TITLE: 
The Role of Data and Analytics in the Presidential Elections

ABSTRACT:
If you're still recovering from the barrage of ads, news, emails, facebook
posts, and newspaper articles that were giving you the latest poll numbers,
asking you to volunteer, donate money, and vote, this talk will give you a
look behind the scenes on why you were seeing what you were seeing. I will
talk about how the Obama Campaign used analytics to improve decision making
within the organization and describe how data from a variety of sources was
used to improve fundraising, volunteer activities, and voter contacts. We will
cover what kind of data was available to the campaign, what technologies were
developed and/or used, and how the resulting products were adopted by the
campaign in order to help win the presidential elections. Although the focus
will be on the elections and politics, we'll also talk about lessons learned
during the campaign and how some of the same techniques can be used by other
organizations to make them more successful through smarter use of data and
analytics.