Kentucky Democratic Party

Kentucky Democratic Party Campaigns’ Phone Purchase -  Appending to Votebuilder Policy

Phone Appends Overview

To ensure that all phone numbers added to Votebuilder are of the highest quality, campaigns will need to provide the State Party with the original file containing the phone numbers and other pertinent data. The State Party will send the file to the DNC for processing and uploading to Votebuilder. 

Annual In-Cycle Buys Overview

It is worth noting that during an election cycle, either the National or State Party routinely buys phone numbers to add to the voter file. During 2020, the DNC purchased cell phones from various vendors  12 times, usually monthly. In Kentucky, this added over 1.3m cell phones to the voter file. 

The phone numbers added in 2020 were acquired through TargetSmart and InfoGroup. The DNC ingested all available phone numbers from the vendor from TargetSmart, and all phone numbers from InfoGroup that were matched to individual voters. Going forward into 2022 and beyond, Kentucky users can expect new phone number purchases to occur in a similar manner. 

State Party Discretion 

The State Party reserves the right to approve or deny any request to append phone data that campaigns have purchased for any reason. 

The State Party reserves the right to roll back any attempts to append phone numbers by a campaign that do not originate through this process.

Phone Append Workflow

As phone numbers are a shared resource in Votebuilder for all campaigns, it is imperative to ensure that all phone numbers added to Votebuilder are of the highest quality. 

To ensure this, the function for campaigns to bulk upload phone numbers has been disabled. If campaigns want to purchase phone numbers and have them added to Votebuilder, the campaign will need to provide the following information:

• The name of the vendor the data was procured from;

• The date the data was procured; and

• The original data from the vendor as an Excel spreadsheet, CSV, or Text file, including:

  • How the phone number was matched to the voter;

  • The confidence/quality level of the match; and

  • If acquired from sub vendors, the names of those vendors. 

With this information, the State Party will escalate the data to the DNC who will process the data and upload the numbers to Votebuilder.

Data Processing Overview

The file that was provided to the State Party will be processed, phone numbers scored, and then added to Votebuilder.

During processing, phone numbers that are historically bad (such as being marked wrong or disconnected multiple times) will be identified and removed from the pipeline so that they do not reappear in VAN. Additionally, based upon poor historical performance, phone numbers matched at the household level will be removed from processing. 

Following these steps, the new phone numbers will be matched against several references to determine the phone type (cell phone or landline). After this, the numbers will be run through the DNC’s Sonar Model for scoring to determine the quality of the phone number and the likelihood of being able to reach that voter.

Following these steps, the file will have been cleaned up and will be passed from the DNC to NGP VAN for uploading into Votebuilder.

For this process, please allow 7-10 business days from the file being received by the State Party, sent to the DNC for processing and scoring, and uploaded for usage in Votebuilder.