TO:FanDuel
FROM:Bradley, Seth
RE:How we win this thing
DATE:December 2, 2015
The more we work on this campaign, the more apparent it becomes that the way we win this fight nationally is by awakening and mobilizing the more than five million people across the United States who regularly play daily fantasy sports. We have a community of customers who are, in most cases, not politically active, not necessarily even regular voters, but they love playing fantasy sports and they do not want some politician taking it away from them. If they were going to vote, it’d be over an issue like this, and the more we help them get there by registering them to vote, telling them exactly where their elected officials stand, mobilizing them as we try to pass legislation in each state, and then running a real get-out-the-vote effort, the better our chances of achieving the goal of every effective special interest: letting elected officials know that if they vote against the group’s interests, there’s a heavy price to pay at the ballot box.
Why do our fans matter?
Our fans are: (a) numerous; (b) easy to reach; and (c) passionate about fantasy sports. All of our research shows that while they are fine with reasonable regulations (provided it doesn’t get in their way), they are not fine with anyone who takes away their right to play (their view is pretty straightforward: they’re adults, they’re capable of making their own decisions and they don’t need a politician telling them what they can and can’t do).
Numerous
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Between FanDuel and DraftKings, we have more than five million customers spanning virtually every single state, every congressional district, every state senate district, and every assembly district. If properly organized, it makes our constituency among the most populous issue groups in the nation. Below is a sample of major, national special interest groups and their membership.
Entity / National MembershipAFL-CIO / 11.5 million
Planned Parenthood / 8 million
National Rifle Association / 5 million
Moveon.Org / 5 million
FanDuel/ Draft Kings / 5 million
SEIU / 1.9 million
Teamsters / 1.5 million
NARAL / 1 million
ACLU / 500,000
AIPAC / 150,000
On top of that, 57 million people in the United States (and Canada) play fantasy sports. –about 11 percent of the electorate. Of those, 84 percent supports a law allowing daily fantasy sports. The overwhelming majority hold intense opinion on the issue. Not all of them are easily reachable and not all of them will care what happens to FanDuel and DraftKings, but if we’re out there, banging the drum about how a political elected official either supports or opposes their right to play fantasy sports, some of them (beyond our own five million active customers who we’re talking to directly) will notice and act on it.
Easy to reach
We’re a technology company. We communicate with our customers digitally, many of them every single day. We know their emails. We know the popular social media handles (and the fantasy community is exceptionally active on multiple platforms). And they visit our site all of the time. The effort and cost involved in reaching, educating and mobilizing our customers is fairly minimal. It is far easier for us to reach this particular population than it is for an elected official to reach them.
Our reach also extends beyond iPhones or computers – we can reach customers in any jurisdiction through TV ads too. We’ve already shot spots to deal with the issue in New York and the message applies everywhere: don’t take away this thing I love. There’s no shortage of ways to convey that message to our customers (and to the other 50+ million people also playing fantasy sports).
Passionate
You don’t need us to tell you about your own customers. They love sports. They love fantasy sports. They talk about it constantly and it’s very much a way of life for many of them. And just like all of the different interest groups listed above, people react – strongly – when their way of life is threatened. That’s our biggest weapon.
To be clear, we’re not curing cancer with this effort or by offering people the chance to play fantasy sports in the first place. And this is not a moral or ideological issue like abortion or guns or immigration. It’s just fantasy sports. But our customers care a lot about it, they love to play, and they don’t want it taken away from them.
How do we organize our customers?
There are five steps necessary to turn our fans into a potent political force in districts across the country.
(1).Register our customers to vote. Many of our customers likely are registered voters, but many are not. If we gave them a reason to register and made it easy to do so, many will. We need to get every one of our customers registered to vote, and that means sending them voter registration forms, giving them a reason to register and making it easy for them to register. We have major added advantage over most any large interest group trying mobilize voters: our issue is completely non-partisan and we do not care at all what party they enroll in, so we’re not at risk of turning off anyone. With the use of some basic analytics, we can target just those players that are currently unregistered and focus all our attention and resources on them. Partnering with a non-partisan voter registration nonprofit like Rock The Vote, iVote, Project Vote or lead a coalition of like-minded tech companies to start our own voter registration focused organization.
(2).Make sure they know who’s with them and who’s against them. Most people, in general, don’t pay close attention to politics, and even fewer pay attention to specific legislative issues. When it comes to fantasy sports, we need to change that. Through email, through Twitter, on the site itself and through every other platform we have access (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc…), we need to organize our customers by assembly district, state senate district, congressional district and state so we can let them know exactly who supports their right to play fantasy sports and who wants to take it away from them. This would work anywhere, whether a big state like New York, California or Florida, a medium sized state like New Jersey or a smaller state like Rhode Island or Delaware.
For example, all New York customers would be regularly notified about Attorney General Schneiderman’s attempts to deny them the right to play fantasy sports. And if Governor Cuomo, Speaker Heastie, Senate Majority Leader Flanagan or anyone else comes in to support fantasy sports (through legislation that would counteract Schneiderman’s efforts to ban), we’d make sure our customers knew that too. Conversely, if any of those elected officials or any State Senator, Assemblymember or other politician weighed in against fantasy sports, we’d hold them to account with their constituents.
This matters because Schneiderman wants to be Governor, he’s mulling a primary challenge to Governor Cuomo in 2018, and given that it’s probably a long-shot bid to begin with, having every fantasy sports customer in New York ready and willing to vote against him does not help his cause. And while he’ll say publicly that he doesn’t care about the politics, just the policy, it should be pretty easy to refute that, given that his actions against fantasy sports clearly did not seem to come out of principle (if so, why wait till now – you’ve been operating for six years, why only target daily fantasy and not the millions of season-long leagues where money is exchanged, why only target FanDuel and DraftKings and not ESPN, CBS, Yahoo or others that run paid entry games, and why take so much campaign money from so many casinos?).
And it’s not just New York. For example:
- In Massachusetts, we would tell our customers about Attorney General Healy’s proposal, what we think works and what doesn’t, and organize them both to weigh in on her plan and to know exactly where their representatives in the statehouse stand.
- In New Jersey, if state legislators see a large outcry against Congressman Pallone and his anti-fantasy views, that could help bring them to the right side of this issue.
- In California, with so many races on the ballot next fall, creating a fantasy sports voter could be meaningful to a lot of candidates across the state.
- In Florida, the grassroots campaign has already begun. Over 7,500 Floridians have already weighed in with their legislators, and that’s without a concerted effort on our part.
(3).Organize and mobilize our customers. The special interest groups above all do an effective (sometimes even outstanding) job at mobilizing their members to weigh in on specific bills, regulations and policies. That’s how politics always work. But now, technology companies like Uber are mobilizing their customers to weigh in with Mayors, Councilmembers, state legislators, Governors and others to support or oppose regulations that would make it easier for them to use Uber or make it harder to use Uber (this has been extraordinarily effective across the country). People will act in their self-interest. Sometimes that means protecting their rights on a broad-based policy level and sometimes it means protecting their rights from politicians who prioritize praise from editorial board members ahead of the interests of their own constituents.
Most elected officials in state government operate in the shadows. They rarely hear from real constituents, so when they do, it makes a difference. Having 700 constituents from their district weigh in directly on a particular piece of legislation goes a long, long way. And given that our customers are digitally sophisticated, once we provide them with the email address, twitter handle and other contact information for their elected officials, it won’t take them more than 30 seconds to let electeds know how they feel. While lobbying, pr, TV ads and other tactics are all necessary parts of a campaign like this, the single most effective tool we have is connecting our customers to their elected officials. And it’s something we can do, easily and frequently.
(4).Keep them informed. We already have the ability to geo-target our customers so they know where their specific elected officials stand on fantasy sports legislation. Every day, we can let them know who’s with them, and who wants to take fantasy sports away from them – and we can do it directly on the site, so they see it as soon as they log in. Our audience is not passive and not indifferent. When they’re on our site, they’re engaged, they’re thinking, they’re active. They’re not changing the channel or fast forwarding on their DVR or clicking to another site because our site is where they want to be. That gives us an opportunity and, at least for more sophisticated elected officials, it makes them realize how dangerous this issue can be.
(5).Get Out The Vote (GOTV). None of this matters if we don’t mobilize our customers when it counts most – on election day (and the 33 states that permit early voting). Most elected officials care about how our customers feel, not because they truly want to know, but because they truly do not want our customers turning out to vote against them (keep in mind, most elections are low turnout, so an infusion of a few thousand votes can change the outcome). That means for every election day (primary and general), we need to activate our customers, whether it’s emailing and calling them to remind them to vote, promoting the need to vote on the site (and making sure they know exactly where each of their representatives stand on their ability to play fantasy sports), and then going a step further and doing what any effective special interest does: rides to the polls, canvassing, phone banking and all of the other tools that help get people to the ballot box to express themselves.
When does this all happen?
We should start registering our customers to vote immediately. And with most legislative sessions beginning in the next six weeks, most of the steps listed above should get going immediately. The good news is, from the day this fight began, we started building the tools to execute each facet of the campaign. So we’re ready. We’re primed. And we now have the opportunity to mobilize millions of people around this one issue, day-in, day-out, until their representatives recognize and respect their right to play the games they love.
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