Earlier this month PDI was proud to be voted Best New Data and Analytics Tool for 2018 and the Best New Overall Campaign Tool for 2018 from the attendees of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center!
What was generating all the buzz at BISC ? It was our new Tableau-driven infographics that has the potential to change your relationship to voter data forever.
Wanna get a training on the new tool, and all the ways it can update how you’re running your operations? Just select from one of the following training dates:
The idea for this new graphic interface was born from the dozens of political campaigns that have wanted really stellar graphic representation of their voter universes, along with mapping to show where their targeted voters live. Often times they were struggling to get these created by campaign staff, or paying thousands of dollars to a small group of experts who can map and create basic pie-charts of voter universes.
What came out of the work was a new layout for our free count reports, an instant visualization tool that can show your universe as you’re building it, visualization of any voter universe that can be printed and sent to a client or candidate, and visualization of a campaign’s support and undecided counts with precinct summaries.
All of these enhancements, at no additional cost to PDI clients.
Public Counts
As a few examples of the new public counts using Tableau, check out these PDFs for the upcoming April 3rd Assembly Special Elections in Los Angeles: AD 39, AD 54 and AD 45. Using the live counts function here, these can be further refined to hone in on any political party, ethnicity, or geographic overlap.
Universe Creation
Whenever you are creating a universe in the PDI, you can now take a moment before saving and view the voters in your select, graphically. This implementation allows you to have a little double-check of your work, to see that the geography looks correct, and that the ethnic, partisan and age compositions all are aligned with the universe you are trying to create.
No need to save the universe and then worry about if you did it exactly right!
Universe Analysis
At any time you can go into the data visualization section of the voter tools and either select all voters in your geography, or one of your universes, and get a fully-interactive graphic to better understand the voters in that select.
One of the best uses of this infographic is the ability to simply save that graphic as a PDF and show to your client, campaign manager, or the candidate. And these versions are great for campaign planning. You can produce graphic representation of each of the universes that will be targeted for mail, phone, walks, digital campaigns, or any other element of the campaign.
View your Support and Progress
Within the tableau you can also select a layout that will show you precinct-level totals for your support, oppose and undecided voters. If you have a weekend walk, you could save all those precincts in a universe, and then analyze it before and after – showing the progress you made through your grassroots efforts.
This is also a great tool for reporting to the rest of the campaign the impact that the field efforts are having.
And these new implementations are just the start! We are working on versions of the Tableau infographics that will track absentee votes that are cast – updating live from the database on a daily basis, and reports of contacts through the field program, so you can see the actual work of a canvasser over a period of time, or cumulative throughout the campaign. Those and more will be implemented in the coming months.