Yard signs don’t vote and, let’s be honest about their role in campaigns; they are a physical sign of support when shown in people’s front yards. In lower level races where name ID for a candidate is low, they can increase name ID, but forests of yard signs in front of a polling location, or jammed into a highway median, are nothing but clutter and visual white noise for the average Joe. All that said, it is impossible to beat the economic-usefulness ratio of yard signs. They offer 24/7 advertisement of your name or issue, they are extremely low maintenance, and if designed correctly, can be used multiple elections. Below are suggestions for getting the most out of your yard signs.

1. Keep them simple and to the point.

Nobody is going to bother stopping their car to read a candidate’s sign: make sure that whatever you are advocating is in big, bold letters that anyone can read and understand. And example would be “Smith for Senate”. Make that as big as possible on whatever sign design you choose to have. Having something like “Elect: John Smith for US Senate because he’s awesome” will never fit on a sign with font big enough to read.

2. Use colors that stand out.

Avoid using “common” colors that will blend into the surrounds landscape. For example, a dark green sign with brown letters will blend into lawns and will not likely be as noticeable. Good color selection will not only use uncommon colors, but will have good contrast. Red or blue on white, yellow on dark blue, white on light green, etc. These colors will not only stand out of the average lawn, but will immediately draw attention because of the fact that they are out of place.

3. Make sure to follow all election laws.

When can you put a sign up? When does it need to come down? Do I have to give the disclaimer a certain font size? Before you order thousands of dollars of yard signs, make sure that your signs will comply with local election laws. If they don’t and someone notices (aka, your opponent) they can start a suit or have a judge forbid you from using them until they are fixed. If a discrepancy isn’t noticed until just before the election, it will be disastrous for your campaign.

4. Try to have something catchy if possible.

If you are able to find a couple words that share qualities with your name, use them. “Elect Elena” “Smith for Senate” “Vote Veronica” might be some examples. The idea is to have something that will stick in the voters mind. Remember, that’s the whole point of yard signs to begin with! If you do decide to use other language on the sign, make sure that it doesn’t too closely resemble your opponent: you want to distinguish yourself apart from them.

5. Put them in prominent places.

This is especially crucial if you have a tight budget. Having 2,000 yard signs in yards with only 30 of them along prominent street will be a waste of your time and money. Make sure that you get signs along high traffic streets whenever possible. This can be supplemented by billboards or non-standard sized signs placed on private property. Also make sure that the voter understands that, once a sign is placed, they need to make sure they stay up: if they plan to mow their yard, have a party, whatever the reason might be, respectfully request that at the end of the day they are always back out for people to see.

Yard sign are an affordable, low maintenance way to help with name ID and show support for the candidate and if used correctly, they may very well help sway the flow of the election.

This week, we’re releasing a simple feature that adds a new data-driven targeting tool to Voter Gravity and makes it easier than ever to integrate all of your campaign’s contacts in one place.

Tags have always been a staple of how Voter Gravity lets campaigns add data to voters so they can go back and segment audiences based on what they’ve learned about a voter via canvassing, phone calls, or even via Facebook friends.

Now, campaigns can add tags to contacts, making it easy to segment key audiences by online action.

Why is this important? Who cares?

Let’s say Gary is running for Congress and his digital team has online ads encouraging people to sign a petition to take action on immigration.

When a person fills out that petition, their info is added as a Contact in Voter Gravity (via our integration with Zapier). Gary’s campaign can then easily match that contact to the voter file. If there’s a match, what started as a simple web signup is now a full profile of that voter.

This is what campaigns can do today in Voter Gravity, and it’s been a great way for campaigns to integrate data from different sources with the core voter file. But what if a campaign wanted to go back and contact just those voters who signed the immigration petition?

With Contact Tags, when Gary’s campaign sets up Zapier to sync their online petition signups with Voter Gravity, they can add a unique tag, such as “webform-immigration_petition-July_2014″. That’s obviously quite a tag, but it uniquely tells anyone in the future that this contact filled out immigration petition web form in a campaign run in July 2014.

Let’s say immigration suddenly becomes a major campaign issue in September and Gary’s team decides to host a town hall on the issue in the district. Thanks to smart tagging and an integrated campaign effort, they can quickly pull a list of every likely supporter in the district who filled out that online petition and invite them to the town hall. They could also segment just those contacts who are prior donors and filled out the petition and send them an issue-specific fundraising email.

Because of his integrated campaign approach — using online activity to drive offline action — Gary wins the election and goes to Congress. Months later when Congress debates major immigration legislation, Gary’s campaign team can reach out to their supporters who have expressed interest in the issue and encourage them to get active in the debate.

The possibilities are endless for innovative, integrated, data-driven campaigns. How could you use contact tags to learn more about your target voters, and engage them to take action with messages targeted to their specific interests?

Let’s have that conversation. Contact us for a live demo today: www.votergravity.com/demo.

Two options became available: I could either assume the way I went about the campaign was correct and it was just a bad year or I could evaluate my methods and determine what went wrong. Initially, I choose the former: “Why of course I am a good candidate!” I told myself.  As time went on, however, I realized I had, in fact, made many critical errors. The greatest was the inability to get my message to the voters, from mailings, to calling, to yard sign placement, data and how to use it ultimately sank the ship.

Trust me, there were other flaws; poor ship design, hyping something up to be something that it wasn’t, and a captain who refused to listen to reason. But in the end, my inability to communicate the right message and track data correctly was the iceberg that brought the ship down. So I decided to change that and discover how I could avoid this mistake in the future and help others in similar situations.

Organizing data of all kinds, allowing for easy understanding of large amounts of information, and the ability to quickly filter the data are now musts in 21st century politics, and for campaigns of all sizes. That’s why I’m excited about Voter Gravity. I’ve run for the state legislature, have seen what a campaign looks like in the real world, and In the following series of posts, I will outline some of the advantages of Voter Gravity, how to utilize the technology, and how that technology enables candidates to manage a successful campaign.

As a candidate, one of most space and cost effective tools you can have at your disposal is a palm card. Palm cards should be thought of as “campaigns in a capsule” because they should contain all of the highlights of your candidacy. With that said, having a good palm card is not as easy as slapping your name in a pre-formatted card from your home printer. Here are a few tips to have a great and memorable card.

Tell the voter why you deserve their vote.

Your campaign should have a motto or catchphrase “Confident. Caring. Committed.” or “For a better today and a brighter tomorrow” are some examples. Use this and expound on it. Give a short stump speech as to why you are the candidate they should vote for.

Use high quality, professional photos.

Just because you might have a good camera at your disposal doesn’t mean you should skimp here. Pay for a professional photograph and use it on the card. Some retail stores even have booths you can make an appointment for. They don’t take long, look great, and are usually quite inexpensive. Also use high quality stock images.

Follow election laws: remember your disclaimer!

All election advertisements or publications must include who paid for it. Find out exactly what has to be included and have it somewhere on the card. Note that the font can be as small as possible while still being readable.

Be consistent with the rest of your campaign.

Don’t try to cater to everybody if that’s not what the rest of your campaign is about. Keep your message, and thus your campaign or “brand”, consistent as it will affect your credibility and public image.

Include your contact information.

Make sure to include reliable contact information on your card so that potential donors or political contacts can reach you. If you don’t already have “secondary” emails or phone numbers that you check regularly it might be useful to set them up: odds are you will not want to have your mobile number or primary email for every John Doe that you hand a card to.

Separate yourself from your opponent wherever possible.

This includes not only message but media appearance. Avoid similar colors or design schemes that your opponent uses, include key policy differences, and always try to have positive themes about yourself on your cards. Remember, these are like tiny summaries of your campaigns and should represent you as such.

As a note, one vendor we have received good prices and great palm cards from is Voter Contact – www.votercontact.org. If you haven’t already, check them out today!

Political campaigning involves an ever-increasing cacophony of activities throughout the course of an election cycle. To emerge from this tornado with a victory, each campaign must leverage a vast variety of tools and skills – fundraising, messaging, public speaking, advertising, on-the-ground organizing, and coalition building. Technology has the ability to build each of these into a force multiplier.

As the Chief Operating Officer at Voter Gravity, I lead the product development team building a next-generation web and mobile application that turns data into votes. Last week I was honored to participate on the Navigating Voter Data panel at The Art of Political Campaigning Conference sponsored by Campaigns & Elections. It was exciting to discuss my passion: political technology.

For the last 10 years, I have been trying — without success at times — to encourage Republicans to make better use of technology and to adopt an innovation mindset —  including innovating how they leverage data. No other buzzword is so empowering, and yet so confounding, to today’s political operative as “data.”

It’s not like political campaigns are new to using data. Direct mail, of course, is explicitly built on the practice of identifying, segmenting and contacting voters in distinct groups. “Microtargeting” if you will.

But this data we speak of today is something new… Like Jack Bauer faced with the urgency of diffusing a nuclear bomb, we stare at the enormous problem before us, frantically slashing through a technical and complicated mess trying not to blow up the whole thing, and all the while…  knowing with tense certainty… that we are running out of time. Modern voter data comes served on a menu with a dizzying array of options. Would you like it with consumer information? Social streams? On a map? Modeled And you can even get your voter data baked … in cookies.

On the panel we explored the extent of what is possible in the modern campaign when it comes to the use of data. How it can be applied to connect with the right voters, using the right message, through the right medium. Getting data right IS CRITICAL to campaigns who are competing in tough races. But beware: Data is not a magical elixir to all campaign ills. It is, however, a mighty potion to identify, persuade, and turnout the voters you must turnout to win an election.

The fundamental principle of a democratic society is that the general population (however that population is measured or qualified) decides its own course through the election of public officials and leaders. The consent and active participation of a population is thus critical for the accuracy of the public beliefs to be made manifest in the election of like minded individuals: without a majority opinion on any given issue, a radical or extreme minority can easily sway a nation in any direction it pleases once it has reached a critical mass of voting power.

Continue reading →

This is an excerpt from a piece by Ned Ryun on RedState today. Read full piece here.

We’ve been doing a series of studies at Voter Gravity on a variety of topics, from GOTV to social media to mail. I am biased and found them all interesting, but the newest one on independent voters is probably the best so far. I’m not going to tell you about everything inside the study, but some of the highlights are below:

The number of self-described independents is increasing, and this growth is at the GOP’s expense.

According to a Gallup poll released in January 2014, the number of political independents in the United States is at a record high. Specifically, the percentage of Americans who identify as independent is 42 percent, the highest percentage since Gallup began asking this question in the 1980s. Most of that growth was at the expense of Republican identification, which is now around 25 percent of Americans, down from 34 percent in 2004.

To read the rest of the post, click here.

Below is an excerpt from our new report, “Political Independents: Who They Are and What Impact They Have on Politics Today.” To download the full report, click here.

The number of self-described independents is increasing, and this growth is at the GOP’s expense

According to a Gallup poll released in January of 2014, the number of political independents in the United States was at a record high.[i] Specifically, the percentage of Americans who identified as independent was 42 percent, the highest percentage since Gallup began asking this question in the 1980s. Most of that growth was at the expense of Republican identification. This same series of polls estimated that only 25 percent of Americans identified as Republicans – down from 34 percent in 2004. Thirty-one percent of Americans identified as Democrats, which is down from its 2008 peak of 36 percent. The Gallup report speculated that this growth of self-described independents was due to “Americans’ record or near-record negative views of the two major U.S. parties, of Congress, and their low level of trust in government more generally.” Continue reading →

Voter Gravity allows campaigns to narrow any walk list using a large range of options, including party affiliation and gender. We’ve created a special option to help Voter Gravity users drill down even more – we call it the Gravity Score.

The Gravity Score is something we use at Voter Gravity to gauge the propensity of an individual to vote within a range from 0-12. The closer someone is to zero, the less frequent of a voter they are. So for example, if a voter has a Gravity Score of 12, they vote in every election. The exact breakdown is:

• A vote in the 2012 general election: 5 points
• A vote in the 2010 general election: 3 points
• A vote in any other election: 1 point

This model weights the score towards voters who have turned out in more recent elections. We do this because we want to pay more attention to those voters who have proved themselves to be active currently as opposed to those who may or may not be active anymore. Doing this helps you know which voters are worth targeting, since it is usually not worth it to message to those voters who no longer turn out.

For operatives who are used to searching in GOP Data Center for 2 of 4 and 3 of 4 voters, this is a similar concept, just adjusted to give more value to more frequent elections. The Gravity Score is a tool to help you better understand how your voters act and what you can do to motivate them.