Last Sunday, as I was enjoying doing absolutely nothing, my doorbell rang.  Naturally, I assumed it was a salesperson.  My husband hates salespeople, but I’m a little more sympathetic, having done sales in the past.  So when I answered the door, I was pleasantly surprised to find a staffer from my political party’s state committee standing on my doorstep asking for me.  I was about to be ID’ed!

Voter identification is a process where campaigns and parties seek to augment their files with new information that will tell them how to best connect with a voter in the future.  There are three main goals:

• Campaign-based, where the voter is asked whether they’ve made up their mind how to vote
• Election-based, where the voter is asked whether they intend to vote
• Data-gathering, where the voter is asked their opinions and/or actions on certain issues

In all cases, the goal is to allow the collector to better allocate marketing resources and to provide the messages that will be most successful with the voter.

Once I got over how cool it was that I got picked (I never get picked!), I got to thinking how inefficient this process was.  Going around knocking on doors?  Calling individual people?  Reaching them by mail, phone, and cable buys once you know how they feel?  The goal definitely sounded familiar – after all, reaching people by understanding their values, beliefs, and attitudes is really what Resonate is all about, but the process is older than Old School.
 

While there is a place for traditional voter ID processes, the experience also reaffirmed my faith in what we do here at Resonate: we give marketers a way to identify and reach specific segments, but with scale, efficiency, and frequency.  We can replace voter ID projects, in some cases, or help use the results more effectively in others.  We offer an exponentially more powerful and efficient tool for any marketer’s arsenal.
When it comes to politics and public affairs, finding attributes that speak to specific viewpoints and issue positions available for targeting online can be hard to come by.  Many available options must reduce people to their most basic demographics to be able to find them online – Republican or Democrat, registered to vote or not.  We see this problem for brand marketers, too – kids or no kids, male or female. 

Resonate has achieved so much more nuance by taking a cue from traditional voter identification practices – you have to ASK!  By asking about values, actions, viewpoints, vote history, issue position, ideology, and more, and coupling this data with an understanding of the respondent’s online behavior.

Resonate has the tools to augment traditional voter identification and communication projects into scalable and efficient online campaigns.  It translates to the brand world, as well, where we transform complex consumer understanding into uniquely targeted actionable media.

And all of that is even cooler to me than getting picked to be ID’ed, but maybe that’s just my inner geek talking.