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Political campaigns of both Republican and Democratic candidates are taking Big Data lessons from retailers, gathering information about individuals, and using it to serve up personalized messages to prospective voters. It’s called “microtargeting,” and it was was a key element of the successful Obama for America campaign and its unprecedented fundraising.

Direct marketers have long used tests to determine what works in advertising. The ads you get in the mail are often the result of many careful tests of elements ranging from the color of the envelope to the sales copy to the price of the product. Online advertisers have even greater ability to personalize than direct mailers. You’ve probably noticed that items you view on one web site follow you around as ads on other sites. Online retailer product recommendations are also personalized based on your buying and viewing history. Political candidates are now emulating those processes to effectively advertise themselves.

Here’s how microtargeting works.

It begins with a voter database. While your votes are private, your voter registration and voting records (whether and when you actually voted) are public. Those records form the starting point of voter databases. The Republican and Democratic parties each provide candidates with portals to access public voter information, as well as supplemental information gleaned from commercial and other sources. The supplemental information may include things such as:

• Demographics
• Occupation
• Political and charitable contribution history
• Memberships
• Home, auto, and boat ownership status
• Permits and licenses
• Magazine subscriptions
• Political volunteer history and other indicators of political views

Now begins the work of the individual campaigns. Each campaign can add additional information to the database. It’s a lot of work to gather this information, and individual candidates within the same party may still need to keep information to themselves, as in a primary election where candidates of the same party are in competition, so each campaign has private data as well as shared party data. (When you heard last year about the Democratic data breach, you were hearing about a failure in the systems that are supposed to keep each candidate’s private data private.)

Most of that campaign-specific data comes from surveys. Professional pollsters or volunteers approach voters with questions. In the beginning, these may very general questions aimed at broad voter groups. Early in the campaign, you might be simply be asked who you intend to vote for, or which candidate would have the best chance of defeating an incumbent. Later the question might be aimed at more targeted group, just mothers, perhaps, and more issue oriented. As the process continues, the voter groups get narrower, and the questions more detailed and specific.

Benefits of microtargeting

Over time, the campaign learns what messages work best with whom. Perhaps a candidate will learn that Californian Latinas with older children respond most strongly to messages about work opportunities for young people, while those with very young children are more concerned about public schools, or that while gun owners in general might react negatively to the candidates gun control stance, they react positively to the same candidate’s economic plan.

This information tells candidates and their campaign staff what messages appeal most to voter groups and even individual voters. Depth of information means that every message issued, whether it appears on the website, in a speech, an email or through canvassing, can be something better than one-size-fits-all. Volunteers can head out to the neighborhoods knowing what sorts of people they will meet and what to say in response to questions they are likely to be asked. Phone banks can reach out to voters with scripts designed to appeal to individuals, based on the information in the database.

Another benefit of having the right data and using it well is greater impact from the paid advertising budget. If you know can tie survey data to narrow demographics, then you can optimize advertising buys to reach desired audiences at the lowest possible cost. The 2012 Obama for America campaign did not just raise more money than the Romney campaign. It also used and augmented TV viewership data available from firms such as TV ratings leader Nielsen to reach desired audiences at lower than normal cost. The right analytics enabled the campaign raise more money, and stretched each dollar further, than the competition.

Data will not sell voters on a candidate whose messages they don’t like. But the right data collection and analytics can enable campaigns to match the specific issues and positions from the candidates portfolio that are most appealing to specific voter groups and even individual voters.

This article was originally published on www.forbes.com and can be viewed in full

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