Political Campaign Software: Computer Programs to Win Elections
The advent of computers and specialized software has made it easier to do just about every job imaginable, and political campaigning is no exception. Although I’m sure you could run a winning political campaign without a computer, I wouldn’t want to try it. When it comes to organizing and tracking names, addresses, finance reports, contributions and countless other data, computer programs make a political candidate’s job immeasurably easier.
First time political candidates might think that they need to buy specialized political campaign software or programs in order to make the best use of their computer during the election season. And while there are plenty of programs and software packages available for purchase that claim to make campaigning easier, the fact is that everything you need is probably installed on your computer already.
The two computer programs that I’ve used most extensively for political campaigning are Microsoft Word, a word processing program, and Excel, a spreadsheet creator. Unless you’re running in a statewide election or you’re a field director for a presidential campaign, I doubt that you’ll ever need anything more than these two programs, which come installed on many Windows PC computers out-of-the-box.
The biggest value of a computer in political campaigning is its ability to help you organize, track and plan. The Excel spreadsheet program is a huge help for any campaign, and I suggest that you familiarize yourself with it if you plan on running for office in the future. Not only is it fairly simple to use, but it allows you to easily keep track of every interaction you might have on the campaign trail.
Additionally, most election statistic reports that you receive from your local board of elections will likely be in an Excel format. If you know a bit about how to use spreadsheets, you’ll be able to sort and organize names, addresses and voting history for people in your district–a very useful ability that could mean the difference between winning and losing your campaign.
Sure, you could probably find flashy political campaign software and programs that make the process of tracking and organizing more entertaining, but you’d basically be paying for something that you probably have the ability to do already. Microsoft Word and Excel aren’t flashy software, but they’re very useful to political campaigns from the lowest to the highest levels.
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mpanger on April 25th, 2011
This article is WAY off the mark and I hope no one takes this advice.
Although Excel and Word are GREAT products, they will NOT manage the needs of most political campaigns.
I have been using Excel since it first arrived on the scene in the mid 80’s. I have logged many thousands of hours and developed many projects in Excel. I love the product, but I would NEVER use it to manage the data needs of a campaign.
They will NOT integrate with your website to take donations and volunteer signups. You will have to add this data manually. And what about handling the duplications that occur when some is already in your database and they make a contribution?
Finance reporting boards take a dim view of not managing your duplicates properly.
Word and Excel will not send mass emails to maintain communication with your voters. Your regular ISP (ie, AOL, Comcast, Gmail) will limit the number of emails you can send in a single day to about 250. This will work only for the smallest of campaigns.
You didn’t mention congressional races, but they are REQUIRED to file their finance reports electronically. You cannot do that with Word or Excel.
When it comes to targeting your voters some additional information is useful. How many elections has this voter voted in? Are you running in a primary? Do they vote in primaries? This is data you can get and have integrated into your campaign database. If you are a very good at Excel, you may be able to join your voter list with your voter history list and determine this information.
If you have notes you would like to keep on your voters, what happens when you have more than one note per voter? Do you create a duplicate voter record? Do you put notes in a separate tab and join the notes tab with the voter tab? A good Excel person can do this, but it’s beyond the skills of most candidates I have come across. Or worse, do you keep widening the spreadsheet adding column after column of notes?
Same thing for contributions. Many voters will give multiple times to your campaign. You will need to be able track multiple contributions for a single voter. You will need to track what election that contribution is attributed to. You may be running in the primary and again in the general.