Call (Time) Me Maybe

How data analysis can take political programs to the next level

Recently, I gave a presentation on one of my favorite projects from my last campaign. I’m quite proud of the work I did on this project so I wanted to share it here as well. I’ll add little explanations beneath each slide

Call Time is when politicians, politicos, and non-profit heads call potential donors and ask them for money. For politicians this is often a full time job each week in addition to their other duties.

Obviously, dialing people who don’t really want to talk to you and begging them for money for dozens of hours each week sucks. However, it is one of the best ways to raise money, and congressional campaigns in particular desperately need those funds. Accordingly, facilitating this process is a huge part of a finance team’s job, with teams spending hours identifying, researching, and sourcing numbers for potential donors. Usually teams have a “call time manager“ who sits with the principal of the organization and helps them with the process. Given call time’s importance I thought I would try to help.

After exhaustive data exploration I found some really neat stuff!

In particular, I looked at the things we can control as a lot of call time is luck. The single most important variable I found for our team was the number we used to call from.

I was really happy with our results. After making changes we tripled our connect rate with the most important segment of the population for our campaign (Iowa is small so many calls were to national donors), we were able to talk to more people per hour, and our conversion rate (the chance someone who picked up ended the conversation with a donation) stayed the same!

I think there is a lot more room for improvement and can’t wait to keep exploring this in the future.

As of writing this post I am still looking for a job so feel free to send anything you see my way!