The Case For Data Hacking on Republican Campaigns
The data you need for your campaign is all around you on the internet.
Social media, public sources from the government, industry, and research organizations all have organized volumes of data that can provide actionable insights for your campaign.
The cost and ROI are extremely favorable to campaigns with budget’s of all sizes. Here are few places that the data can add value:
- Social media targeting with potential supporters
- Lead generation for raising money
- Analytical insights similar to polling.
Let’s take an example of how Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) might use sentiment analysis of social media data from Twitter. Sentiment analysis is a technique to analyze and understand text scoring on a scale of very negative to very positive.
Around 1,400 Tweets were analyzed from the last week 5/23–5/27. Below we see that Tweets negative are higher relative to the other categories, which makes sense as he is facing a tough re-election against former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. The numbers from the sentiment analysis mirror a PPP survey from May where 40% of voters disapprove and 32% approve of Portman’s job performance. Sentiment analysis scored 37% of the Tweets as negative, and 20% as positive.
Still the question remains, how would the Portman campaign use the below results?
Twitter users scored in the positive or very positive can be asked to take another action such as donating money or volunteering for the campaign.
If 20% of the Tweets were positive that amounts to around 280 users. The average amount contributed to Portman is $1,034. If all 280 users gave that amount, its possible that the campaign could raise $289,520.
A significant amount of money for analyzing data at a very reasonable price.
“What’s the point?” you’re probably asking yourself.
Campaigns can make analytical information work for them with a high ROI and a very marginal cost in comparison to other tools they might use to understand voters.
