Dynamic Analytics for Data-Driven Advocacy

Obtaining up-to-date audience and voter-specific civic engagement data is a massive challenge for many political campaigns in the United States. Traditional polling services are expensive, time-consuming, and provide limited insights. Similarly, voter modeling services, which solely rely on past data and lack real-time behavioral indicators, are available, but are often prohibitively expensive for smaller progressive campaigns.

These financial and data-use limitations give wealthier, conservative, well-financed, and oftentimes (though not exclusively) anti-democratic candidates an advantage, as they can afford the data to reach and persuade voters with minimal impact from their opposition. These limitations affect electoral outcomes and public policy across the US and even internationally, as big data is increasingly used in political races. Conservative campaigns have successfully utilized data to promote their messages and spread disinformation across many communities in the US and are increasingly doing so for political purposes in countries worldwide.

As the use of expensive data tools expands, it becomes crucial to empower progressive causes with powerful data and strategy resources to educate, engage, and mobilize voters in support of community-oriented and democratic civic causes. This is necessary to maintain democratic and civic engagement in historically marginalized communities who already experience barriers to obtaining civic education information and voting information data; however, use of these civic technology resources are also needed to counter conservative or authoritarian political efforts and uphold inclusive policies and representation worldwide.

The widespread use of AI tools in political campaigns and audience messaging strategy is a significant concern not only in the US but also in democracies globally. Building affordable, accessible data solutions that can strengthen progressive, community-centered causes in the United States will benefit communities and their advocacy leaders. These tools will pave the way for the development of similar resources that can be used to strengthen strategic community advocacy internationally.

The rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence in political campaign tools has predominantly favored politically conservative candidates and parties with business support. However, as these technologies continue to advance, progressive organizations can leverage them to gain a significant advantage. By harnessing powerful tools, progressives can develop smarter strategies, understand the impact of regressive campaigns, and effectively counter their efforts while managing their own campaigns more efficiently.

To level the playing field, and provide communities and justice-focused causes opportunities to win in the current political campaign ecosystem, it is crucial to offer affordable and accessible tools that are equally powerful for progressive parties and causes. By doing so, we can enhance the effectiveness of progressive, egalitarian, community-oriented political endeavors.

Advocacy Analytics Collective Technologies’ platform offers a cutting-edge data intelligence and analytics service designed to help progressive political candidates, policy advocacy organizations, and political consulting firms understand their audiences’ changing political sentiments, and tailor their messaging to maximize message resonance and engagement. Our sentiment analysis tools help organizations to identify campaign-specific audience segments and track how specific concerns, political interest, and issue salience evolve within these audiences over time, particularly during fast-paced political races. Our online survey tools enable organizations to conduct community surveys on specific issues and refine campaign language through real-time, online opinion and message-testing polls across audiences in any geography, large or small.

Our software integrates individual voter file data, behavioral data, census data, real-time social media language, radio analysis, news media content, and online opinion surveying using recent advances in large language models, graph theory, and machine learning.

Our platform provides both a crucial data lens into understanding the impact of their advocacy, education, mobilization and persuasion campaigns. Our platform similarly helps advocacy groups and campaigns understand the impacts of, and execute messaging campaigns to fight  opposition campaigns, including disinformation and ‘fake news’ messaging. This is especially important for communities who have historically been targeted by disinformation campaigns and whose political agency may already be limited due to historic information barriers and systemic inequality.

By tracking sentiment analysis of different issues across different populations, our software can help leaders understand how disinformation and conservative thought campaigns impact different communities. This data is crucial for message formulation, testing, and distribution that can actively fight disinformation and provide more accurate civic information to voters. By understanding how opposition messaging may be specifically targeting and impacting minority communities, community and campaign leaders can understand sentiment changes early on and counter them with their own educational messaging and community engagement strategies.

In summary, our solution empowers organizations to build successful, strategic, data-driven political campaigns, grow civic education engagement opportunities, and combat disinformation by monitoring the sentiment of different communities.

Our data intelligence services aim to benefit progressive political candidates and policy causes by providing necessary campaign data and resources to historically underserved communities impacted by systemic inequalities. Our software empowers these communities to build successful, strategic, data-driven political campaigns and grow civic education engagement opportunities.

Historically marginalized, minority and working-class communities that drive progressive political initiatives stand to gain the most from the software we offer. By tracking sentiment analysis of different issues across different populations, our software can help leaders track the success of their own education and voter mobilization campaigns to turn out minority and low-propensity voters. 

The software can also help local advocacy leaders understand how disinformation and conservative thought campaigns impact different communities, and build messaging and engagement strategies to fight disinformation and empower voters with truthful civic information about candidate merits and voting opportunities. Typically, the voter modeling services and opinion polls necessary to acquire this information are exceptionally expensive and only available to well-financed political initiatives. We aim to democratize access to this data and make it available for small, community-centered campaigns spearheaded by labor, minority, and working class communities. 

This data is crucial for message formulation, testing, and distribution that can actively fight large business interests, and disinformation campaigns, providing more political agency and correct civic information to voters, particularly working-class and minority voters who have historically been targets of disinformation campaigns and whose political agency may already be impacted due to systemic inequality.

Our real-time campaign data solutions geared at progressive campaigns and causes directly track how sentiment and ideas propagate through different audience segments. By understanding the ideas and political sentiments of different communities and how they evolve over time, our software can assess the impact of possible disinformation propagation and its effect on voters’ capacity to make democratic and informed civic decisions; for many communities, including ethnic minority communities in the American political system, community-specific disinformation campaigns can massively impact voter decisions and voter turnout. 

Our team is uniquely positioned to deliver solutions that serve the needs of progressive political campaigns and the communities that they represent. As a minority-led team made up of People of Color, immigrants, and LGBT people, we have firsthand experience of the systemic injustices our own communities face, and hold have a 

Our team's two non-technical co-founders, Danielle and Alisar, entered political work as young people during a time of significant social and political change, and they have personally experienced the direct effects of regressive, violent policy and politics.

Our team recognizes the importance of intersectionality and the need for community-oriented movement work and data-informed campaign strategy. Our own experiences of injustice and our commitment to community empowerment and safety drive our motivation to develop public-interest technology solutions that help elect progressive, community-oriented leaders to public office and help justice-oriented movements win public policy at every level of government.

We are also committed to tailoring our solutions explicitly to support the most progressive candidates and cause campaigns. We intend to modify our software offerings and business model continually to position groundbreaking, progressive movements and causes in an advantageous position to fight conservative and disinformation messaging, no matter how powerful the opposition may be.

Our team is deeply engaged with our own communities, as well as the minority and historically marginalized communities we aim to serve. We have actively sought out their input and ideas throughout the development process, and we continue to engage with them as we refine and improve our solutions. We recognize the importance of diversity in resources to serve the diversity of political causes and communities. Therefore, we are committed to designing solutions that meet the specific needs of these communities, and we use their input and ideas to guide the meaningful implementation of our solutions.

We have the technical backend of our platform already built out, and we have an indication that the software works as designed to provide the intended the data insights. We need to develop the front end of the product to serve the specific data queries and needs of our users, which is currently in process.

Please see the technical demo below of our software working as intended: 

Beyond fundraising, our team is particularly interested in accessing direct mentorship from public policy, legal, communication, political movement, and  political campaign experts. We’re interested in connecting with these experts who we believe can help our team currently improve, and later optimize our product to address the most crucial data gaps in the most useful ways possible, for our software users. 

As an organization, we will also be constantly iterating on our software, and we want to be working within a network who can provide guidance to help us consistently and creatively optimize the software to address the latest campaign data challenges of our users, and to keep our software accessible (financially and otherwise) to the movement and civic engagement leaders who we intend to prioritize. 

Finally, as we consider expanding our software to support movement and political campaign work outside the USA, we intend to surround ourselves with a support network of creative and legal thinkers who can help us navigate the unique challenges that we know will emerge in international political support work. 

Firstly, the use of data analytics and machine learning to analyze and interpret large amounts of data is a cutting-edge approach in advocacy work. By leveraging advances in technology to quickly and accurately analyze information on communities and political sentiment, our solution can provide insights and recommendations that would otherwise be difficult or time-consuming to obtain.

Secondly, the focus on impact measurement and evaluation sets our solution apart from traditional advocacy approaches. By using data-driven metrics to assess the effectiveness of advocacy efforts, our solution provides a more objective and evidence-based approach to advocacy work. This could lead to more targeted and effective advocacy strategies that produce measurable results, particularly for small organizations that typically cannot afford traditional data analytics firms' services.

Thirdly, the emphasis on collaboration and knowledge-sharing through a platform-based approach is also innovative. By bringing together different stakeholders in the advocacy ecosystem, our solution has the potential to foster greater cooperation and coordination among organizations and individuals working towards common goals. This could lead to a more cohesive and effective advocacy ecosystem.

Overall, our solution combines cutting-edge technology, data-driven metrics, and collaborative platform-based approach to provide a novel and innovative approach to advocacy work.

Our impact goals for the next year is to have our software used across at least 30 small and medium sized political campaigns and consulting firms, and to receive clear indications of how the software is informing political strategies, messaging, and voter communications of our users. By the end of 2024, we would like to reduce polling and analysis costs by an average of 30% for all adopting campaigns.

Our impact goals over the next 5 years are to have our product implemented in 150 campaigns nationwide, and to have reduced polling and analysis costs by an average of 45% for all adopting campaigns, and to clearly produce more accurate, and frequently accessible data than traditional polling and audience data analysis methods.

1. Cost savings: We can measure the cost savings achieved by our solution by comparing the costs of traditional polling and analysis methods with the costs of our platform. This could include direct costs like fees and expenses, as well as indirect costs like the time and effort required to conduct polling and analyze data.

2. Time savings: Another metric to consider is the time saved by using our platform compared to traditional methods. This could include the time required to design and administer surveys, as well as the time required to analyze and interpret results.

3. Accuracy: One of our goals is to improve data analysis and accuracy, so we could measure progress in this area by comparing the accuracy of our results with those obtained through traditional polling and analysis methods. This could involve conducting side-by-side comparisons, or collecting feedback from clients on the quality and accuracy of the data generated by our platform.

4. Client satisfaction: Ultimately, the success of our solution will depend on whether it meets the needs and expectations of our clients. We could measure client satisfaction by collecting feedback through surveys or interviews, or by tracking metrics like client retention rates and referral rates.

5. Impact on election outcomes: When our platform is being used by political campaigns, you could measure its impact on election outcomes. This could involve comparing the success rates of campaigns that used our platform with those that did not, or tracking the performance of individual candidates before and after adopting our solution.

Our theory of change linking improved data access, analysis, and campaign messaging to political progress, democracy, and civil rights for minorities can be outlined as follows:

1. Access to accurate and relevant data is critical for designing effective outreach, education, advocacy, and data-driven messaging campaigns that can improve the interests of low-income communities and minorities by helping historically marginalized people and their communities win electoral seats and policy change in government.

2. Historically, access to this data has been limited to large, well-funded organizations and political campaigns, resulting in unequal access to the political process and reinforcing systemic inequalities.

3. By providing low-cost, accurate, and accessible data analysis tools to community campaigns, AACT can help these groups better understand the needs and preferences of their constituents and design more effective advocacy campaigns.

4. By making these campaigns more effective, AACT can help to level the playing field for traditionally underrepresented groups, helping them get crucial data that previously they never had, to inform the voter outreach, targeting, and messaging strategies of local campaigns. 

5. This, in turn, can lead to increased political engagement and representation for these groups, as well as greater democratic participation and a more just and equitable society overall.

Overall, the theory of change suggests that by democratizing access to data analytics, AACT can help to build a more equitable and just society where the voices of all communities are heard and represented in the political process.

The goal of this software is to help political and policy campaigns understand and analyze community-level sentiment across a wide variety of issues by  leveraging publicly available data from various sources, including news media, Twitter, Reddit, census bureau data, and local radio stations. The software will use Kafka for streaming, Neo4j as the database, Python for the backend language, and React for the frontend. The architecture will consist of microservices and everything will be managed using Docker.

1. Data ingestion: The software will have a component to ingest data from various publicly available sources such as news outlets, Twitter, census bureau data, Reddit, and radio stations. Kafka will be used for streaming and the data will be stored in Neo4j, a graph database.

2. ML models: The software will have a component to run ML models to extract topics, sentiment, and general insights from the ingested data. This will help political campaigns better understand their communities and create more effective political messaging.

3. API: The software will have an API to serve the data to the user. The API will allow users to query the data and retrieve relevant insights. The API will be built using Python and will interact with the Neo4j database to retrieve data.

4. Frontend: The software will have a frontend that allows users to interact with the data and view all the outputs. The frontend will be built using React and will communicate with the API to retrieve data.

The software will be built using microservices and managed using Docker. The infrastructure will consist of the following components:

1. Kafka cluster: Kafka will be used for streaming data from various sources.

2. Data ingestion microservice: This microservice will be responsible for ingesting data from various sources and storing it in Neo4j.

3. ML models microservice: This microservice will run ML models to extract topics, sentiment, and general insights from the ingested data.

4. API microservice: This microservice will provide an API to serve the data to the user. It will interact with the Neo4j database to retrieve data.

5. Frontend microservice: This microservice will provide a frontend that allows users to interact with the data and view all the outputs.

the AACT team, made up of a small and diverse group of Women, People of Color and LGBT people, fosters an inclusive work environment where all team members feel valued and respected. 

This includes promoting open communication and actively seeking out and incorporating feedback from all team members. Additionally, our team actively engages with and listens to the communities we're serving to ensure that our work aligns with community needs and values.

Additionally, our team ensures that our technology is accessible to all users, regardless of any disabilities or limitations. This includes designing our software with accessibility features in mind and regularly testing for accessibility.

Finally, once we do onboard more people, our team will provide ongoing DEI training to all team members to ensure that everyone is aware of and able to address issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, justice, community support, and historic inequality. This justice lens informs and will continue to inform our work moving forward.