One pain point campaigns and groups are facing in 2024 is too much data. But a long-time DC vendor thinks it has the solution: a new platform to visualize all of a client’s data points in one place. And they mean all of them.
Advocacy Data’s Political Explorer, a joint project with data visualization company Social Explorer, matches voter and eligible voter files for over 350 million Americans with some 200 attributes from demographic and commercial data.
It offers clients details like precinct-level data on the percentages of children going to public school versus children in private or charter school. The platform, which is meant for Democratic and Progressive campaigns and groups, is designed to help clients process and geographically visualize data more easily.
“There is too much data in that it becomes very easy to get lost, to get overwhelmed,” said Roger Alan Stone, CEO of the DC-based Advocacy Data, which is non-partisan. “The data that is important for one campaign can be irrelevant noise for another.”
While campaigns certainly have no shortage of partisan and non-partisan data providers in the political market, Stone says that vendors are not tailoring their offerings to, say, education advocacy groups or a local campaign’s specific needs. “What we’re doing is not only combining the available data, but also the mapping and visualization such that you can see what data is important,” he said, pointing to an example in Kentucky where a group was tasked with engaging formerly incarcerated people.
Ultimately, Stone believes the visual element is what will help the platform gain adoption. He notes that while many campaigns and groups have a data staffer now, turning that data into strategy can be difficult.
“When I’m talking to our pollster clients, sometimes I remind them, ‘You know, if a candidate could understand cross tabs, they’d be a pollster, not a candidate,’” he said.
