Microtargeting is a process that answers the questions that are fundamental to the strategy of any campaign. Which voters support your candidate? Which voters are undecided? Which voters care about a particular issue? Which voters will vote at all? Most important of all, which voters will respond if you reach them?
Microtargeting utilizes a variety of tools that have guided commercial marketing for decades and have been more recently utilized by political campaigns as well. Microtargeting helps campaigns better shape and deliver messages to specific individuals and households by tracking and analyzing information on a person-by-person basis.
Voter files are the raw material of political microtargeting, because they are the way to start developing a person-by-person view of the electorate. Retailing changed in some dramatic ways when “point of sale” systems finally were put into place – high quality voter file systems are their broad political equivalent. Tremendous advances in data technology have made it easier than ever to access and analyze new high quality databases about voters which have rich amounts of detailed information drawn from public sources, commercial data providers, and past campaigns.
Having the basic data is the start – and microtargeting can then go in many different directions. At one end of the spectrum, there are large scale surveys of voters (with six thousand or more interviews), serious data analysis and modeling, detailed scores and profiles of voters, and carefully matched mail, phone, canvass, and even cable media buys based on those scores and profiles. At the other end, there simply is a better list of which doors have already been knocked in a precinct and a tracking program that remembers that a voter asked about a particular issue.
Microtargeting is also closely linked to clinical trial testing – a related set of approaches used to carefully measure the impact of campaign activities. These approaches use standard experimental design -- “treating” one large group of people with a campaign communication (some pieces of mail, a phone call, a visit) but also holding out another small group of statistically indistinguishable people who do not get the treatment (the control group). You can then actually measure how much impact a program has – and a cycle of learning can get started. Good voter files and database systems make running these experiments far easier than ever.
All of these approaches present a set of immediate challenges that can be intimidating to candidates and campaign managers. Microtargeting and testing can be expensive. Different people call different things “microtargeting” and there’s no Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for vendors. Some people appear more interested in microtargeting because it is cool or new than because it will really help win an election. Intentionally not communicating with a group of voters by holding them out as a control group strikes many as insane (and there are certainly times when it should not be done).
And on top of it all, any new and major project always threatens to distract campaign attention from getting the basics right – having the candidate or campaign make a persuasive case about issues that matter in language that people understand.
We cannot clear up all of these confusions or overcome all of these obstacles. We can on the basis of our experience and the experience that others working in the field have so generously shared with us – lay out the basic steps for using microtargeting and some of the different options available. We also append a list of resources from which you can learn more.
We can also offer some quick rules of thumb. You should consider using the tools of microtargeting if you are going to run a large direct contact program. If voters in your state do not register by party, or if when they do, it is not very predictive of voting behavior, you should explore how you might get access to these tools. Smaller campaigns and organizations can often gain the benefit of these tools by turning to the Party, coalitions like America Votes, or subscription data services (including Catalist). You need not be running a large program to be able to participate in a cost effective manner.
One thing this memo won’t try to do is explain how the analytics behind microtargeting actually work. We’ve put too many people into dazed, confused states in person to branch out into doing it through a broad memorandum. Hal Malchow has been a leader in this field for decades and has literally written the book that describes many of these tools and their proper use in clear detail. The book is called The New Political Targeting and a new edition will be available in the fall of 2007. We’re going to focus on why to do microtargeting, and how to run the process.
Download the PDF version if you want text and visual graphics, or click on the full report for text only.
