Target Point

How to Win a Chart War

Check out the October issue of Wired Magazine UK, where TargetPoint's VP & Research Director Alex Lundry writes on "How to Win a Political Chart War."  

Using the fictional chart below, he takes readers through eleven different ways that visualizations can be used as a tool of political communication and persuasion.

A Massive Conservative Resurgence

What happened on Election Day 2010?  It's not that complicated really.  

First, the 2010 voting electorate was the most ideologically conservative in modern political history.  And second, Republican vote performance among conservative voters was the strongest it has ever been in modern political history.  

For visual proof, check out both pages of graphs embedded below, which speak volumes about yesterday's results.

Historical House Data

3 Ways MicroTargeting Can Help Your Campaign

It sometimes helps to see a few real-life examples of what MicroTargeting has done for others, in order to better imagine how it might help your campaign. The following three examples focus on recent gubernatorial races. 

Governor Sonny Perdue successfully used MicroTargeting to identify the best targets for outreach efforts within the African-American community. The Governor was committed to improving his election results among the large African-American voting bloc, but knew talking to every African American voter would be too costly. MicroTargeting allowed him to find several small but receptive groups of voters within this community most willing to listen to his message...

Asian Americans Absence

This article was written by TargetPoint's superstar summer intern, Laura Strohm.  Laura is a Georgetown University double major in Government and Japanese, so we thought she would be an ideal person to do a deep dive on some large sample Asian-American data we had.  Her findings are very interesting and underscore what a fantastic job she did for us here at TPC.  Here's wishing her the best of luck during her year long overseas program in Japan!  If you're interested in interning at TargetPoint, email us your resume along with a cover letter and writing sample.  

For every election, every bill, every town hall meeting, there are countless groups trying to get their voices heard and in some way influence the outcome.  One group, however, frequently choose to stay home on election days.

In a 2008 study of swing states by TargetPoint, 24% of Asian Americans said that they have voted in no elections in the recent past.  Across all ethnic groups, only 7% of Americans responded similarly.  It seems Asian Americans are either remarkably honest or remarkably disengaged...

4 Ways Location Data Can Change Campaigns

Could the places you go reveal your partisan preferences?  We’ll likely soon know, thanks to the explosion of location based services (LBS) like Foursquare and Gowalla, and especially now that Facebook has gotten into the location game.  

Digital strategists are excited about location services’ potential as another connective tool in the social media ecosystem – a way to humanize candidates, create an intimate connection with supporters, and distribute their message in unique ways to voters.  

But with recent news that Foursquare is in talks with search engines to license their data, it’s time to consider the ways in which rich location data could add strategic value to candidates and campaigns.  

• Opportunity 1 - Customized mobile ad-targeting: From a consumer products perspective this application is fairly straightforward: if someone is online and they’re walking past your store, offer them an incentive to stop in and spend their money.  But in a campaign context, customized mobile ad-targeting isn’t as obvious...