Why Events, and Event Data, Matter.

For longer than many of us can imagine campaign events and fundraisers have run in a very non-data rich environment. When I first started working on campaigns back in 1996, supporters attending campaign events were asked to fill out paper supporter cards which campaigns would toil over entering into their databases, sometimes never entering them at all.

As campaigns have matured and technology has allowed for greater efficiencies and functionalities, events, and data at events, have stayed in the slow lane of progress up until late. In 2012, the Romney campaign started to evolve this process by ticketing their 236 campaign rallies through the Eventbrite platform. Because of this, they were able to amass a data set of nearly every single person that not only registered in advance to come to the event, but also accounting for the people who actually showed up. Continue reading →