Our Data Makes Us Different — And Makes A Difference
Over the past decade, Public Democracy has developed a database of tens of millions of Americans whom we have engaged through email, social media, and digital ads on a myriad of outreach campaigns. The database reflects trillions of data points, with billions of behavioral tags drawn from our highest value engagements.
Our Values Data is now available via the LiveRamp Data Store for curated activation across all DSPs, and for usage by partners in analytics and to improve machine learning in support of more meaningful AI.
Public Democracy has demonstrated the power of its Values Data through nationally recognized projects that have supported veterans with severe PTSD, developed tools to treat people at the earliest stages of opioid addiction, and informed investment strategies in low-income urban and rural communities nationwide through a partnership with the U.S. Census.
Our underlying assumption in building the database and the different engagement tools attached to it is that the best way to connect with people is by understanding their values and how they view themselves in the world. Over the past decade, we have worked to refine opportunities for engagement and improve our understanding of how people connect and can be motivated to engage through shared values.
Most fundamentally, we designed our database as a way to harness the inherent value in each of the moments of engagement, when our users trusted our offering and believed enough in themselves to act. Thus, our database serves as repository of intent, hope, and communal engagement by tens of millions of individuals over many years.
Values Data drives better results for digital engagement efforts and targeted marketing, primarily because it encourages the advertiser to meet the user’s needs rather than the other way around. By categorizing people based on their values rather than their demography or purchase behavior, PD’s Values Data measures impact using commitment instead of attention metrics, which allows for deeper insights and better targeting.
This also results in data that creates a unique environment for machine learning, teaching AI very different lessons about human motivations and what matters most. We have been using our data as a key input informing our behavioral modeling and machine learning tools that allow us to gain insight and connection with people—by moving beyond PII-based targeting to identifying the moments people are ready to engage. Moment-based marketing and behavioral modeling is built on a foundation of understanding and empathy. Once the behavioral patterns are identified, we no longer depend on or even use personally identifiable information to target the ads and outreach.