If you’ve ever spent time selling your company’s products or services, you know how important “qualified leads” are. The challenge is finding access to eager prospective customers standing with money in their hands waiting to buy your company’s goods or services. How do you identify those high-quality leads and are there tools and techniques available that move more people into that “high-quality” category?

The question is the same if you’re looking for the right people to support your cause or issue. Welcome to the exciting world of database management!

It’s important to understand that database management is far, far more dealing with a list of names. Today it involves bringing together available data and using it to assess and categorize people to be better able to predict or identify where they’d likely fall on a particular issue. This is essential information. It lets companies and organizations identify potential advocates who – to some degree or another – will step up and support the given project or cause.

Here’s how Velocity used a proprietary database management program to build support and advocacy for a major project.

Velocity’s approach brings together a broad range of sources of verified and appropriate consumer data to create an evolving database.  We then use other steps to analyze the information to rank, categorize, and scope how likely an individual will be to take supportive actions. Being able to create and manage an extensive list of data points associated with people on key lists allows us to focus on engaging people most likely to be interested in a specific position on an issue.

We start with voter and census data and then add in other data sources. (We also strictly follow the laws and regulations of state and federal governments.) As an example of the data set’s extensiveness, Velocity’s system has the potential to work through more than 1,700 data variables on 230 million Americans. 1,700 variables is a big number, but it effectively illustrates the extent to which data today can be sliced and diced to hone in on individuals with extremely specific demographic profiles. And keep in mind they can run this kind of analysis on 230 million folks!

In the case of a complex project, the data – and some additional Velocity modeling – gave Velocity the ability to identify specific individuals from which to create a “coalition of the willing” in a manner that extended beyond and above partisan issues and other traditional limitations to create a universe of people connected to an issue, position or project that may or may not be evident based solely, say, on whom they voted for.

The effort was extremely effective. As a result of this database and companion tools – and other components we’ll discuss in future blogs – Velocity was able to  

  • identify over 100,000 supporters.
  • collect over 20,000 signatures of support
  • place over 7,000 lawn signs in strategic positions.
  • facilitate over 40,000 phone calls to the Governor’s office.

…all for the benefit of the project.

One more thing: Properly managed, today’s database management is a powerful tool, and – forgive the cliché – it’s not your father’s database management. Improvements are happening daily, and it’s no longer an activity to assign to an intern or to someone to handle piecemeal during slow periods. Tools – better data and people who know how to use it to maximum advantage – are tools worth investing in. Velocity can help. Contact us.