Campaigns put tremendous energy and effort into knocking on doors and making phone calls in order to turnout voters.

But how many really use voter contact to inform strategic decisions?

Modern voter contact tools allow campaigns to begin contacting voters earlier, with more focus. This early canvassing serves several political purposes:

• Identifies issues important to voters
• Identifies persuadable voters
• Identifies voters the campaign should turnout

But can these canvassing efforts also serve the purposes of other parts of the campaign?

For instance, can canvassing help the campaign make better TV ads?

At Voter Gravity, we believe smart, actionable data is the cornerstone of a winning campaign. Good voter data contains more than just whether someone has voted before or what issues are important to them, but helps the campaign make important decisions such as what messages most resonate with target voters.

When a campaign decides to focus on making their grassroots team a strategic priority, all sorts of good things happen. Not the least of which is teams out in the field, talking with voters, and gathering information. Using a platform like Voter Gravity, the new data is uploaded immediately, giving campaign strategists an instant snapshot of what the hot button issues are in the district.

This information can then be used to inform all sorts of messaging decisions, from direct mail to press events and yes, even TV ads.

Once a campaign has committed to a data-driven, grassroots strategy, they can slice and dice the data to draw out real issues that are important to key groups of voters. This allows even broadcast media like TV to be more finely targeted to the specific issues identified in the field.

Data is more that a tool to blast messages to voters. It’s a means of better understanding and relating to voters in order to predict what is most important to them.

What are other ways campaigns can leverage data creatively?