Learning from the Obama campaign about creating a culture of experimentation in government: An interview with Amelia Showalter, former Director of Digital Analytics at the Obama campaign – Episode #15

Amelia Showalter served as Director of Digital Analytics on Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, leading a team that designed and implemented hundreds of experiments to improve the performance of all types of digital outreach.  Today, she is a consultant who helps organizations achieve better results through testing.

In the interview, we draw on her innovative experience in politics to consider how government — in nonpartisan ways — can learn from the same techniques of testing and experimentation in order to improve program and agency performance. In other words, how can public managers build a culture of rapid organizational testing and improvement?

Web extra: Amelia Showalter talks about the “email derby” in which she and her staff tried to pick the most and least effective versions of fundraising emails and how the derby results underscored the usefulness of randomized testing. [click here]