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Ithaca College profile
As a junior at Ithaca College, Rob Flaherty ’13 helped elect the youngest-ever mayor of the city of Ithaca. Just seven years later, he’s helped Joe Biden get elected as the oldest-ever president of the United States. And, as of Jan. 20, he is working from the White House as its new director of digital strategy.
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Rob Flaherty '13, director of digital strategy for the White House.
Flaherty was named to the position at the end of December. He will manage the Office of Digital Strategy, overseeing a team of 20 staff members handling social media and digital creative strategy for the Biden/Harris administration.
Even as Biden was being sworn in as the 46th president, Flaherty was working behind the scenes to transfer all the social media accounts from the previous administration to the new one, and hustling with his team to get new content from President Biden out the door.
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Flaherty was deputy digital communications director for the Hillary for America campaign in her run against Donald Trump. While the opponent was the same four years later, Flaherty said the strategy shifted this time around to capitalize on the strengths of the candidate.
“The best digital campaigns are the ones that reflect the values of their candidates,” he says. “You can't run an Obama campaign for Hillary Clinton, and you can't run a Clinton campaign for Joe Biden. We built a program that reflected his values, that brought people together, that showed empathy and didn't divide people but provided people with hope.”
“But, the things we need to do to win during the pandemic were the things we needed to do to win before the pandemic.”
Rob Flaherty '13, director of digital strategy for the White House
This time, the digital aspect of the campaign took on even greater importance, as in-person events were replaced with virtual events and candidates were unable to connect with voters in person. Flaherty says the campaign tried to make people feel as if they were engaging with Biden, even if they couldn’t speak with him. He acknowledges that running a campaign during a pandemic was not ideal.
“But, the things we need to do to win during the pandemic were the things we needed to do to win before the pandemic,” he says. “Generally, building a community of supporters who wanted to take action and felt respected and empowered and connecting people through the campaign, making people feel hopeful about the future of the country and pushing for a more empathetic vision of leadership; all of those things were part of the plan to win in February, before the whole world shut down.”
Those things were made even more important, he says, by the harsh realities people were facing in the early days of the pandemic. Biden started recording video addresses in a studio in the basement of his Wilmington, Delaware, home. His campaign shared videos and stories on social media they hoped would resonate with voters and create a sense of optimism. For example, one video showed Biden meeting and talking with Brayden Harrington, a 13-year-old boy who has a stutter, just as Biden did in his youth. The video was viewed more than 2 million times. When Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson endorsed Biden and Harris, the video received more than 5 million views.
They were even able to do some things that wouldn’t have happened in the absence of a pandemic. For instance, instead of hosting in-person fundraisers, they were able to put on a virtual grassroots fundraiser for 100,000 people featuring the Broadway cast of “Hamilton.” The Democratic National Convention was also held mostly virtually.
Flaherty said the campaign was also able to capitalize on the trend of posting positive content, à la John Krasinki’s “Some Good News.”
“There are massive problems with social media platforms, from top to bottom,” Flaherty says. “They intensify and encourage division and argument and polarizationand these are all things that we as a society need to work through, but at their best, they can show and promote empathy and that hope that we were trying to demonstrate and engender in our program.
“You know, we weren't going to ‘happy puppy’ our way to winning the election, but there was something to the idea that there's an audience out there that looks for a positive vision, and, for these stories of togetherness and compassion, particularly during a pandemic right in this moment in time
https://www.ithaca.edu/news/digital-native-becomes-digital-director-white-house