RNC's Cyrus Krohn Calls It a Day
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, March 5 2009
Despite, as Ben Smith noted, joining a Facebook campaign in favor of keeping his own job, Cyrus Krohn is letting people know today that he's leaving his post as Internet director of the Republican National Committee. The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas has the story, and Krohn shares some parting thoughts of the life of a Republican techie in a post on on the e-Voter Institute blog:
[T]he perception that the GOP is woefully behind online and can’t catch-up is the blog-flogging of political simpletons.
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Change comes quickly online and the tide will turn again in favor of the GOP, once we hone our message and harness emerging technologies. To do that, we must match Democrats, programmer-for-programmer. Regrettably, we’re in terribly short supply of professionals focused solely on building platforms and applications. This is where we got dot bombed in 2006 and 2008. Maybe we should start providing computer science scholarships in exchange for a commitment to serve our party?
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The RNC made some notable gains during the past election cycle. I soon realized our online network was fragmented, our list of e-mail addresses was minimal and we lacked innovation. Today, we host 31 state parties on our website platform, and our e-mail universe has grown from 1.8 million to 12 million addresses. Based on our voter file matches with major web publishers’ databases, we can advertise online directly to 40 million-plus voters. We outperformed the DNC in several areas, accruing twice as many Facebook friends and producing our 2008 Party Platform using the internet. There is a lot more work to do, but the foundation has been laid for new faces to build upon.
Krohn, who has passed time at Microsoft and Yahoo, is heading back west. He and his family are bunkering down, he says, in "the GOP safe-haven of Seattle." Whether he initiated the departure from the new Michael Steele-run RNC Krohn doesn't say. But on the way out, he wishes "RNC Chairman Steele and his new crew [emphasis added] the best in 2010."