16 April 2015

If previous general elections in the UK’s recent history were determined or at least influenced by spin doctors, the 2015 general election – due to take place on May 7 – will be driven by Big Data.

All three of the main political parties are deploying Big Data analytics engines. The LibDems are using something called Contact Creator, an online tool which can be accessed by party members to view voter contact details, preferences, interests, past voting behaviour, and demographic or socio-economic information are available.

The system is based on the Mosaic voter profiling system. Owned by information services group Experian, Mosaic is a “geodemographic segmentation” system that classifies UK households and individuals based on data from governmental and commercial sources.

“Mosiac was one of the first segmentation classifications in the UK,” says Jed Mole, European marketing director at Acxiom, the data and technology company. But, adds Mole, it can be a blunt instrument if used alone because it stereotypes people based on, say, their postcode.

“Individuals, regardless of whether they are voters, are now far more complex and need to be understood and communicated to on an individual level,” says Mole.

The Mosaic-based Contact Creator was also the Big Data analytics engine of choice for the Labour Party in previous elections for such things as mass emails and leafleting campaigns. Labour currently uses a number of similar tools, including Contact Creator and Voter ID.

Perhaps most noteworthy is its 2013 deployment of NationBuilder, an online platform which enables party activists to collect data on and communicate with voters using a wide range of tools, including the facility to accept donations, forms to sign up volunteers, and templates for website designs.

NationBuilder also says it offers “dynamic profiles of all your people, with info captured from anywhere”, including “follow-ups and targeting”.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, are reported to be using a system called Merlin – or Managing Elector Relationships through Local Information Networks – which is a national database commissioned in 2005 and deployed in 2008.

The Tories worked with cloud computing, data storage and general IT giant EMC on Merlin. “Over a period of many years, the Conservative Party had built up many disparate sets of data about their electorate,” noted EMC in a report.

“Isolated data-sets and a lack of data standards were making it impossible to analyse information across constituencies in any meaningful way to respond to elector issues on a national level.”

The Tories worked with EMC to unify the many voter data-sets into a single view which could be accessed through the internet by constituency offices and the Party’s headquarters.

The US has already deployed Big Data in a big way for previous elections. Mole says that in the 2012 presidential election, analytics were employed to “precisely identify ‘swing’ voters who are receptive to a political message, and intelligently buy media time that precisely reaches them”.