Getting your constituents to turn out to vote is hard, but they are more likely to do so when they are properly informed. Good thing BallotReady is here and ready to share with your constituents what they can expect on the ballot and help them create a plan to vote.
Information is power. That’s why BallotReady is so important, especially today. In this Tools Episode, Joe speaks with Alex Niemczewski about Ballot Ready, a tool that provides your constituents with information about all of the races on the ballot for the upcoming election. It also teaches the public about early voting rules and helps them make a plan to vote. As a data-driven platform, this tool is all about making as much information available to the voter as possible such as a candidate’s educational background and endorsements. Learn more.
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Joe Fuld
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Martín Diego Garcia
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Presented by The Campaign Workshop
Joe Fuld (00:00):
Hey there. It's Joe Fuld. Welcome to How to Win a Campaign: Tools Edition. We're here this week, chatting with BallotReady founder, Alex Niemczewski, and happy to chat with you, Alex. How are you?
Alex Niemczewski (00:17):
I'm pretty good. How are you?
Joe Fuld (00:19):
Good hanging in there. So talk to us about BallotReady.
Alex Niemczewski (00:25):
Okay. So we've been around for about five years. We are most known for making voter guides to the whole ballot, and we're, we're showing voters every candidate and referendum that will be on their ballot plus background information about them so they can vote informed and we can customize a voter guide to only show an endorsed, an endorsed candidates from a specific organization or show only information on a certain issue or set of issues. And we're also known for making our turnout engine where voters can pledge to vote and make a plan where we walk them through how they can vote, whether it's day of on election day, early voting, or voting by mail.
Joe Fuld (01:14):
Cool. So you said you started this five years ago. So talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the tool over five years. What did it start out as, what are more things that you've added?
Alex Niemczewski (01:28):
It started as a nonpartisan, our own nonpartisan guide. The first thing we added was the ability to customize it for a specific organization. So whether it's like a digital slate card or a voter guide around a certain issue, what we added more recently, well, one in 2017, we expanded to all 50 States. So now we cover every candidate and referendum on every ballot. Some other things that we've added recently are we learned that there are a lot of discrepancies between data at the state and County level. So this is part of why we've grown our team so big, but also we are starting to gather our own polling places because we've seen so many gaps in the data that's available.
Joe Fuld (02:18):
So what separates sort of your tool from other tools out there?
Alex Niemczewski (02:24):
Ballotready has the most comprehensive database to elections and candidates. So what that means is we go further down the ballot than anybody else in the space. We go all the way down to school board. We've talked to school boards where they actually only governed four students, which may have been overkill, but that's what we cover. We also cover more information on candidates their previous experience who endorses them. So we're really all about the data.
Joe Fuld (02:55):
So you talked a lot about sort of data being different, different places that you're collecting it. Talk to us a little bit about how you source data for BallotReady? Where does it come from and how do you make sure it's accurate?
Alex Niemczewski (03:12):
So in order to get information, like what candidates are on the ballot, or where polling places are, what are the rules for early voting? We are going County by County and municipality by municipality. And we do that because we see these discrepancies between States and municipalities. And it's so important to us that the data is accurate and we have more and more opportunities to QA the data. For information on candidates. We gather the same pieces of information for every candidate, for our own profile on them. And that includes their previous experience, work history and education, their stances on issues and who endorses them. And for all those, we gather that from their websites or social media, and we always link directly to their source.
Joe Fuld (04:01):
And talk to us a little bit about your customers, right? Who hires BallotReady? Who are the folks that you work with?
Alex Niemczewski (04:09):
So we often work with advocacy groups, whether they're C3s or C4s, we make branded nonpartisan guide. So even if an organization is a C3 we give them a really great way to do C3 friendly voter turnout. We also work with local organizations, so you could be a national organization or a local organization or candidate. And for candidates, the tool they can buy is our turnout engine where voters can pledge to vote and then make a plan by seeing where their polling place is.
Joe Fuld (04:47):
And so you talk about it being a nonpartisan tool. So do you work with Democratic groups and Republican groups? Talk to us about sort of the partisan ship nature of the clients you work with?
Alex Niemczewski (05:00):
Yeah, we, so being nonpartisan is really vital to what we do. So we work with all sides. Our rule is we don't work with hate groups. We're never going to do that. It's important to us to work with all sides because when we go to gather this data, election administrators often ask us if we're partisan and we get more data because we're nonpartisan and we've heard a ton of stories of state parties or other partisan organizations, just data being withheld from them because they're partisan.
Joe Fuld (05:34):
And so how do you keep information secure? Right? If you're working with a specific client that is doing voter turnout work or work for an organization, how do you make sure that just the client gets that information and that it doesn't go to the other side? How do you do that?
Alex Niemczewski (05:51):
For all of our customers they are the ones that get data on who uses their tool, like the email addresses and phone numbers who uses their tool. And they're the only owners of that data. We don't own that data. And we integrate with their, you know, with Every Action or BSD. So they're the only ones that sees that data.
Joe Fuld (06:13):
And so talk to us about some of the lessons you've learned in building this tool over the years, what have been some of the struggles and how have you grown doing that?
Alex Niemczewski (06:25):
So one is, we've seen that a lot of our customers want to be able to add their own content on candidates. So now we've made this backend where they can upload their own information. And so for example, some groups we work with, send out questionnaires to candidates and they can do that via our backend. We also have learned that showing voters what's on their ballot increases turnout. We did an experiment where we specifically targeted low to mid propensity voters and saw that when voters were shown information about their candidates, they were 20% more likely to turn out compared to their voting history and demographics. It wasn't an RCT, but it's a really good indicator of what sort of makes common sense. If people feel prepared, they might feel more motivated and actually go vote.
Joe Fuld (07:14):
Is testing a part of what you're doing? Do you have more tests that you're planning and doing for 2020?
Alex Niemczewski (07:21):
Yeah. We want to do tests all the time. We are waiting for some results from 2019, from the Analyst Institute, not to blame them. I think it's the fact, the fact that the voter file takes so long to come out after the fact, but that's what we're waiting on, which we should get pretty soon.
Joe Fuld (07:38):
So talk to us about new innovations for the tool for BallotReady for 2020 and what else you're looking forward to.
Alex Niemczewski (07:46):
So one new tool we've put together is what we call an election center. And it is just a one stop shop for voters. It has everything they need. They can check their registration pledge, make a plan, remind their friends, see their ballot all in one place. We put this all together because we have customers who were linking all over the place for this, and then voters weren't following through. And now we can track and make it super easy and intuitive for voters to find everything that they need. We are also really excited, our goal for this year is to reach 50 million voters and we're on track to get there. So, but we're looking for more partners to, to help us.
Joe Fuld (08:28):
Can you give us a sense of the cost of BallotReady? What does it cost for folks to use it?
Alex Niemczewski (08:33):
We charge based on geographic area. So whether it's national state by state or local, so it kind of depends on what they're looking for, but no one has said no to us based on price.
Joe Fuld (08:46):
Well, thanks so much for Alex for taking the time to chat with us. Folks, if you want to learn more about this tool or others, you can go to the campaign workshop and out our tools list at thecampaignworkshop.com. Alex, thanks so much, good luck with everything. And we look forward to talking again.
Alex Niemczewski (09:03):
Thank you so much.
Joe Fuld (09:05):
Thanks for listening to this episode of How to Win a Campaign: Tools Edition. To learn more about great campaign tools, check out our blog and remember to like review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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