In 14 months, Randall Woodfin went from a city attorney with little name recognition to Birmingham's mayor-elect. And he triumphed by running a campaign for the digital age, using strategies never before seen in the Magic City.

Woodfin's campaign pooh-poohed traditional campaign tactics like blanketing neighborhoods with literature and paying uninspired volunteers to knock on doors in favor of an analytics-based approach that helped the campaign target potential voters who were most likely to vote for the former school board president. The campaign did use some traditional methods like campaign signs, but they were not the focus of the campaign.

Through campaign software the Woodfin team was able to license through the state Democratic Party , "we built a really solid voter target after a lot of experience and a lot of testing," said Daniel Deriso, the campaign's field and operations manager. While the mayoral election was nonpartisan, Birmingham is a Democratic city, so the software was helpful.

At first, the campaign found that the typical Woodfin voter was young and on the lower end of the income spectrum.

"As Randall got more name recognition, that line bled," Deriso said, and the campaign started attracting old and young African-American voters and Hispanics in addition to white millennials. "Out of nowhere, come June or July, our support was doubling at an incredible rate."

When campaign volunteers canvassed neighborhoods, they weren't having one-way conversations with potential voters.

"On Randall's campaign, we stressed having full conversations with people," said Taylor Packer, a Woodfin field organizer. "We really got to know the issues that each voter was having in that area. People knew that we cared."

Woodfin's embrace of modern campaign strategies gave him an advantage over incumbent Mayor William Bell, who has been involved in local politics for decades, according to Deriso.

"People stay with what they think is tried and true, and its 2017, and there's so many aspects to campaigning now - social media, emails, fundraising online," Deriso said. "You have to make things as accessible as possible for people."

For example, Bell's campaign didn't have an online donation platform, instead asking potential donors to mail checks to a post office box. Meanwhile, Woodfin's campaign embraced ActBlue, a grassroots Democratic online platform that gives campaigns access to small-money donors who previously contributed to campaigns through ActBlue. As a result, the Woodfin camp tapped into a network of millions of potential donors, and amassed 4,000 small-dollar donors - the most of any Birmingham municipal campaign.

The campaign's fundraising appeals included one pitch that explained how $30 donations were going to be used to buy radio air time for the campaign. The connection between a donation and its impact empowered donors, Deriso said.

Woodfin heavily targeted prospective first-time voters as part of his campaign strategy. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Woodfin, made a robocall on his behalf that appealed to 12,000 such voters, Deriso said. The phone calls turned out more than 1,000 voters, with the Sanders appeal being the only contact from the campaign to that voting bloc.

The strategy was an efficient one for the Woodfin campaign: In the Oct. 3 runoff between Woodfin and Bell, 11,500 voters never voted in a municipal election before. Of those voters, 1,500 were between 18 and 24 years old, and 5,000 were between 18 and 35 years old.

But even with the campaign's in-depth approach to courting voters, Deriso said the effort would have been for naught if not for the candidate.

"Randall's message - we couldn't have done anything, any of this stuff, without the candidate. I need to throw full credit to Randall," he said. "He's personable, he's young, he's good looking, and he knows what he's talking about. Every single person he talked to .... he just has genuine conversations with everybody, which is not something I see in politicians at all. Without Randall's message and policy agenda, none of this would have been popular."