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Which Moderate Women Can We Connect With?

Galvanize Action works at the intersection of data science, behavioral psychology, and neuroscience to find women who want progress on key issues but aren’t reliably playing a role to get us there, connect with them on their values, and impact their civic behavior. Our specific area of expertise is moderate white women, America’s largest voting bloc. But there are a LOT of moderate white women in this country—how do we know who to spend our time connecting with? Through data science, using models and targeting.

Models provide us with helpful information about people (e.g., traits, attitudes, barriers, values, opinions, some demographic information) that is used to determine who might benefit from seeing our ads online. If a tangible analogy helps, you can think of our model like a filing cabinet of information we’ve learned about our audience. Files for values, files for traits, files for geographic location, files for survey responses, files for consumer data like what they watch on Hulu. . . at this point we’re not talking about individual real people, we’re talking about more abstract types of people.

Pie chart titled Uncertain Individualists, our youngest voter segment with their slice of the pie as 23.3% of all white women segments nationally. Followed by a list of values: in-group care, achievement, hedonism, excitement, nostalgia, environmentalism. Vote choice bar graph, 33% voted Trump, 33% voted Biden, 33% didn't vote. Traits that drive vote choice: internalized sexism (high), political self-efficacy (low), compassion (low), self esteem (low), moral righteousness (low). Interests: Internet, Pop/country music, cosmetics/personal care.
An example segment

We aren’t interested in changing anyone’s core beliefs, so it only makes sense to connect with people who are likely to be open-minded. By removing folks on both extremes, we’ve already pared it down a fair bit. Targeting is the strategic process by which we narrow down which groups of women we’ll connect with, and that’s how we are so efficient with ads and spending!

Internalized sexism, outgroup derogation, and racial resentment are just three of the many factors that go into these decisions. 

The next step is finding the groups of people we’ve decided to connect with in the voter file, which means matching our abstract profiles up with real women. Then Galvanize Action delivers our ads to those women wherever they are online. That’s how an Uncertain Individualist in theory becomes 34-year-old Linda in Pennsylvania who is seeing a message about subsidized childcare between Bob’s Burgers episodes on Hulu, or how a Traditionalist Conservative in theory becomes 57-year-old Barbara in Wisconsin seeing a message about accepting nonbinary people to unlock the Women’s Health article she wants to read. 

animated gif showing three women getting matched with a persuasion message

This information not only allows us to reach the women we seek to connect with, but it also informs our programming and helps Galvanize Action’s partners across the country reach moderate white women as well. We’re always happy to share our unique insights along with the whitelabel ads we give away. For more information about how this works, read more about how Galvanize Action scales by sharing.