Direct Mail

Put this one in the dictionary next to "counter-intuitive." The Rothenberg Political Report has a great little piece up about how the Obama campaign used commercial mailing lists and direct mail as a gateway to reaching young voters in Iowa:

Despite the vast amount of attention and success in organizing connected, Web-savvy voters, new media technologies are not as good at discovering the disconnected or persuading undecided voters. Beyond the presidential level, strategists are still wrestling with how to use new media effectively for persuasion.

[...]

Younger, more connected voters are believed to be the beginning of the end for direct mail. But when the Obama campaign realized it needed to increase the overall turnout of the Iowa caucuses in order to win, the Senator’s strategists went back to direct mail. The campaign bought a commercial list of high school students (age 18 or those who would be 18 on Election Day) used by prospective colleges.

Those students were sent a full-color, direct-mail piece with an image of Obama placed on an iPhone, which also included various ways the recipient could connect with the campaign — via phone, text or Web site. The campaign used a traditional campaign tactic to discover new supporters that didn’t appear on any voter file.

It's interesting, and the piece is written to suggest that this could be a successful first-step for down-ballot candidates to approach local young voters and build a reliable voter file for the under 30 set.

Once you've gone through this process, you should have a list with millions of entries, each containing personal and consumer information--ideally for every registered voter, and all non-registered adults.  So what can you do with it? Plenty.

Once it's compiled, the data has to be accessed.  Various people can be granted different levels of access--making the whole file available to any volunteer would raise serious privacy concerns, not to mention possibly giving access to rival campaigns or, god forbid, the other party.  For low-level volunteers, this access can be extremely limited, while higher-level operatives can be granted more generous permissions.  Broader access can be granted through a web interface like the DNC's Votebuilder, RNC's Voter Vault, or Catalist's Q-tool.  Using some relatively simple Boolean logic, you can create lists of all the people in a state, district or precinct who share certain characteristics--for example, you might want to find all registered black voters under the age of 40.  With a certain (ever-diminishing) amount of inaccuracy, this is a trivial list to pull.

As you can imagine, this is extremely useful.  You can use these tools to do everything from create walk lists for your volunteers to pull samples for polls or blanket a state with direct mail.  Which is why these files are considered so valuable, and why making them is big business--with big consequences.