The RNC tech bump - they are now up to 21st century speed

Five new digital tools the Republicans used in the Florida special to boost their campaign

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/five-new-digital-tools-the-gop-used-in-the-fla.-special-to-boost-their-campaign/article/2545576


• Canvassing app: The RNC has developed multiple smartphone and tablet apps for field staff to use to input data about prospective voters. The data is uploaded to the RNC’s main database in real time and is immediately available to the committee, the campaign and approved vendors, allowing them to make quick decisions on how to apply resources and whether to make strategic adjustments.

• Application programming interface: This is the fancy term the RNC is using to describe how it shares voter data with campaigns and approved vendors — and vice versa. Previously, a campaign, its consultants and the committee might be working off three sets of data. Now each entity can share and synthesize its data through the interface, increasing its accuracy and ensuring that the RNC, the candidate’s campaign team and outside strategists are making decisions based on the same voter information.

• The email list: For the first time, the RNC was able to synthesize its list of email contacts with its voter file. It sounds simple, but an inability to do this previously had significantly reduced the number of prospective voters the committee was able to contact.

• Voter scoring: The more a party knows about prospective voters, the more efficient and effective its voter targeting. The RNC used to rank voters on a simple one-to-five scale, one being the least likely to vote for the Republican candidate, five being the most likely. The committee now ranks prospective voters on a complex scale of one to 100, with each data point representing a piece of information about a voter that helps determine how best to talk to him or her and motivate him or her to vote.

• Dashboard: For the first time, all of the data gathered by the RNC minute to minute was available to view on-demand via computer. Neither the campaign, the National Republican Congressional Committee nor any other approved entity had to request reports from the RNC or worry that the information might be outdated by the time they got them.