As the election season winds down and campaign consultants look forward to spending time with their families, we’re reviving our Florida campaign contribution microtargeting tool, built with Neo4j.
What does it do? Allows candidates, campaigns, and other interested parties to learn more about the priorities of the electorate in order to prioritize their fundraising efforts at scale.
How does it do it? Using available contribution datasets, it learns what type of person donates to what sort of candidate, allowing campaigns to make inferences about potential donors beyond looking at previous contribution history.
In a nonpartisan election, candidates might struggle to target likely donors. Below is a representation of the relationship between Contributors, Contributions, and Candidates.
This would be easier with names. Let’s call our candidates of interest “Karen” and “Bob”, and our contributors “Stacey”, “Stephany”, and “Jamal”. Now we can ask the question:
Karen is a Candidate looking for Contributors and has already received a contribution from Stephany. Who should Karen target next, Stacey or Jamal?
Since Stephany and Jamal have both donated to Bob, Karen should take a closer look at Jamal as a potential candidate, and perhaps send him a mailer or a phone call focusing on the issues she and Bob have in common.
Naturally, this situation is trivial with only a handful of candidates and contributors, but at scale, a technological solution would be required for efficiency.
Do you have an innovative idea for a political campaign analytics tool? Let’s talk!
We have extensive experience in building tools to power data curing, analytics, and micro-targeting. If you’re looking for a partner and expert in Neo4j, business automation, data extraction, and all-around software development that will help you and your clients reach the right people at scale, drop us a line at info@tsl.io.