Noah Jennings
Iowa Political Director,
Never Back Down Inc.
SwipeRed was an important part of Never Back Down’s ground game for Governor DeSantis in Iowa.
The product was very exciting and served as a key engagement tool for our team of activists and volunteers in Iowa and across the nation. The Buzz360 team went above and beyond to work with our team and activists to ensure all parties were comfortable with the platform, and to help in developing engaging content and calls to action that were measurable and deliverable.
When we defined a need, Buzz360’s team worked hand in hand with ours to develop and implement solutions quickly. In one particularly demonstrative case, we needed to further segment out voters being contacted to ensure precinct captains were contacting the voters in their specific precinct. The Buzz360 team helped to develop data-matched affinities for this purpose, saving countless hours of cutting individual universes and streamlining the strike-list process.
I will definitely use SwipeRed again, and I strongly recommend the product for campaigns who are looking to focus on developing and activating a grassroots infrastructure.
THE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES
In a highly contested Presidential Caucus in Iowa, Never Back Down had built a historically strong ground game of paid door knockers and a strong precinct captain team for the 1626 precincts across the state. Reporters said voters have been swayed by contact from the super PAC, but many remained unconvinced.
Organizers for Never Back Down PAC recognized two things:
• Texts or phone calls from people the potential caucus attendees knew would be far more effective than communication from strangers.
The robust paid ground game needed to be supplemented with a strong volunteer army with good technology to communicate with friends and their “strike list.”
• The Never Back Down team contacted Buzz360 two months before the caucus to use SwipeRed for friend-to-friend outreach text, direct message, and call conversations to make the outreach more authentic.
The Never Back Down team contacted Buzz360 two months before the caucus to use SwipeRed for friend-to-friend outreach text, direct message, and call conversations to make the outreach more authentic.
TARGETING POTENTIAL CAUCUS GOERS WITH CURATED MESSAGES
Never Back Down data and modeling team imported a robust file of potential caucus attendees with data to target just the right voters to attend the caucus.
Buzz360 and Never Back Down IA staff used a train-the-trainer approach with a blend of online and in-person field team training to streamline volunteer training. The Buzz360 team added help articles in the SwipeRed app to supplement the training together with links to how-to pages for quick deployment.
Volunteers could easily find responses to common questions about the platform to make the process more efficient. The NBD team in IA and Atlanta curated the messages to share from SwipeRed. The advocates effortlessly started digital conversations with the caucus attendees on their strike list.
During the debates, the rapid response team and Buzz360 would craft messages, and the advocates shared with friends and social media in real-time.
RESULTS
In precincts where SwipeRed was used, Ron DeSantis performed 25% better than in precincts where SwipeRed was not used. Additionally, in the 40 counties where SwipeRed was most adopted, there was a positive increase of up to 24.73 percentage points. In the largest county in IA, Polk County, there was an increase of 15%.
Noteworthy is also that the voter turnout went up by 19%, equalling close to 4 Percentage Points in the precincts where SwipeRed was used.