Infrastructure Matters: Getting Out (Every) Vote.

Every vote matters — perhaps more this year than any other — which means every dollar and hour spent by political campaigns is more valuable than ever before. When the stakes are this high, every organization needs to be as efficient as possible: wasted time, money and outreach efforts could mean lost votes.

Due to COVID, vote by mail has increased from ~20% in 2016 to more than 50% of Americans in the 2020 primaries (Pew Research). More than half of these voters are new to voting by mail.

Advocacy groups rely on political tech tools like VoteAmerica and BallotReady to help voters understand and complete the process, along with outreach tools such as social media, texting, email, and other tech as follow up. Unlike the generic registration messages on big tech platforms, these groups invest in outreach to their communities using the most appropriate language, channels, and social connections.

I believed that stringing these tools together was heavy on manual for staffers and exactly the type of data flow Bluelink is designed to automate. Think Zapier for political tech. I worked with Cory Alpert founder of South&West to understand his approach on behalf of two advocacy groups, Secure The Ballot and Field Team 6, and as a result, we reduced their costs 24% and 12% respectively.

Here’s how we did it.

A Case Study: Secure the Ballot and Field Team 6

Secure The Ballot and Field Team 6 are two advocacy groups with a shared goal: to help voters get their mail-in-ballot and complete the voting process. Their process is to identify unregistered users, drive them to the voter registration platforms, then follow up using email, Facebook, and the voter Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) NGP VAN. Secure the Ballot ran a $50k voter registration program, and Field Team 6 ran a $1 million program.

The Problem

Each advocacy group is using multiple systems for follow-up communication and data management, but the systems weren’t communicating with each other. The voter registration platform knows what step the user completed but Facebook and the other tools are in the dark. This is creating two problems: wasted staffer time manually updating data between each system, and lost advertising budget.

I’ll start with the data update. At these organizations, staffers run a manual process to update by downloading a text file (CSV) from the voter registration platform, which they import into Google Sheets. They then transform the data into the format each of the downstream tools expects and uploads the files to Mailchimp, Facebook, and their voter CRM. For example, the user’s status (registered but didn’t register to vote by mail) needs to match the right tag and campaign in MailChimp.

A single run of the processes takes ~6 hours. Cory’s team, as the consultant, was running them for each of the organizations about every 3 days — often at 1am; if the team ran it every day, as they wanted, it would be a full-time role. While most of the work can be done manually with significant investment of time and the risk of human error, some systems do not accept manual data. For example, there’s no manual access to Alloy’s verify API, a powerful capability, to check whether voters the tools consider ‘registered’ successfully appear on state voter rolls.

When the data isn’t fresh, some advertising budget is wasted. Of all the channels groups use for outreach, ads are the most expensive; Facebook ads cost between $1 and $6 per click. Their ability to show the right ad, which I’m calling ads budget efficiency, enables groups to get the most for their money. For example, the campaign needs to respond to where the user is in the pipeline: ad A if they have not yet registered, and ad B if they have registered but not yet requested to vote by mail. Showing ad A to a registered voter is not only wasted money, but a wasted opportunity to push the user to the next step in the flow.

The Solution: Bluelink Data Integration

We automated the process to flow data automatically, removing the need for the manual — and time-costly — update. But the automatic data flow also improved context, which is valuable both to the advocacy group and to the user directly.

Context allows us to show the user the next relevant piece of information and is valuable to both the advocacy group and to the user directly. Users have high expectations of being shown the right content: if I click on a sweater, it follows me around social media for weeks based on modern ad tech. Yet our expectations aren’t met in the political tech world.

A friend of mine describes donating 6 times to her favorite 2020 primary candidate and getting an invite to volunteer on the 7th donation. When users don’t know how to engage, we lose their advocacy. The ratio of volunteers to paid organizers is 10 to 1 or greater: in truth, campaigns and orgs are powered by volunteers. They generally have a very small paid staff and attracting volunteers can make all the difference.

In the case of Facebook ads, the Bluelink integration allowed data to flow back to Facebook and remove (suppress) users in the registration campaign when they have registered, and add them to the vote by mail campaign so they see the right call to action. The voter registration tools don’t fully support the ad tech, which uses the pixel technology, to do this at the right level of detail. Since the integration went live for Secure the Ballot, 4 weeks ago, we have suppressed about 7K users.

Bluelink is not a Facebook optimization tool but rather a general-purpose platform that empowers groups and campaigns to use the right next tool for their community and provide context in the form that each tool expects: for MailChimp we use tags, for Salesforce we use topics and campaigns, for NGP VAN we use tags and activist codes. Context creates an improved user experience, which should lead to better results.

Impact: Up to 24% Cost Reduction

I was thrilled to see that Secure the Ballot had a 24% cost reduction and saved 1K per month on an ~$50K program, and Field Team 6 saved 12% and saved 10K per month on an ~$1M program. The smaller program gains more because they have fewer total person-hours to work with.

Imagine giving each effort an average equivalent to 15% more budget?

In both these cases, the money saved is not simply dollars in the bank but is reinvested in their direct voter contact programs. Secure the Ballot reinvested in their ads program while Field Team 6 hired another two organizers who ran 12 phonebanks on the day Cory and I discussed these improvements. This on its own is an outstanding outcome.

In the first month of using Bluelink, the improved context has conservatively eliminated $700 of mistargeted ads which is an additional 10% ads efficiency gain as applied to the voter registration program. While improving ads budget efficiency doesn’t equal money in the bank, it does mean groups are getting the most value for dollars spent.

What’s Next

In the last month, we added 8 new systems to our list of systems Bluelink connects with to automate data flow. We’ve built a user experience, for non-technical people, to easily set up the tactical data flows they envision; whether it is sending donor info (ActBlue) to print a thank you postcard (Thanks.io) or something else.

We are excited to do more post-election analysis, which I’ll be sharing here. We think many groups will see an efficiency gain of 15 cents on the dollar and better context to reinvest in their advocacy work.