Election Spurs Sale of Valuable Voter, Donor Data

One way presidential hopefuls raise money for 2016, and pay off debts from prior campaigns, is to rent out valuable voter and donor data. And that's a boon for other candidates and causes. "A lot of folks that ran in 2012, their lists are on the market," Ryan Meerstein, senior director for Client Strategy at Targeted Victory, a Republican tech firm, recently confirmed to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper. Targeted Victory, for example, paid $1.1 million to rent list data from Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential bid. GOP presidential bidder Rick Santorum has earned nearly $281,000 by renting supporter lists from his 2012 election effort, while 2012 GOP also-ran Newt Gingrich has earned $434,000 off supporter lists. The most coveted data, campaign pros told the Pittsburgh newspaper, includes the personal contact information of campaign donors. Also desirable are lists of supporters "willing to turn an online action into an offline action," such as attending a rally or posting a lawn sign, added Meerstein. Of course, national candidates are not the only source of valuable political data. On the market are voters by city, state and local campaign, members of special-interest and advocacy groups, and donors to a range of politically relevant causes, with many of those lists selectable for party affiliation. Political lists are rented via data brokers, like Beyond Voter Lists, the article notes. But we would add that a good broker will help candidates and causes avoid the problems also cited in the newspaper article, such as overuse and poor targeting, by checking usage history and making sure list data is updated and matched with client targeting. See http://www.post-gazette.com/news/nation/2015/06/01/Political-fundraising-campaigns-manage-debts-by-selling-data/stories/201506010025

Donor List Rental Still Top Political Fundraising Tool

Donor list rental is still the leading tool of political fundraisers despite hype about social media and online politicking, reports a recent Advertising Age article. The list-rental dollars in this year's elections are indicative: The National Republican Congressional Committee already has spent just under $200,000 to rent the Romney 2012 e-mail list from Targeted Victory, a consultant for Romney's digital campaign. The Democratic National Committee has put a $190,909 per month value on the Obama for America list, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told the Federal Election Commission (FEC) it used $135,000 worth of the same list twice in April. While the Obama and Romney lists may be among the largest, they are hardly the only lists being rented per FEC reports. Candidate campaigns and advocacy groups are renting lists of online petition supporters, campaign event attendees, donors to specific nonprofits or political candidates, left-leaning subscribers to The Nation and DailyKOS.com or right-leaning subscribers to Newsmax, and so on. The primary season is especially rife with donor list rentals as lesser known candidates vie for cash to support upcoming election bids. Why are donor list rentals so key? Can't the data wizards extract targets from public voter data using known-donor profiles? "You can build predictive models of likelihood to be a donor using your list of donors and lists of people who have not donated to you," Alex Lundry, senior VP at GOP data analytics firm TargetPoint Consulting, acknowledged to Advertising Age. But he then added, "That will never perform as strongly as just going out and renting a list of people who have given before to another campaign."A person's history of donating is the best predictor of another donation, the political direct marketers agreed. Read the full article at http://adage.com/article/campaign-trail/world-campaign-tech-list-rental-a-force/293714/