Catalist, the keeper of the progressive political world's voter targeting databases, has evolved quickly since it was founded in 2005 into a robust enterprise with dozens of clients and some of the most tricked-out enhanced voter lists in the country. The Obama campaign dives into their data every day, as does virtually every left-leaning political and ideological organization in the country.
Catalist has hundreds of millions of names, numbers and data points, but, as Laura Quinn, Catalist's CEO put it, "we don't have the tools to go out and do walks." In other words, in the case of - and let's choose a non-random example, a group like Rock the Vote can use Catalist data to send voter registration forms to a 25-year-old woman from Arkadelphia, Arkansas who isn't registered, but Catalist couldn't provide a way to organize a canvass, to find someone in that woman's neighborhood or a friend of hers who could nudge her to turn the forms in.
The older, pre-Catalist generation of Democratic field operatives have always prioritized the knock-and-drag over list-keeping, which is one reason why Democratic lists had gotten so dirty in the early part of this decade.
A company called Nico Networks, working along Catalist CTO Vijay Ravindran, developed what Quinn thinks is an ingenious, and, importantly for Catalist, cheap way to bridge the data with the harder work of bothering, persuading and contacting real people. It's an application for the Facebook social networking site, known to the readers of this blog as, ah, Facebook.
Catalist client Rock the Vote launched their app on Saturday by way of a mass e-mail sent to the 44,000 members of its Facebook group. As of this afternoon, 500 Rock-the-voters were using the new tool. On their individualized dashboards, each volunteer is given a list of folks from ten battleground states, who, at some point, downloaded a voter registration form off one of those ubiquitous Rock-The-Vote voter registration widgets. Catalist's computers are able to figure out who returns the forms and who doesn't.
Those who haven't yet returned the forms show up on the list that's sent to Rock to Vote. In 2006, about 20% of those who asked for a form did not turn it in, the group says. This year, that's about 100,000 young voters.
Each "user" is sent a list of names of folks in their area who haven't turned in their form, given their e-mail and phone number, and a sample script.
Did you register, they're coached to ask.
If so, "awesome, thanks!" is the preferred verbiage. If not, they're counseled politely. (A banner at the top of the application warns users not to call after 9:00 pm local time.)
Users can recruit their friends, too, and a public leaderboard shows off the users with the most voter contacts. "As we know from our testing, peer to peer contact is really the most effective way to get a young person to do anything, especially in the political arena," said Heather Smith, Rock the Vote's executive director. Rock the Vote plans to use the tool for canvassing, too, thanks to the combined Catalist/Facebook geocoding capabilities. Those knocking on doors are advised to talk to the target "in a conversational manner." Catalist hopes that more of its clients will use the tool to chase voter registration applicants, to collect supporters and identities and then to persuade them to vote. One of their biggest clients - the Obama campaign - is in its own universe. In March, the campaign used Facebook to organize online phone-banking.
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