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All posts by Ned Ryun.

How to Build Your Own Survey

Customize with Voter Gravity’s Survey Builder

The survey is a critical tool for campaigns to use when going door-to-door or phone banking. Campaigns of all sizes benefit from determining – and recording – the issues with which their voters identify most strongly.

The ability for candidates to create their own customized surveys for their unique campaigns is something we’re very excited about. Campaign staff can easily build surveys through Voter Gravity, allowing you to connect with voters and gather the data that will best serve your campaign! Check out my “how to” video on the step by step process of building a survey. 

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How to Read the Data on Why Obama Won

We’re firm believers in taking a good, hard look at data before making that next step. This includes gathering data from past elections to better inform future campaigns. Conservatives have much to learn from last year’s Presidential Campaigns and a year later, they’re still gathering insight. That’s good.

But what’s not good is when they simply sit on the data and fail to let it affect their future actions. This is one of the reasons why Voter Gravity exists – to use data to spur real, actionable insights. The outcome? Victory for your campaign.

Yesterday, a Washington Post piece by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck titled “What really decided the 2012 election, in 10 graphs” highlighted specific stats on the 2012 Presidential Election. The graphs include the following findings:

  1. Republicans liked Romney. Really!
  2. Conservative Republicans liked Romney too.
  3. Republican primary voters were not much divided by ideology.
  4. Romney appealed to the mainstream of the party.
  5. The economic fundamentals favored Obama.
  6. Party loyalty is really powerful.
  7. Most groups of voters move in similar fashion from election to election.
  8. Obama’s “gifts” didn’t amount to much.
  9. It was hard for Obama or Romney to out-campaign the other.
  10. Romney did not lose because he was perceived as too conservative.
Read their article for more detail and for a look at the graphs themselves. We encourage you to make it your mission to keep up with data on past elections. The implications for future campaigns, including your own, can’t be overstated.

An Inside Look: Voter Gravity in 4 Minutes

New: Log in to mobile app with your email address

For those of you already taking advantage of Voter Gravity, your email address is now your username across all Voter Gravity apps and services. We’ve updated the mobile login to use the same username as the portal, so the next time you log in to voter.mobi, please remember to use your email address instead of the old username. We hope this makes remembering your login info easy!

An inside look

This week, take a step inside Voter Gravity with me. In this short clip the team titled, Creating Walk Lists, but I like to call it An Inside Look at How to Make Your Campaign More Awesome, I introduce you to the Voter Gravity portal and explain how exactly you can easily create and route user-friendly, mapped-out, optimized walk lists in five minutes. Actually, make that four minutes:

What does the Voter Gravity app actually look like? How easy is it to use? If you have questions, we want to make what we can do for you as clear as possible. View this clip and then request a demo to give you an in-depth look at how we can help your campaign complete in minutes what used to take days.

Targeting Voters with Data is a Science, but Not Rocket Science

Data is important. But unless data is used correctly, by itself it doesn’t win elections. Turning data into real, actionable insights and taking consistent, meaningful action wins elections. 

As a political candidate, targeting voters is a necessary tactic that allows you to get the most out of your voter outreach efforts. But the work doesn’t stop there.

Fine-tuning your voter contact lists is only useful if you know how to connect with that targeted audience. You won’t want to miss the chance to connect, but unless you’re intentional, you may end up doing just that. Whether you’re creating a walk list or a mailing list, making live calls or organizing local volunteers to go door-to-door, using data to determine voter history, who those voters are, and what they like, gives you insight on which voters to reach and how best to establish a connection. 

As we all know, each campaign has limited hours in a day and limited manpower. When mobilizing volunteers, understanding the best walk-lists to generate can move the vote by several percentage points. Generally, there are three broad categories into which voters fall: those who will always support your side, those who will never support your side, and those undecided. I like to call them saints, sinners, and savables. Through my experience working with grassroots activists and campaigns across the country, I’ve seen that a campaign must focus on turning savables into saints and then mobilizing the saints.

Using data to determine the right doors to knock on and people to talk to saves you valuable time. Not to mention, it makes for happy volunteers. (Knocking on the door of a staunch supporter of your opponent is never fun.) But voter history is certainly not the only factor to which you should be paying attention. Targeting a specific slice of voters allows you to bring a specific message to them. For instance:

  • Unaffiliated suburban women who are frequent voters.
  • Republican or unaffiliated voters who recently registered to vote
  • Republican, frequent voters who have not been contacted in the last three months

The 2012 Obama Campaign successfully utilized data to fine-tune voter characteristics. As Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab, writes, “Obama’s analysts built statistical models to pull out other factors that distinguished voters from nonvoters. Socioeconomic factors like income and housing type played a role; those who lived in multi-tenant dwellings, for instance, were less likely to vote. But within those households Obama’s analysts found a twist. A voter living with other people who had a demonstrated history of voting was predicted as more likely to turn out herself.”

So, set your vote goal and aim to identify, persuade, and get-out-the-vote. Let analytics guide your voter-contact efforts to victory. It’s a science, but not rocket science.

Smart Partnership Leads to Smarter Campaigning

Earlier this week we announced that Voter Gravity has integrated Esri Tapestry Segmentation into our Esri base maps. I’d like to explain with some more detail as to why partnering with Esri is such an incredible step for Voter Gravity and the campaigns that use our voter contact technology.

I’m a firm believer that all politics is local. Data analysis leads to a hyperlocal campaign. If you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to convince you that that’s good. A hyperlocal campaign, no matter the size, gives a campaign the ability to contact targeted voters the right way with the right message. Which is why I’m excited to add another layer of segmenting to Voter Gravity’s technology. Esri Tapestry Segmentation ultimately “divides US residential areas into 65 distinctive segments based on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics to provide an accurate, detailed description of US neighborhoods.”

What does this mean to you?

Any map that you pull up in Voter Gravity can give you information about your targeted area based on the 65 segments, broken down into 12 Tapestry summary groups. Esri calls these “LifeMode Summary Groups” which are characterized by lifestyle, lifestage, and shared experience, such as being born in the same time period or a trait like affluence. These segments are represented by distinct colors. See the chart below for a breakdown of each summary group. So, for example, if a targeted neighborhood is shaded with the color purple, then it falls under the description of Metropolis:

LifeMode Group: L3 Metropolis

Residents in the six segments of the Metropolis group live and work in America’s cities. They live in older, single family homes or row houses built in the 1940s or earlier. Those living in larger cities tend to own fewer vehicles and rely more on public transportation; however, workers in most of the Metropolis segments commute to service related jobs. The Metropolis group reflects the segments’ diversity in housing, age, and income.

For example, ages among the segments range from Generation Xers to retirees; households include married couples with children and single parents with children. Employment status also varies from well-educated professionals to unemployed. The median household income of the group is $39,031. Their lifestyle is also uniquely urban and media oriented. They like music, especially urban and contemporary formats, which they listen to during their commutes. They watch a variety of TV programs, from news to syndicated sitcoms, and would rather see movies than read books.

Esri Tapestry Segmentation Voter Gravity

When going door-to-door, placing yard signs in the area, handing out campaign material, or sending mailers to the voters in this neighborhood, imagine how valuable it is to know this unique information about the voters you’re trying to connect with.

For a review of each Esri Tapestry segment and more info on how Esri can enhance your voter outreach efforts, take a look at Esri’s Tapestry Segmentation Reference Guide. If you’re ready to take us for a spin, contact Voter Gravity today!

Taking Political Data to a New Level

In an effort to continually enhance the voter data for campaigns, we’ve integrated two exciting new features this month:

1. 50-State Voter Database

Voter Gravity now features complete voter files in all 50 states. Our database now includes:

  • Voter profiles appended with vote history for all major elections going back at least four cycles;
  • Geocoded voter profiles that will display beautifully on our Esri maps;
  • Able to append key consumer data points to increase predictive accuracy;
  • Monthly and quarterly updates for phone numbers and addresses;
  • A unified database that allows us to track voters even when they move across state lines.
Voter Gravity’s database also includes phone numbers and emails in all 50 states. With the click of a button, candidates and organizations can now append phones and emails to their voters, giving campaigns of any size the ability to truly tap into the power of Voter Gravity’s technology.

More Than Just Voter History: Esri Tapestry Segmentation

2. More Than Just Voter History: Esri Tapestry Segmentation

We’re excited to take the Esri maps inside Voter Gravity’s system to a new level. Voter Gravity has integrated Esri Tapestry Segmentation into our Esri base maps.

Campaigns now have an even better idea of what makes up the “fabric of America’s neighborhoods,” allowing them to identify and target voters with the best political data. Esri’s Tapestry Segmentation divides US residential areas into 65 distinctive segments based on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics to provide an accurate, detailed description of US neighborhoods.

Using Campaign Technology to do GOTV Right

As we enter an era of data driven politics, it’s important to know what really works and what doesn’t in regards to Get-out-the-Vote (GOTV). It is still astounding how much money was spent on robo calls and mail for GOTV in 2012. There were reports that the some campaigns were doing five robo calls a day to the same voter during the last five days of the election.

The good news in regards to where you should spend your time and money for GOTV? Alan Gerber and Donald Green have already done a study for you to let you know what works best. In their 2004 book, which has been updated, they broke down the most effective means for GOTV. (There have been even more recent updates at Yale’s research site on GOTV.) But let’s take a look at some of the techniques, with their cost and effectiveness:

Alan Gerber and Donald Green GOTV StudyNow the study notes that the * means “Cost effectiveness is not calculated for tactics that are not proven to raise turnout” and that “door-to-door canvassing is talking to targeted voter, for phone calls, talking to targeted voter.” So robo calls, emails, and direct mail have no real impact for GOTV, and it should be noted that television and radio raise turnout by less than a point. That is not even targeted GOTV. It just raises turnout generally, not necessarily among a campaign’s targeted voters.

The study came up with the $29 a vote for door-to-door by calculating $16 an hour and 6 contacts per hour. The live calls were based off $16 an hour and 16 contacts and hour. Imagine if you were able to drive down costs for doors and phones to, say, $10 an hour, and then drive up doors to 10 contacts an hour and calls to 25 contacts an hour. That’s what campaign technology like Voter Gravity can do: make volunteers more efficient and effective by targeting the right voters so that more of the right work can be done in a shorter amount of time.

Political Technology: A Means to an End

There’s some real innovation starting to take place in center right politics in regards to political technology, and we’d like to think Voter Gravity is right at the forefront if it all. However, in the midst of this revolution, it’s probably good to remind people that technology is a means to an end. It is not the end in and of itself.

Having great technology and great data are a must if the center right is to make gains in future elections.  But having great “whizbangery” is not going to actually cause the center right to win. It’s knowing how to use said whizbangery that will help the center right win. Harper Reed, the Chief Technology Officer of the Obama for America campaign, said, “The technology was not the real innovation. The real innovation was the ground game.” It was Obama’s technology that refined voter contact to very targeted demographics with the right messages, and allowed the volunteers to focus on the right voters with the best message that was the recipe for success.

It was about having as personal a contact as possible with voters, and emphasizing the quality of the contacts (I wrote about some of this for The American Spectator back in May). So in conversations about political technology, especially in regards to canvassing and GOTV, we have to emphasize what it’s about ultimately: live voter contact.

It’s that shift that needs to take place on the center right: using political technology to shift how it approaches politics and emphasizes more live contact with targeted voters. It’s not about door literature drops or an over-emphasis on phone banks (though Voter Gravity has a predictive phone system), but actual real life conversations and interactions with targeted voters.

That’s what technology like Voter Gravity is meant to do: take volunteers or candidates going door-to-door on the most efficient route to the right doors to talk with the right voters to ask the right questions. Then, with the data collected, empower candidates or advocacy groups to be able to make strategic and even financial decisions.