Laura Quinn

 

Quinn: Sure. We were born after the Democrats’ experience during the 2004 elections, where there were a number of efforts to pull together national voter lists to help John Kerry’s presidential campaign and various progressive organizations, particularly Americans Coming Together.

 

Over at the DNC, Terry McAuliffe built a large national database, mostly for fundraising, which he had enormous success with. The Americans Coming Together database was only built in the battleground states, and it was built late and had a lot of technical problems. But people like Carl Pope and Harold Ickes, who were integrally involved in the Americans Coming Together effort, believed that if they had had an opportunity to build their database earlier and on a larger scale, we would really have seen a big advance on our side.

 

After assessing those efforts, as well as what the Republicans were doing with their Voter Vault, we concluded that we needed an entity that focused on data and nothing else. This infrastructure was too critical to be in the basement as part of a side effort. The other thing was that if the company was formed as a for-profit, it would have a lot of flexibility to work with all different types of organizations. We are a little unusual because we are owned by a trust, so we are a bit more like a public utility.
 

 

Politics: There’s still a lot of separation between the different fields, such as polling, fundraising and GOTV. Did you see those coming together more in the past cycle?
 

Quinn: Well, a lot of those disciplines do exist in separate silos inside a campaign or an organization. In the past, consultants and staff would do their work and then share their conclusions, but they didn’t work off the same backbone—which limited their ability to see an individual in their totality as a donor and a volunteer and a voter. Catalist helps bring the disciplines together, because the more you understand who you’re talking to, the better conversation you’re going to have. It’s basically that simple.
 

 

Politics: How has Catalist been able to break down some of those walls?
 

Quinn: We focus on providing the core data that everybody can work off of, so we assemble a national database that includes about 180 million registered voters, then add to that another 75 million records of people who are over 18 and unregistered. So we think we have a pretty close to complete database of all the people over 18 in America. Then we keep appending more information to every name, so that no matter who is looking at that name—whether it’s a pollster or a fundraiser or an organizer—they’re seeing a more and more complete picture of who they’re talking to.
 

 

Politics: How close are you getting to updating voter information in real time?
 

Quinn: Extremely close. One of the great benefits of Catalist—that the Obama campaign has utilized more than any other client—is we have the ability to take that back-end database and connect it to a variety of different channels. That means a client can have their direct mail, their phone banks, their Facebook tools, their website, their online fundraising and so on connected back to Catalist. So those applications are pulling the data they need out of Catalist to do the phone calls or the door knocking, and then as they’re collecting response data it is automatically being synced back into the database.

Politics: What was one of the most innovative uses of your data this cycle?
 

Quinn: One of the more interesting examples was Rock the Vote, which used a Facebook application we developed called iCanvass to register young people in Virginia. The application looks at the addresses you have in Facebook and says, okay, here are the 20 people in your neighborhood who Rock the Vote is targeting that need to get registered. So you can then go knock on their doors, and when you figure out whether they are registered or not registered, you can come back, log in that information, and that gets delivered back to Rock the Vote so that their staff sees a report of who is working on what. And you can then encourage all of your Facebook friends to download this application so they can start doing the same thing in their neighborhoods. It’s a powerful way that the old tools and the new tools can be linked and get some powerful results at very low cost.
 

 

Politics: What were the biggest limitations you saw this cycle with what Catalist was able to do that you’re working to improve for 2009?
 

Quinn: Time was our biggest limitation. We started putting this together in late 2005 and opened the doors in early 2006, so what we created, we built in two-and-a-half years. I also think there is so much more we can do in terms of data visualization, such as mapping technologies—which may be very important for redistricting, for instance. We’d like to have more integration with other types of applications. There are dozens of applications we could potentially provide through Facebook.

 

We have good strategic partnerships and alliances with people like VoteBuilder; we’d like to create more. Catalist is really the wholesaler that provides the back end, and some of these other kinds of tools are very much the front-end dashboards through which people can do very tailored and specific things, so there’s so many more opportunities to do that kind of alliance building. We built several important models for predicting partisanship or predicting turnout, but there’s more we can do now for the Democrats’ legislative agenda. A lot more.