Robert E. Finch

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Robert E. "Bob" Finch (b. 1959) is professional consultant who specializes in public relations-related project management with a particular emphasis on the healthcare, information technology and community-based organization vertical markets.

Origins

Born in Evansville, Indiana, he grew up in Fort Lauderdale Florida and graduated from Fort Lauderdale High School in 1977. After a year break, he went to the University of Florida (UF), where he earned a B.S. Degree in Journalism with a major in Public Relations and minor in Political Science in December, 1982. He is a former Gator Growl staff writer and a member of Theta Chi Fraternity.

Early Career

After graduating from UF, Finch returned to Fort Lauderdale to begin his career. He was immediately hired as an independent contractor to run pool deck and seaside shows promoting products to college students who would come to town for Fort Lauderdale's notorious Spring Break shenanigans. At the conclusion of Spring Break in 1983, he turned down an offer to tour the nation with a promotional company that specialized in direct product marketing to vacationers at various resort towns during the heights of their tourist seasons. Instead, he decided to stay in Fort Lauderdale to pursue public relations work; however, it was politics that came calling first.

Political Activities

His first big break came when he was chosen to serve as Finance Director for U.S. Congressman E. Clay Shaw, Jr. in his successful 1984 re-election campaign. For the next few years, except for a stint as Income Development Director for the American Cancer Society in Broward County, his primary focus was on politics and he developed a reputation for being able to identify political precincts in which there were, based on his analysis of past voting patterns, likely to be large numbers of "persuadable" voters.

From the late 1980's to the early 1990's, Finch ran the Florida Medical Association's (FMA) Regional Office in Miami. While there he was responsible for public relations, advocacy, lobbying & political campaign consulting for the association and the medical community. He also recruited, educated and organized physicians into advocacy teams that became an effective grassroots force for influencing the Florida Legislature.

As a part of his duties with the FMA, Finch worked three full election cycles and various special elections doing campaign analyses and consulting for candidates supported by the association's political action committee, FLAMPAC. As a result of his work there, coupled with his long-time interest as a computer hobbyist, he acquired a set of public records of historical voting data and began work on a database methodology for ranking precincts in order of importance that could be used by campaigns and candidates to plan resource allocation, primarily for campaigns for state legislative offices.

From 1993 to 1996 Finch took a break from political work and joined the North Broward Hospital District as a Physician Services Administrator responsible for convincing physicians to admit more of their patients to his assigned hospital. There, he further honed his ideas about using past behavior to predict and influence future behavior by using state-provided admission history and trends data to determine which physicians in the market exhibited both growing practices and flexibility in admitting patterns. The resulting list of physicians became the focus for the hospital administrators to seek out and develop relationships with. The strategy worked and admissions increased far beyond the best pro-forma accounting projections.

In 1997, Finch put his campaign database ideas to the test when he contracted with the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) to produce reports and maps that were used for planning the Broward County strategy for Jeb Bush's successful bid for Governor in 1998. In 1994, Bush had run for governor and won the rest of the state by 40 thouand votes, but lost Broward by 80 thousand votes. While Bush probably could not win Broward outright in 1998, if he could cut the margin of loss in half, it would have a big impact on the statewide outcome. Finch's research identified precincts in which the allocation of additional campaign resources would have the largest positive impact on the Bush campaign.

In 2000, he managed the Debby Sanderson for Florida Senate campaign, a Republican seeking election in a district that spanned the boundary between Broward County and Palm Beach County. Because of the political environment, most local pundits predicted Sanderson would lose; she ended up with a comfortable 8000-vote margin of victory.

Senator Elect Sanderson was the only GOP candidate in the region not forced to wait through vote recounts. It is possible that the campaign's get out the vote(GOTV) strategy and execution played an important role in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election; any additional voters that the campaign motivated to turn out would not only have been votes for Sanderson, but would have been predominately votes added to George W. Bush's Florida total.

Project Management

After the 2000 election Finch refocused his professional activities toward consultancy and project management. Since that election, most of his time has been spent working on various public relations, marketing, and computer-related projects. The primary focus of his current work is in project management on behalf of healthcare companies.

While he still contracts with political candidates with whom he has a particularly strong affinity, his politics has evolved into a more personal, issue-oriented mode facilitated by the evolution of technology. Today, Finch's politics are more of a passionate avocation than a career interest.

On-Line Presence

The advent of the Internet,and particularly Blogging as enabling venues for individuals to once again engage in the traditional American practice of publishing anonymously under pseudonyms (Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac and various other nom de plumes are examples) Finch became and has remained active in numerous on-line political venues for more than a decade. As a descendant of several of the first American colonists, including Governor John Endecott, he remains mindfully Conservative of his rich legacy of handed-down stories and values. He considers his anonymous publications to be both a nod to his heritage and a safeguard against the retribution that has become a hallmark of the politically correct atmosphere of these times.

Since 1994, Finch has been publishing his personal web site, bob.finch.org, which serves both as his personal portfolio space and as a sandbox for trying out new coding techniques.

Finch also currently publishes two blogs under his real name, 150-Word Limit, which focuses on communications and technology issues and The Movement You Need, launched in July 2006, which will become the home of his opinion columns, editorial pages and other written works. He intends to also continue ghostwriting for clients and friends, and publishing under pseudonyms at blogs and other forums, the most prominent of which is RedState.