It’s another Saturday, so for those who tune in, welcome to a diary discussing the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic Campaign. If you’ve missed out, you can catch up anytime: Just visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide. Every week I tackle issues I’ve been asked about, and with the help of other campaign workers and notes, we discuss how to improve and build better campaigns.
Every modern campaign values data as an important part of their campaign. From the voter file to contact lists, fundraising lists to polling data, campaigns collect and maintain plenty of data to keep themselves going every day. Because of how integrated data is to every phase of a campaign, thinking about data becomes a lot like thinking about breathing—you just do it, without a lot of thought paid to it.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this level of integration of data into a campaign. Still, understanding the value of data, from data provided to you to data you build for yourself, can give a lot of candidates an understanding of how important every race on the ballot truly is for ongoing Democratic efforts.
Data states and counties help provide a campaign
Most Democratic campaigns at all levels are familiar with NGP-VAN (VoteBuilder). Tools like NGP-VAN provide campaigns with walk lists, targeting, the ability to create mail universes, robocalls, and volunteer tracking.
Products like VoteBuilder also provide campaigns, big and small, the opportunity to put data back into the system. Everything can be updated, whether someone has moved or passed away, changed their registration or switched parties, all of this information gets updated constantly, often through the canvassing work of campaigns.
As campaigns conduct their canvass they input data they collect and that data becomes a resource for every campaign that follows them. This is important as organizations build institutional data. For many years, campaigns kept data for themselves, and the next campaign for the same district started from scratch every time. Building up ongoing data and resources allows institutional memory to help every campaign, big or small, understand a district to implement the best turnout model possible.
Maybe you don’t think of it as data, but …
Some of the most important data in a campaign is such a given that campaigns don’t even think of it as data. Volunteer coordination, scheduling, and event planning are all done through the collection of data. The process is a matter of data collection, when do events happen, what are their rules. What days are volunteers available, how many? And the purpose needed: do we go or stay? How many lists do we print, how many doors do we plan to hit, what tools do we need to provide our canvassers? All of these questions are solved through data.
If you begin to think about these questions as data collection, it often makes it easier to keep and manage the information in a way that you be effective later. Campaigns can develop spreadsheets or shared documents that contain important information and allow input. When we treat tasks as important sources of data, available to the campaign, we get away from one person in a campaign making executive decisions without a lot of input, and we can provide actual reasons why the campaign is operating the way it does.
When we treat planning as a matter of data opportunities, campaigns develop data and tools they can also pass on. This can be rules around a community event, what worked at events, and what didn’t. The more we build up our knowledge of communities, the better our campaigns continue to perform.
Data can be fun
Listening to how much data campaigns collect, it is easy to imagine data as a cruel task manager, tying people to desks, doing data entry and barely seeing the sun. Data management doesn’t have to be done that way. Many volunteers find that data entry is one of the things they can do, especially true for those who are elderly or differently abled, who may not be in a position to go knock on doors.
Other tools, including data entry from phones and other mobile devices, help make sure the task isn’t done in big batches, but instead, smaller easy to manage input that can happen in the moment. This can help make the data management task small and accessible to you on the go or in an office.
Data management can be fun—what was the strangest door response of the day? The most doors done in a day? What would you say about the campaign performance in a parade? All of these are opportunities to build shared experiences with people working your campaign and those shared experiences can help build a community.
Data can be fun, and it can be unifying for a campaign. Don’t fear data, welcome it, and use it to find things that connect your campaign together.
Next week: AARGH! Campaign Mistakes (again!)