The Coronavirus has changed everyone’s plans for the upcoming campaign, as face-to-face organizing is put on hold for the foreseeable future, and the campaign office is taken online. For many campaign staff, the campaign office is the center of the universe. It’s where the most hours are spent, where strategy is hashed out, and where progress is tracked via huge maps all over the walls. The campaign office is the place for collaboration. With offices closed, and those maps behind closed doors, Empower Engine can provide a digital replacement. Your work will continue in spite of the crisis, and we need to support campaigns’ innovative approaches.

We’ve always seen data visualization and maps as a clarifying force for campaigns, it helps your stakeholders understand what they are doing and why. At a time like this, when so much is uncertain, data visualization is even more of a requirement. As we move forward into the campaign, it’ll keep getting harder to get a clear sense of what is happening, especially without the benefit of a campaign office where people are working together. Empower Engine can help you see through the fog and make strategic decisions.

Quantifying your limited voter contact

With canvassing and all other sorts of face-to-face organizing put on hold, campaigns are going to rely on other methods to reach supporters and persuade swing voters. Digital outreach, phone-banking, and texting are a few tactics that campaigns will likely lean on to a greater extent. These interactions can and should be tracked in VAN, as everything comes down to data. As is always the case, clearly demonstrating the impact of these programs to candidates and donors should be done with visuals, not spreadsheets. Using Empower Engine, we can quantify these interactions, separately by method, or as one. Empower Engine provides a true sense of where you’re reaching voters and where you’re falling short.

During the 2019 cycle, we teamed up with the Mississippi Democratic Party to help them support their candidates. They used our platform extensively to track their statewide texting program. The map below is a reflection of that work.

We set up a nightly sync from Votebuilder, so they were able to create a map for any part of the state, visualizing their updated results. If they wanted to focus in a particular district, such as Hinds County (Jackson), they could do so easily.

Using a map like this, you can see which precincts your program is hitting. Maps like these can be made for any method of voter contact you choose. But it’s more than just the visuals, because everyone on your team will be able to access the maps they need while you’re all working from home. Our platform can help keep the campaign together.

Plan for the Future as a Team

Anyone who has been to a campaign office has seen the abundance of maps on the walls, tracking all aspects of the campaign. Unfortunately, these maps are inaccessible at the moment, but our click and color maps provide you a digital environment in which to replace them. As you track the work of the campaign and collaborate for the coming months, you can recreate the maps you had on your wall, and give everyone access to a live copy.

Under normal circumstances, click and color maps can be used to help Data Directors define organizer turf - like the example above - track where work like canvassing has been done, or mark your priority precincts. With limited contact methods at our disposal, this tool can be a valuable resource for planning.

Click and color maps allow you to categorize your districts based on whatever characteristic you choose, such as target precincts for lit drops or candidate visits, when things get back to normal. This tool lets you create an interactive map that shows your data with every decision you make. For example, if you categorize a priority precinct, you’ll be able to see the number of targets located therein. Under these circumstances where collaboration is difficult, you can share this map with everyone on your team, giving you a live environment in which to work with your teammates.

This is going to be a campaign like none other in the modern era, but victory in November will still come down to fundamentals: identifying supporters, tracking your work, and getting them to the polls. Empower Engine can help.

Helping your campaign through the COVID-19 crisis