Research as a Service

The political landscape can get overwhelming and sometimes a curated list of actions — what candidates to donate to, what will best support our goals — is just what we need. What if there were a data-driven, at least somewhat objective way to find the candidate or candidates that give our dollars the most leverage?

I’m happy to think that I’ve found such an elixir in a platform called Oath that is organizing a different way of political giving. For a given political goal — say, flipping the House, or getting out the vote — Oath provides a slate of high-impact donation choices. You can fund one or more of them at a click of the button; Oath distributes your funds, minus processing fees, and asks for a tip to fund their work.

There are two ladles of special sauce here. One is that Oath scores the candidates along several dimensions, including how close the race is and how much funding need the candidate has. So your dollars are going where more dollars are most likely to tip the balance. I’m thinking of this as research as a service.

High impact is important. The Connector, in its article on Oath, referred to this as “how not to set your money on fire”. But the second, the one that got me to donate through the platform, was that Oath does not pass information along to the candidates. I can donate to 10 candidates and not be drowned in weekly begging letters from 10 more campaigns, in addition to anywhere they sell my name to? Sign me up.

For political campaigns, Act Blue may be a magic formula, but for individual donors, giving your name there is more like the sorcerer’s apprentice. As someone who has donated fairly freely in the past, I’m getting a dozen fundraising appeals every day, more when the news cycle is heavy. So I appreciated what Oath was offering and plan to go back there in the future.

For me, one of this year’s most important goals is getting out the vote, and it can be hard to discern where, amidst the hype, contributions will do the most good. Flip The Vote fits into my theme of “research as a service” because of their tag line “We do the research so you don’t have to.”. What Flip The Vote has researched is grassroots, black-led, GOTV organizations in swing states. These organizations are doing critical work, reaching underserved Democratic voters, generally on a shoestring. Donations here have high impact. Flip The Vote has a one-click contribution button (through Act Blue!) to 8 of these organizations in the most closely contested states.

Just as a reminder, as I write this it’s less than four months to the election. The groups that are doing this critical GOTV work need the money soon or it will be too late to find the people to run the programs to talk to the people to get them to the polls in November. One of the great things about “research as a service” through these organizations is that it has helped me speed up my decision process so that greater things can happen.