Dear MoveOn member,
My name is Amy White. I've never emailed you before, so let me introduce myself: I'm the senior data analyst at MoveOn.
I spend most of my time buried in spreadsheets, analyzing data, and solving complex math programs to help win campaigns.
Today, I wanted to share with you a behind-the-scenes sneak peek at a powerful voter engagement tool that I developed. MoveOn rolled it out in the spring, and it's been a vital tool in MoveOn's work to block Trumpcare this year.
And now—if we can roll it out more broadly—it could not only help win the urgent battle to stop Donald Trump and the GOP's tax scam (which has just passed the House and is headed for a major fight in the Senate), but would also play a major role in our election strategy in 2018.
It's a secret weapon, powered by math (but the exact math I won't give away ... it's secret!)
We've been calling this project "Amy's phone magic," which isn't really all that exciting. A better name might be "MoveOn's data-rific phone call fire hose."
Here's how it works: Using some data and a whole lot of math, we identify progressive-leaning voters in key districts with members of Congress who most need to hear from their constituents. Then, we make huge numbers of calls to alert those voters to what's happening and encourage them to get involved!
Imagine it: You're cooking dinner, and you get a phone call from a friendly MoveOn voice saying, "There's about to be a huge vote to give 1.5 trillion dollars in tax giveaways to corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Your senator is one of the deciding votes. Want to be connected to tell them to vote no?" You answer in the affirmative, get patched through, and your voice gets heard. Easy peasy, and you're back to your cooking.
We've already been using this tool—and it's been making a huge impact! But our impact is limited by the data we have. Now, we want to buy a national voter file, roll this program out to more districts, find more voters, help more progressives make their voices heard, and use this program to help win elections. Which is where you come in.
There is a big problem that our movement is facing right now: Hundreds of millions of people in this country share our values, but not all of them are—right this second—ready or able to go march in the streets, attend an event, or make a phone call. Figuring out who is tuned in, fired up, and ready to make their voice heard—and helping more people get to that place—is an eternal organizing challenge, and it can be the difference between winning and losing a close vote in Congress or a close election.
That's why we built a predictive analytic model that—if fully resourced—will ultimately let us reach tens of millions of voters who want to make their voices heard, and empower them to do just that, generating huge amounts of calls to Congress and other impactful campaigning activity.
So far, we've determined from our testing that this program is significantly more cost-effective, dollar for dollar, than if we were working with outside consultants to help identify the voters and power the technology generating these phone calls. But beyond that, we are able to reach more people than we can reach by traditional methods. We are truly expanding the realm of what's possible.
I love this program because MoveOn member dollars are now being stretched further, we're better able to beat back the organized forces of Big Money and the far right, and we're able to reach more people than ever before. But we can fully scale this up only with your help.
Using this technique, we powered 136,434 calls to stop Trumpcare that we couldn't have otherwise made. A volunteer phone bank fire hose!
We're using this secret weapon again to help win one of our top two priorities this fall—to stop the GOP's tax scam. I have the key Senate states all loaded up in my system. Now, I need to know what size budget we have for this secret weapon.
That's where you come in.
Connecting a call costs us about $1.05. So if we can raise $105,000, we can make 100,000 more calls than we'd otherwise make as a progressive community to stop the Republican tax scam. Can you chip in now to help us reach that goal?
Yes! I'll chip in $3.15 to help connect 3 calls.
Yes! I'll chip in $21 to help connect 20 calls.
Yes! I'll chip in $78.75 to help connect 75 calls.
Or, click here to donate another amount.
Just think about it: Progressives have made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to defeat Trumpcare, but now we know that there are hundreds of thousands more concerned Americans who share our values that we could also activate to call—we just need the resources to reach them.
And these calls matter. Members of Congress use them to gauge sentiment in their districts, and as we have seen over the past year, the amount of pressure elected officials feel from their constituents can be the deciding factor in how they vote on legislation that impacts us all.
Which is why this new tool is now more important than ever and really could be our best weapon to stop the GOP's tax scam.
That's it. Back to my spreadsheets. I hope you'll chip in, Eddie—and thanks for all you do.
–Amy White
P.S. I'm a little embarrassed by nicknames like "data guru" and "analytics whiz" for me and other members of my team. But if hearing those nicknames helps you have a bit of a sense of what we do and helps us power our secret weapon to stop the GOP's tax scam, then I'll put up with it!
Want to support MoveOn's work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us?
Click here to chip in $3, or whatever you can afford.
PAID FOR BY MOVEON
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