R.E.D.D. began with a 52-bullet checklist of actions that the NRSC expected campaigns to take, broken into seven categories: campaign structure, website, email, fundraising, social/video, advertising and data/analytics.
Finn then prepared report cards for the campaigns, tracking their performance in each of the seven categories. She hired a deputy, Kelsey Jarrett, who had been in the Google Fellows program. In 2012, the digital team at the NRSC had only included two people. In 2014, Finn and Jarrett were part of a roughly 20-person team based at NRSC headquarters.
But Finn was the linchpin in standardizing digital and tech standards across campaigns, a particular challenge in midterm elections.
In a presidential election, major party nominees and their campaigns tend to set the tone and to create the culture that determines how an array of campaigns work, which vendors and technologies they use, and their best practices. Certainly, that was the case in 2008 and 2012 with the Obama campaigns, which had enormous influence on the entire Democratic Party apparatus. In a non-presidential year election, however, there is much less that binds campaigns of the same party together. They use different vendors and consultants, different tactics and different technologies.
In the absence of the unifying force of a presidential campaign, Lira and Finn played the role of heavy.
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