Using State Party Data in Reach
In all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the state Democratic parties acquire voter data and work with the DNC and external data vendors to process, enrich, and standardize that data to make it available to Democrats in their states. They make this data available in a number of ways, including the VAN instance known as “VoteBuilder”, the DNC’s analytics platform known as “Phoenix”, and, in most states, Reach!
Each state party does have to opt-in to the data flows that allow their data to be available in Reach and they must approve each individual campaign who wants to access their data in the tool. If your state has not yet opted-in, we would love to talk with them to get things set up. State parties can learn all about the Phoenix Data Flow in our explainer PDF here.
What does it cost?
Each state party can decide what criteria they want to use to determine which campaigns will get approved to access their data in Reach. In most cases, if you are using VoteBuilder via your state party, you can also use that data in Reach!
Reach charges nothing for you to use state party data in Reach.
What is included in state party data in Reach?
State party data includes all the core fields from the national voter file, as well as State File ID, Vote History, and Contact Information. This data will be updated periodically to keep it fresh for you. State party data includes many possible unique IDs including Voter File VANID, DNC Person ID, and Voterbase ID.
The state party data you see in Reach should match up directly with state party data you see in VoteBuilder.
Will state party data work with Reach’s VAN Integration?
Yes! If you are using VoteBuilder, then state party is the best source of data to use in Reach and you will be able to use the VAN integration based on Voter File VAN ID.
What about Data Sharing? Is Reach data sent back to my state party and the DNC?
Yes. When you base your Reach campaign off state party data, all of the data about and collected by your users will flow back to the DNC and the state party. This will be covered in more detail in the “State Party Data Addendum” to the Reach Licensing Agreement which you and the state party will sign when we’re setting up your Reach campaign. If you do not want any data from your Reach instance flowing back to the state party or the DNC, you should consider an alternate source of data.
