Delivering bipartisan data on Super Tuesday

By Stan Freck as written on enterprise.microsoft.com

At Microsoft, we believe technology can create a more secure, accurate, and efficient election experience. We recently supported the 2016 presidential election process by providing advanced technology to help organizations on both sides of the aisle manage their campaigns on Super Tuesday, the biggest day of the 2016 primary season.

Our goal throughout the election process is to enable presidential candidates, regardless of their views, to use technology to more effectively manage their campaigns. Here are a few examples of how both Republicans and Democrats are embracing innovations from Microsoft and its partners to improve the election process, including Super Tuesday:

•The Republican National Committee (RNC) is using Microsoft Power BI to create rich dashboards that enable party officials to bring vast amounts of data to life, thereby quickly spotting trends. With 3 terabytes of data to manage, the RNC needed to make this information easily accessible to a variety of stakeholders, including those who aren’t data savvy. “We were able to do that through Power BI,” says Conor Maguire, Director of External Support for the Republican National Committee. “I think it’s going to revolutionize our reporting and dashboarding for this cycle.”
•The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is using Microsoft Dynamics to improve its tracking system for assigning volunteers to polling places and for identifying and addressing any voter issues that may arise. By rebuilding its tracking system on Microsoft Dynamics, the tool is now far easier to use. “We had real confidence that by working with the campaigns and with Microsoft, we were going to make the product better,” says Pratt Wiley, the DNC’s national director of voter expansion. “I think .”
•CMDI, which provides innovative fundraising and compliance solutions for Republican political organizations, hosts its integrated platform Crimson v2 in the cloud on Microsoft Azure, offering a reliable way for customers to access data—anytime, anywhere. “We don’t have to wake up our IT director in the middle of the night because the server’s gone down,” says Jack Simms, Vice President of CMDI. “It’s running in Azure, we have a backup, and we’re good to go.”
•NGP VAN, a leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations, has been moving its integrated campaign platform to Microsoft Azure, so its customers can easily scale up and down as demands change. Says Stu Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN, “Campaigns tend to be very spiky in terms of their activity and that’s a really good use case for Azure. We’re able to scale it up really effectively and very quickly.”

These are just a few of the ways that Republican and Democratic organizations are taking advantage of Microsoft technology to make informed decisions about their campaigns on Super Tuesday and throughout the 2016 presidential election process. To learn more about our efforts, please watch our Super Tuesday video. Also, see my recent blog post, “Microsoft technology powers the 2016 Iowa caucuses.”