Resources

A deep dive into data-driven campaigning, uncovering the tools that are used to understand, target and influence voters around the world. The PDF guide, featuring case studies from around the world, gives clear descriptions of thirteen of the methods, explaining how they work, how they use…

Highlighting fractured and alternating online experiences through a design system that gives a nod to online segmentation and targeting is what Tactical Tech's design team set out to do for The Influence Industry Project.

Readers, learners and explorers of The Influence Industry Project…

Our television viewing habits have acquired valuable political currency due to changes in the delivery of TV content and the role of personal data in the process. Together, these two developments make internet-enabled television — commonly referred to as 'Advanced TV' — possible.

Today, voter data is just as much of a target for malicious hacks and breaches as, say, credit card data, and is equally susceptible to poorly secured digital infrastructure. In fact, the problem has already reached a global scale.

Campaign apps capture various types of data that can benefit a campaign as well as the app creator, who can adapt the user experience to solicit even more information from the user. Signing up is often free, and according to makers of such apps, the cost of creating and maintaining an app is…

Digital listening is an umbrella term for monitoring and analysing what someone does or says on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Both the behaviour (retweeting, liking, sharing an image or commenting on a post) and the content (hashtags, tweets, posts and comments) are…

Political campaigns are recognising the value of geospacial information on voters and are investing in detailed, geolocation-based services for the intelligence they contain. Today, location information is the single most valuable piece of data for political campaigns.

A/B testing has been integrated into politics and has become part of standard campaign practice for websites, emails (subject lines, bodies), design elements (images, backgrounds, buttons), headlines, direct mail, TV, radio, phone and even texting to 'find the right messaging'.

Psychometric profiling is the process by which your actions are used to infer your personality. The technique was developed by academics and used by marketers and advertisers to assess the psychological characteristics of an individual or a group. These profiles give advertisers and political…

The growing accessibility of voter data now provides robocalling and mobile texting services with more ways to engage and analyse voters. These tools can also be used to gather additional data from voters, such as their likelihood to attend a campaign event or their stance on a particular issue…

Searching online is one of the key ways that we discover, learn and verify information, and for that reason, the ability to influence search results is a key tool for political campaigns looking to influence or target you before and during referendums, elections and other political debates.

If a political campaign wanted to target their advertisements to women interested in the Bible, conservative politics and the environment, it could turn to one of the scores of marketers and data brokers who have amassed large troves of personal data.

Though it is impossible to predict how exactly political campaigning will evolve in the future, the commercial sector and emerging areas of research and experimentation provide some hints as to what campaigns will be doing.

The past few years have seen WhatsApp become an increasingly powerful and influential tool for political campaigns in the Global South. For many people in the Global North, it may come as a surprise that participation in large WhatsApp groups constitutes the majority of online communication for…

Consumer data helps data brokers create detailed profiles of certain audiences, which are subsequently sold or made available to companies that want to target their customers - or in the political context, potential voters - according to their perceived preferences or attributes.

Voter files are profiles of individual voters that are collected into databases for political campaigning purposes. In its most basic form, a voter file is a list of people who could potentially vote in a given election. This data can also be combined with more detailed information, like party…