Strategic Telemetry, Inc.

	Micro-targeting from Strategic Telemetry:
	It's about time our side had a secret weapon

Huge amounts of time and money are spent trying to persuade people who have already made up their minds, to turn out voters who don’t support our candidates, and to solicit contributions from people who will never donate. No matter what the size of your campaign, micro-targeting from Strategic Telemetry can help you focus scarce campaign resources where they will make the biggest difference. Strategic Telemetry has provided micro-targeting for races as small as city council and as large as the 2004 Kerry for President Campaign.

Ideally, a campaign would ask every voter who they were supporting, and then focus persuasion resources only on those who said that they were undecided, and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) resources only on supporters. In the real world, however, it is not possible to ID every voter. More and more voters have unlisted numbers, have caller ID, or are just unwilling to answer ID questions. There are also cost considerations. Even attempting to call every voter in a district can be prohibitively expensive.

Micro-targeting allows us to predict how voters who we were not able to reach would have responded if we’d been able to ID them.

KNOW HOW LIKELY IT IS THAT A VOTER IS UNDECIDED.
Focus dollars and time spent on persuasion phones, mail, door-knocking, radio and television on the voters most likely to be undecided.

KNOW WHAT ISSUES UNDECIDED VOTERS CARE ABOUT.
Target the most powerful message to each undecided voter.

KNOW HOW LIKELY IT IS THAT A VOTER SUPPORTS YOUR CANDIDATE.
Focus GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts on the voters most likely to actually support your candidate.

KNOW HOW LIKELY IT IS THAT AN INDIVIDUAL WILL CONTRIBUTE IF ASKED.
Boost the returns from fundraising prospecting by mailing or calling those most likely to contribute if asked. At the same time, expand your contributor list by finding brand-new donors, rather than just resoliciting the same pool of known political donors.

How it works...

The idea behind micro-targeting is to look at what we know about voters we were able to ID, and to use that information to build a statistical model to predict how voters we didn't reach would have IDed if we had reached them. Strategic Telemetry combines voter ID information from phone or door-to-door canvasses with detailed demographic and marketing information in order to build the statistical models. This technique can be applied to predict support for a specific candidate or issue, likelihood of being undecided, likelihood of voting, or to find likely contributors.

Strategic Telemetry uses a variety of statistical techniques to build the best possible model for each project. When building a model, it is vitally important to set aside some of the original IDs in a “test set.” The model is then built using the rest of the IDs, without looking at the test set. Once the model is completed, it is applied to the test set. The percent IDed as exhibiting a certain behavior (i.e., supporting our candidate, undecided, etc.) in each segment of the test set should be within the margin of error of the predicted value. It’s easy to build a model that looks impressive, but doesn’t hold up in the real world. That’s why Strategic Telemetry always uses test sets to validate models so that campaigns can use them with confidence.

Download a copy of our brochure.