NationBuilder, a community software platform for organizing political campaigns, had a big data problem. Its mission depends on gathering voter data from across the country, normalizing it, and regularly updating it to include current voter registration and recent election information. National elections loomed, and the company needed to draw together a huge collection of voter records in a hurry. Data access was a major issue.
The data existed in a wide variety of formats, with different standards for data entry, across 50 states and more than 3,000 counties, which only added to the challenge. "Voter records are not all in one format or even in one place," says VP of professional services Gina Davis.
"It requires a fair amount of legwork to gather data from Secretaries of State and other agencies and officials. For different campaigns, you may need to get registered voter data at the state level, by individual county, or by subdivisions of a county. There's a lot of calling and emailing.
"Once you have the data, it's in different formats. Sometimes it's mailed, sometimes it's on CD, and sometimes it's by FTP. It's absolutely different for every touchpoint. Then, when all of this data is gathered, you need to normalize it across the country -- checking for differences in names and addresses, as well as different references to political boundaries, and making sure it's all consistent. Our customers may run campaigns across districts; campaigns may be local or national, and being able to interact with details in the same way is essential."
Voter data is critical to the success of any campaign, and NationBuilder's strength lies in focusing on candidates and people who want to make a change -- whether it be Britain's Brexit campaign, Trump's U.S. election, or any of the thousands of political and NGO campaigns, small and large, across the U.S. and around the world. People need to be organized by email, social media, and knocking at doors. Everything starts with having the right data.
NationBuilder is a cross between a content management system and a customer relationship management (CRM) package, geared towards attracting people to engage with a cause. It provides supporter management through a workflow that tracks how individual supporters are contributing to the campaign result. Sharing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other sites is interwoven into the platform, as is access to social media data. This makes it possible to tie campaign goals to individual social media actions. All of this demands accurate data.
