So - you know that New/Mode is able to contact decision makers worldwide, but how do we do it? Like progressive campaigns, the work New/Mode does wouldn’t be possible without the help of collaborative open-source projects. In this article, we’ll tell you how the datasets work in our system.
When starting a new tool, one of the first things you may do is choose the dataset of location-based targets you’d like to contact. To you and your supports, these contacts are seamlessly generated once entering a postal code/zip code or address. Behind the scenes, we are pulling the information from our external data source. These data sources are scraped once a day, meaning that we’re pulling in new data, or looking for updates, once every 24 hours.
Where this data source is and how we interact with it depends on its scope and location. For the United States, we rely on Google Civic to provide us information for the federal (House of Representatives and Senate), State (Lower and Upper Houses) and Municipal level representatives. When Google Civic updates its dataset, the updates are automatically pulled into New/Mode. Sometimes, if Google Civic has the target we’re looking to contact, but not all of their contact info (say, a twitter handle), we can create a supplementary dataset. These supplementary datasets are directly managed by our team and are able to fill in gaps left by Google Civic.
New/Mode also has the ability to take on subscriber-funded custom datasets. In the past, we’ve done this for school boards, countries previously not supported, and elections. The requirements for these change on a case by case basis, so we recommend connecting with our success team for further details.