How Big Data Is Changing IT and Bringing Out The Vote

One of the most interesting stories to come out of the presidential election was the use of big data analytics to help campaign workers to bring out the vote. Both candidates used the technology. Project Narwhal was the Obama team’s effort. It was used to connect previously separate databases so that information on potential voters was accessible to campaign workers. They used the information to target voters with specific issues before the election and during the election they used it to determine who had not yet voted and do last minute outreach.

Big Data Changes the Process
The angle that makes this fascinating is that the information was there before, but it wasn’t accessible in a comprehensive way. The available data was the result of many siloed data gathering efforts, used for specific purposes over the past years. The role that big data analytics played was in bringing disparate information together in a comprehensive way. This meant that campaign workers could draw from information in sources such as volunteer-management programs, campaign finance and budgeting tools, voter-file interfaces and especially social media to gain a bigger picture of the voter’s profile and to guide the campaign’s success. As a result canvassers weren’t dispatched to knock on the doors of people who were already supporters of Obama, and if a donor had given the maximum contribution, instead of getting email for money they got an email asking them to volunteer.

The way that they did it was a lesson in the creative use of technology. Instead of hiring a consulting company, the Obama campaign pulled together a team of technologists who brought a range of skills and experience to get the job done. Using various programming languages and APIs they built a set of services that acted as an interface to a single shared data store for their applications. This made it possible to quickly develop new applications and to integrate existing ones into the system. As a result they were able to create a dashboard that provided access to a set of tools to use across all of their data sets and drive each step of the campaign process. The application included an analytics programs called Dreamcatcher that was developed to microtarget voters based on sentiments in social media text. Using this tool they could determine which way the vote was going and where to focus their resources. For more information on the technology see, Built to Win: Deep Inside Obama's Campaign Tech.