techPresident - Catalist - Comments

Thoughts on Voter Lists (includes a shameless plug)

scott tranter — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:00:50 -0400

Having been lost on a street corner in late October with a bad list as well as advising candidates on how best to use a list I can see that voter databases and more importantly the interfaces they come in are exceedingly getting better.

I think the problem continues to be the price point at which these companies charge to get access and subsequently use these lists. While this article mentions the 25k to 400k a year price tag to use Catalist (with the RNC's VoterVault probably being similar) and names some big clients that use it how about the guy running for Mayor in small town America - can't he/she benefit from a good database and a non-command line interface to pull all those 4/4 Independent voters?

In my opinion there is a much larger market for this type of product at the small and mid-size campaign level and funny enough no one seems to serve it efficiently. Really ask yourself - with a 50k campaign budget how are you going to target those 3/4 independents 2 months out and than focus in on your 4/4 Dems/Republicans on election weekend - that’s a lot of list cutting. And you can forget about managing a database in the proverbial off season as many list companies provide one-off lists and no storage or ability to store up all those Voter ID's.

Anyways, my point is there isn't a product out there for the little guy and my company Vlytics (www.vlytics.com) is working towards helping those small-medium sized campaigns do the nuts and bolts of campaigning as well as offer a data solution that learns/grows as the candidate works the data.

If you got time check it out and drop me a line.

Transparency and Results

shimanepdf — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:39:15 -0400

Good post. As always I'll come down on the side of voter privacy and the fact that these voters probably never gave the DEMs or the GOP their permission to call them at home.

Here is my op-ed in the Washington Post about this issue if you are interested: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/12/AR200809...

A bigger issue for political parties in general is this:

- Who is responsible LONG TERM for building, maintaining, and innovating political databases?

- Or, another way, where is the "civil service" for the parties? People who work for the good of the party year in and year out irrespective of who won or lost an election.

In the commercial world databases are run by companies that have people that run them year in and year out. Professional people who have long term careers in those organizations.

In the political world databases (perhaps Catalist will be different) are run by parties and the folks who just won the election. The people that run them are rarely long term employees.

For example, I was at the DNC in 2004 (volunteer for three months) and remember that the week after the election pretty much everyone in the operation was fired. That is just the way it is.

Then a new group of loyalists come in and do it "their way".

Where is the institutional knowledge? Where is the serious analysis of "lessons learned" or what worked and did not work?

Who knows what worked or not?

No one cares.

That attitude in the commercial world would bring a company to ruin. To never care about the past and what works and does not work.

In the commercial world there is stability and continuity of operations. Entire depts are not fired at will because someone lost their job (read election).

In the commercial world there are professionals who spend their lives running databases and know every bit of every bite of data.

In the political world, by design, that type of long term knowledge and expertize is rare to find.

I'll finish with a question to political reporters?

- What exactly do you know about databases that allows you to prove that what you are being told is the truth or not?

I'll offer a suggestion. There are many trade magazines that are dedicated to databases and the like. They have reporters that spend all day writing about data.

What do they think about the political database wars?

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interesting points

vijay — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:07:52 -0400

First, thanks Micah for the play by play.

And thanks Dan for getting your thoughts out there!

> Person to person conversations are generally going to be a lot more valuable than knowing what
> magazines someone subscribes to or what kind of car they drive.

I think you want both. You'd like to know more about who are you talking to, so those person to person conversations are more effective, and more importantly the results of the conversation really need to be captured for future uses -- whether it be to help with vote goals, recruiting new volunteers, etc. You seem to see this as either/or, and I see it as enable and prosper.

> It's a better investment to put decent data in the hands of lots and lots of activists,
> along with a tool they can use to improve it,
> than it is to try to collect as much expensive commercial data as possible and building targeting
> models off that.

Maybe, but I would argue that we should be able to have both. This actually speaks to the point I made about at a technical level leveraging Web Services to allow creativity and innovation to occur with the data outside of what one company can foster. And how building a business model that allows for wide dispersal of data is beneficial to everyone. Ultimately, the organizations that use Catalist will make program decisions of whether to use activists, direct mail, TV, etc. If anything, being able to quantifiably capture the effect of programs will be the best way to get decision makers to let go of out-dated techniques (whatever those are), and data is critical to basing that off of.

We see our long term vision at a lower infrastructural level than the application level space of whether one method of electoral contact is superior to another. Whatever is used, there is a clear need for progressive organizations to have: 1) a low cost source to fulfill their data needs, 2) an easy to use data warehouse to match, store, organize, and integrate their person level data 3) a platform that allows for many flexible ways to access their data in conjunction with other basic and sometimes not-so basic information.

Given the cost and complexity for progressive organizations to shoulder this on their own or through a multitude of vendors, I think this is a big advance. I will let others decide if that constitutes game changing or not. But I do know that when I see MoveOn do an application like VotePoke, which would have been prohibitively complex for the ROI without Catalist and its Web Services interface, I think we're on the right track. When I see organizations for the first time be able to know which of their donors are also volunteers and also attended an event, I see real progress. And when I see organizations for the first time have a unique person identifier that they can reliable carry across internal systems provided by Catalist, I get really excited about where this can go. Some of these concepts are not very marketable, but they are super important in the long term.

Please do check out the NDN video of my presentation, and maybe we can get into a deeper discussion sometime soon.

PS. I totally agree that America Votes and VAN deserve more pub -- they're both great organizations and valued partners of ours.

interesting

Dan Ancona — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:49:15 -0400

I just twittered this -

"@Mlsif These updates are like gold to me. Thanks! Catalist isn't the game changer though: VAN+huge distributed relational field ops is"

And Micah asked me to come here and expand, so here goes as best I can with the four brain cells I've got left on a nice Friday afternoon...

What Catalist is doing is helpful, but it's really a top-down offering that's off to the side of the really game-changing thing that's happening, which is that we're at the beginning of this transition to a much more participatory version of our democracy.

Person to person conversations are generally going to be a lot more valuable than knowing what magazines someone subscribes to or what kind of car they drive. It's a better investment to put decent data in the hands of lots and lots of activists, along with a tool they can use to improve it, than it is to try to collect as much expensive commercial data as possible and building targeting models off that.

Ideally, you'd have both, and in some states progressives have done just that. (Credit Granholm's win in MI in 06 to a great modeling and cluster analysis program delivered through the VAN) But if you're really interested in long-term transformation, it's the person to person stuff that is going to reshape how our democracy functions. The tools you can use to augment that process are what's really interesting.

Put another way: data is a commodity, but relationships are electoral manna. I haven't seen anything in Catalist's long term vision that makes it clear to me that they get that. (maybe they'd be willing to come here and tell me how wrong I am, I'd be happy to be corrected!)

I don't know why the folks who are working on that problem are never invited to these things - get someone from VAN, or someone from one of the America Votes statewide organizing tables. Maybe it's less glitzy, or something?