In the common parlance of campaigns a Universe is the set of voters who will be sought via a given contact means. For instance, a “text universe” is the list of people you text, while a “call universe” is the list that gets cut up for your phone banks. A “direct mail universe” is what it sounds like, and is itself a tremendous budgetary decision for campaigns. Scoping the sizes of these universes, as well as wisely selecting their contents is an important strategic task for campaigns.
New technical platforms are continuously emerging and voters are being met there. This has increased the burden on campaigns to maintain multiple universes. Often, these universes begin to really diverge from each other too, as they were purposed differently, and are given differing levels of budget and attention–and they are often managed by different people and teams.
Before the introduction of ranked choice voting in NYC, we typically produced up to 6 different universes for campaigns through their life-cycles, for uses across various channels:
- Deep Canvass Universe
- Survey/Petition Universe
- Mail and/or Postcard Universe
- Voter Identification Universe
- Voter-ID Expansion Universe
- GOTV Universe
These universes are selected from a recent voter file, after a consultation on its purpose.
Our continuous integration of these universes allows for efficient and optimal voter contact, while minimizing waste and voter fatigue as well. This is a phone model that will drop a voter if someone reaches them at their door, and vice versa, or a postcard universe which is populated by anyone who was not reached in two successive phone calls.
We also help campaigns to be maximally extractive within their supply of registered voters. This is a specialty service we provide for campaigns that want to be especially aggressive. One of the ways we have been doing this for years is with bespoke cartography and GIS.
In this research map, we identified the mean and median location of voters within a weirdly-shaped district. Also indicated with red dots are the fixed addresses containing more than a certain number of Registered Democrats. This kind of work is done with a geocoded voter file.
We can also indicate magnitudes of voter quantity, even situating voters in context of Transit Points of Interest like subway stations and stops. This can be incredibly useful when designing public visibility events as well as canvass targets.
While several products dominate in their respective lanes of voter contact, we believe that designing really powerful input, and also integrating what a campaign is capturing via these systems can be essential to out-performing the competition. We believe in universes that continuously remodel themselves as a byproduct of your voter contact activities, to which you are already directing vital resources.
Ask me about better voter universes.