Data, data, data.

If you’re setting up an organization for lasting impact, this is often the first thing you’re worried about. How can I have a database that holds my voter data, my donor data, my grassroots data, my website data, my email data — all in one spot? How do I avoid the plague of multiple databases?

Many have proposed solutions. Few have gained traction. The sad truth is that we are still far away from the “one database to rule them all,” especially in the center-right and pro-business community. Part of this is that different vendors inexorably have to choose what they will be good at: the most established solutions tend to be in fundraising (where clients are willing to pay more if it helps them raise more), and recently, in the voter contact arena (where the sale of data can easily be monetized). As a result, grassroots and website user data — which is usually free to collect, but actually very valuable — is relegated to a backwater of free or underdeveloped tools. Usually, this means hacked together solutions from individual developers or specialty tools like Wufoo that don’t tie in readily to FEC-ready fundraising systems.

This is of particular concern for Republicans and center-right organizations, whose technology ecosystem tends to be more fractured, with a reliance on standalone fundraising and grassroots products working alongside party-built voter tools like Voter Vault. On the Democratic and progressive side, there are three comprehensive suites of campaign management tools that work natively on the web and have gained wide adoption: NGP/VAN, Blue State Digital, and SalsaLabs.

Today, we’re taking an important step in the direction of a comprehensive campaign management suite by announcing that our grassroots and fundraising platforms, Multiply and iContribute, now work seamlessly together to reward your donors and activists.

Our Approach to Data and User Engagement

As we laid out in our post announcing Multiply, the existing set of tools remains stubbornly fractured between back-end databases that don’t really work well online (they’ll generate a static volunteer form, and that’s basically it) and social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Ning that are great for engaging users but don’t allow you to import that data back to your site.

Multiply and iContribute bridge this divide for two of key focus areas for any campaign or advocacy organization: keeping grassroots supporters involved and raising money. And that’s just the beginning. Your Multiply site applies a layer of game mechanics on top of it by letting activists earn points and badges for signing up, sharing content on Facebook, donating, and making phone calls to your targets. With the integrated Multiply and iContribute, your supporters can now earn points and badges for donating — and any follow-up actions they take, like promoting their donation on Facebook or through e-mail.

Wouldn’t it be great if your data management tools not only stored your data but gave you tools to expand your reach? And wouldn’t be even better if you didn’t have to rely on two separate tools to manage your activists and raise money?

A sample user’s history in the Multiply administration panel

We asked the same questions in evolving Engage’s technology platforms from what were at first pretty straightforward site and data management tools to a grassroots marketing engine that makes building your base of supporters and providing things for them to do fun, viral, and interesting.

We did this because we saw that the market was changing, and existing tools weren’t necessarily meeting this need in a scalable, affordable way. Throughout, we’ve been guided by the following insights and principles:

• Today’s activist is an online native. The toolset should be built first around emerging actions neglected by the big players — usable online contributions, sharing content online, and making it super-easy to generate online list-building events powered by PPC ad campaigns and earned media — rather than trying to reverse engineer these tasks from legacy software focused on compliance and voter file management. Your volunteers and donors will power your entire organization, and they’re becoming increasingly adept and empowered online. The tools need to evolve to recognize this new reality.
• The Web is the hub — the “brain” — that makes the “body” go. Long gone are the days when you could build a campaign around a list of volunteers written out on a legal pad or stored on notecards. Campaigns gradually evolved to computer databases — from offline Access databases to online database software — but even when connected to the Internet, they didn’t connect to the website and make the end user experience more vital and interesting. This just won’t do anymore. Today, your most loyal supporters will find you online. The growth in recent years of the Tea Party and netroots movements show that the most active participants can often come from outside the system, are new to politics, and will join you on the spot off a television hit or a Google or Facebook ad. You need a system that’s built around capturing, engaging, and rewarding this new type of activist.
• Make it fun. Your supporters will want to know what’s in it for them. What can they expect to get by joining your community and getting involved? The game mechanics layered into Multiply provide one answer, with points and badges for actions — but that’s just the beginning. The incentive programs you design to reward your top-level activists will be just as important. We can work with you to implement creative incentives and reward programs unique to your organization.
• And yes, it’s not JUST fun and games. Many — if not most — activists won’t join your high-level activist network. That was true for Barack Obama in the last campaign, and it’s probably true for you. That’s why we still score all actions taken through your website, whether it’s a sign up, petition signature, or a contribution — even if they don’t sign up for Multiply — so you can better target all of your users.

If you’ve been struggling with the challenge of maintaining dual activist and donor databases — particularly frustrating since these are often the same people — we invite you to learn more about the new Multiply, powered with online donations by iContribute.