online surveys, and door-to-door. Once this data was entered into Ground Control, the field staff was able to identify key opportunities to persuade undecided delegates.

During the convention, the Gillespie floor team saw when undecided delegates were checking in (and how many votes they were worth) and could more efficiently focus their attention, whether by having Ed speak directly with a delegate or via a surrogate.

Back in the war room, we would listen for the floor captains to report back on the status of the delegates in their unit. The application was responsive, so field staffers could easily update a delegate’s preferences from the floor (though we updated many delegates from the war room).

This may sound easy to accomplish, but it hasn’t always been like this. In the past, and for many conventions still, campaigns had to keep long spreadsheets of delegates and expect their field teams to go out onto the convention floor to see who was present and round up an idea of who they believed would be willing to vote for their candidate. This used up valuable resources since they couldn’t easily identify a delegate with a higher weighted vote than someone else. Seems pretty inefficient, right?

Of course, technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it must have strong offline support to succeed. The two key elements to Ground Control’s success were the Republican Party of Virginia, which provided check-in data live to all of the campaigns, and the Gillespie campaign’s impressive ground game. Gillespie’s industrious field staff had done the hard, on-the-ground work signing up delegates for months before the convention, so on convention day they were easily able to identify and influence delegates.

To watch this process of digital effortlessly mesh with a highly skilled field time was incredibly rewarding. Ground Control enabled the Gillespie campaign to execute their convention strategy effectively, confidently, and efficiently. We hope to bring this tool to other campaigns around the country and make their convention experiences easier, faster, and victorious.