State Money Analysis: Florida in 2008
Over the last month, I’ve been working with Edwin Bender and The National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMST), which operates FollowTheMoney.org. This not-for-profit organization provides a database similar to the Sunlight Foundation’s database of political donations, but NIMST focuses exclusively on state elections.
Their data has been featured prominently in many publications. Most recently, I came across it in the New York Times article “Health Lobby Takes Fight to the States,” which cites the NIMST report “Take $2 Million…and Call Me in the Session Health Care Interests Gave Healthy Doses of Contributions.”
This is an excellent use of this type of data. I encourage you to read the article and the report.
For a test run, NIMST gave me a sample set of data to process in Jute. Admittedly, I have not perfected the analytic techniques here and there is a lot more work to do to make the data relevant. Edwin Bender said to me in a prescient email
“Clay Johnson of Sunlight Foundation said recently that data visualizations are a dime a dozen, but meaningful visualizations are priceless.”
These are the top 5 donors to state candidates in FL in 2008. The largest donations went to the FL Republican Party. These donors give a large number of $500 donations (shown in orange).
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So this is my first attempt at meaningful visualization. I give myself a “B-” on it. I took the data from FL, a state where I’m familiar with state politics after playing a prominent volunteering role with my mother’s unsuccessful run at the state house in 2008.* In the following visualizations, there is a very simple visual index: REPUBLICAN = RED; DEMOCRAT = BLUE; $500 DONATION = ORANGE.
The interesting about this is:
1) The top donors in the state are largely bi-partisan in their giving. Why? Do their recipients sit on influential committees? Is there a specific piece of legislation they wanted to support? A specific fundraising volunteer who brokered these donations?
2) There are a surprising number of $500 donations. Why so many?! What is the significance of a $500 donation to a state official? UPDATED: ”$500 is the legal limit for a campaign contribution to an individual candidate. That amount can be given once during the primary and once during the general election.” according to Linda McDonald, my mother.
Why? I’m not sure. I hope this blog post will help me find out.
FYI: you can access this data set in a network document called “state money FL v1″ by using the Jute guest account. Or, request your own account and I’ll share the data set with you.
Top 2 Donors in FL State Politics in 2008
These are the top 2 donors in FL state politics. What is their political bias?
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Paul Tudor Jones, II
Mr. Jones supports candidates from both parties and both parties' state offices. Why?
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Guy M. Spearman, III
Guy M. Spearman, III also supports candidates from both parties and both parties' state offices. Why?
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Whole Network Analysis: Top 5 FL Donors
Whole Network Analysis shows a surprising number of $500 donations among the top 5 donors in FL state politics in 2008. $500 is the maximum donation permitted.
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Assumed Industry Affiliation
By extrapolating industry affiliations from the companies where donors self-report that they work, we can look at trends of how industries' money flows to parties. This is not really a factually valid analysis--just an exercise in using Jute to crunch NIMST data.
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Finding meaning in this data…
This data set is just a trial, and this blog post is just to get some initial feedback. My hope is that we can elevate this into a funded research project, analyzing trends in the NIMST data, and finding specific, relevant examples that we can publish. Also, I’d like to work with a campaign to help them in their fundraising and strategy development.
There is a lot more than needs to be done to “take this to the next level.” That includes:
Cross-referencing this data with other data sets, like: which campaigns actually won seats in the State Legislature; which committees the elected officials sit on and chair; which federal candidates these donors supported; and, ideally, which candidates I know (or my clients know) and how they can leverage existing relationships to get value out of this analysis. (That last one comes from existing, internal databases.)
But for now, I hope you’ll help me find meaning in this data. If you’d like access to more analysis from other states, or you are interested in publishing this material, please contact me via email or via phone at 828/545.9539.
Sean McDonald
co-founder, Jute Networks
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*A little editorial here: Linda McDonald ran a hell of a campaign against a competitor with an exponentially larger war chest. In a district where a Dem hadn’t had a chance in a generation, she lost by a razor thin margin. And the people of the state of Florida are worse-off because she doesn’t represent them.
Independent Sector: a quick case study
Independent Sector is the leadership forum for charities, foundations, and corporate giving programs committed to advancing the common good in America and around the world. Their nonpartisan coalition of approximately 600 organizations leads, strengthens and mobilizes the charitable community in order to fulfill their mission. Their constituents include some of the world’s leading non-profit organizations like the Gates Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation.
They rely on high-quality information about elected officials and their relationships to those officials. The first step–figuring out “who knows whom and how”–takes months and sometimes even years. With the help of JUTE, it takes just a few minutes to find a “pathway” from Independent Sector (IS) to key members of Congress. (Please note: the names have been changed, out of respect for the privacy of IS and their constituents.)
Jute found strong relationship pathways from Independent Sector to an Elected Official. This saves IS months of time in the “information discovery process.”
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Details
IS became our client in Summer 2009. In the fall, our Nexus team rolled into Washington DC for an on-site project to help the IS executive team convert their slow, social process of discovering people in their networks who hold established relationships with elected officials into an efficient business process. This allows them to spend their time actually building relationships, not just figuring out what the most beneficial ones are.
This conversion, when complete, will lead to a massive improvement in efficiency for IS and help to uncover the wealth of “relationship capital” that the IS team, board members & member organizations maintain. After just one week, the results were impressive.
Elizabeth Kohm, Vice President of Resource Development, described the change as, “being able to go from 0-60 in five seconds, instead of five months.”
When we arrived on site, we had a few concrete goals:
- Start with 6 data sets with over 200k records & mash them up into “database nirvana”*
- Find “pathways” of established relationships from the IS team to a specific elected official
- Generate reports that can be used by the executive team and board at IS
- Get to work, accessing the information and requesting introductions along those relationship pathways
In the end, the IS project was a success. This was a “prototype” project where we focused on a single elected official. We found 18 “pathways” from the IS team to that member of Congress. Our expectation is that among those 18 pathways, there will be many individuals who can, at the least, provide IS information about that elected official, and hopefully, one or two who have some influence with that official and can help IS educate and advocate for the non-profit and philanthropic community.
Can JUTE do the same thing for my organization?
Yep. That’s what we do. Contact Sean McDonald to learn how we can help you.
*A term coined by Patricia Read, Sr. VP of Public Policy and Gov’t Affairs at IS.
Starting Point: data you can use in Jute
I was recently asked for a “Top 10″ list of data sets that might be used in a project with Jute. While there is no “one size fits all” of data sets, I thought it’d be good to compile a list of links that helps someone get started. Most projects end up combining 2-4 data sets, so it’s seldom that all of those can be identified ahead of time. It’s also important to remember that most organizations have not just an internal database, but email address books and social software accounts like LinkedIn–all of which are databases.
So, this list isn’t perfect and it isn’t complete–but it should be a good starting point.
Feel free to comment if you have any questions about a specific type of data set that is not listed here. I’ll get back to you…
Not-for-profit
Blackbaud’s ResearchPoint service culls together a variety of data points on individuals and helps you see not only there giving history, but also critical information like net worth.
Foundation Center Online A compiled list of grants and granting institutions.
NOZA Search Data pulled from across the web on major donors to non-profits, sorted by sector, location and a variety of other attributes.
Charity Navigator’s “Charities performing similar types of work” feature would be helpful on certain projects.
Guidestar A well known data provider for donors and non-profits.
Corporate / Investment
Dunn & Bradstreet / Hoovers The 800 lb gorilla of databases, D&B provides a huge range of data about companies, markets, industries and even individuals.
VentureDeal.com Tracks the deals that take place in the venture capital space around North America. Good balance of accuracy and economics at $25 / month.
The Director’s Database A database of corporate governance.
Dow Jones Factiva
Politics
FollowTheMoney.org (National Institute on Money in State Politics) Tracks political donations and money flowing through lobbyists in all 50 states. Allows users to see which lobbyist represents which clients. [API]
OpenSecrets.org Provides a variety of data points focused on exposing the role money plays in political influence. Available for personal use or for purchase. [API]
Data.gov As part of the Obama Administration’s plan to make government more transparent, they have created this site to open up unclassified government data. Currently, there’s only 597 data sets, but it grows every day. Hoping to find a history of the Toxic Release Inventory in American Somoa? Data.gov is for you…
LittleSis.org “We bring transparency to influential social networks by tracking the key relationships of politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated organizations.” [API]
Aggregators
iWave Prospect Research Online Aggregates ZoomInfo, NOZA, Guidstar, High Net Worth Alert, HEP GiftsPlus, Prospects of Welth, Foundation Finder and Pro Data. I’ve never used this service, but it looks very promising. If it really does provide all that for a $3k subscription, it’s a great deal! (Interestingly enough…they have a caveat that their service is available exclusively to not-for-profit purposes.)
StrikeIron has created web services out of a range of popular data products, ranging from address verification to business intelligence / market research data.
WealthEngine Aggregates regulatory data, voluntarily reported data and statistically modeled data to provide a view of an individual’s habits, interests and resources.
Free & Open Source Data
DBpedia Converts Wikipedia into a database, which allows for interesting things like seeing the connections between Presidents and their Cabinets. (And the million other interesting things you can find in Wikipedia…)
Datamob.org Datamob highlights the connection between public data sources and the interfaces people are building for them.
InfoChimps.org An “open marketplace for data” where people access huge data sets and obscure data sets: from corporate reporting to the top 100k crossword puzzle words of all time, you can find almost any type of data here.
Swivel.com Web community of data enthusiasts who create many types of chart / graph visualizations for the data sets they submit.
Get specific!
It’s important to remember that some of the best data comes from local and / or localized data sources. Chamber of Commerce directories, business council directories member-based organization directories (think: churches) and alumni databases can all be very valuable in expanding your network.
Another incredible set of data that is too diverse to list here is Industry Trade Association data sets. Whether it’s the rubber industry or the Green Building Council, getting access to the key players and their association’s local, regional and national structures will benefit your network data by leaps and bounds.
Good lists / other blog posts about data.
Trust Networks’s wiki of networked data sets. (Awesome list!)
Business Network Visualization @ SourceMap
Business Network Visualization is an emerging field. And, across the field of visualization, there is a movement towards integrating multiple visualization models to give end-users information-rich, yet increasingly simply experiences.
A new project called SourceMap adds to that a bit of good ol’ fashioned “saving the planet through consumer education.” The project combines node / link visualization with geographic mapping from Google Maps.
It’s a great start and an admirable project that helps people understand the impact of their purchasing decisions.
Check it out at http://sourcemap.org
a view of a supply chain from sourcemap
Relationship Visualization: MIT’s flora style
Check out this concept from MIT Information Design Ecology group. It tracks your communication with selected people and shows you an indicator–a plant–with the health of the relationship. Brilliant concept.
MIT's Social Garden app
Professional Network Visualization
If a picture’s worth 1000 words, what’s data visualization worth?
You may not realize it, but you rely on data visualization every day. In the morning, when you watch the weather forecast, millions of pieces of information about weather of a vast, geographic are are consolidated into one simple image. You could never process the data for the weather in your region in a single day, but you process and act on the radar image (a visualization of that data) in just a few seconds.
Visualize your own network. Free trial. Get started now.
Networks of professional relationships are especially complex sets of data. The data comes from several sources and involves many overlapping relationships. In many cases, the data involved–even after our Professional Network Analysis process crunches it–is so rich and complex, it would take hundreds of pages to print it.
But with out Professional Network Visualization platform, you can make sense of it in just seconds.
Want to see some examples? Contact us and we’ll give you a tour.
You can also visit the “Business Networks” gallery at www.VisualComplexity.com.