The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is Valentin Ihßen, whose focus is on the use of metrics in digital political campaigning. The focus here is especially on digital advocacy organisations’ campaigns, which exist in various national settings from democracies to autocracies. Such organisations use the digital media toolkit for online and offline campaigns, and draw centrally on digital data and metrics to determine whether and how they should pursue their campaigns.
At the backstage of these campaigns there are some fairly sophisticated metrics dashboards, therefore – these include opening and click-through rates for campaign mail-outs, for instance, and such metrics then guide further campaigning activities. Valentin explored these practices through interview with such campaigners.
What emerges from this is a potential conflict between data and values, and between performance metrics and political motivations: while these groups and individuals may feel strongly about certain issues, they may not pursue them any further if the response metrics show that such issues fail to generate sufficient engagement – this is disappointing for campaigners, even though they also highlight the value of the campaigning data in creating efficient campaigns.
Campaigners often develop alignment strategies to reconcile this data-driven campaigning logic with their own personal values: these might interpret metrics as a kind of democratic vote, for instance, where metrics indicate the people’s will and legitimately influence the direction of prosocial campaigns.
Alternatively, performance metrics might be interpreted as the results of experimental tests, serving to gather information about the target community and helping to optimise the campaign message framing in order to generate maximum impact amongst its audience. This helps campaigners to improve their efforts.
The meaning of campaign metrics is therefore negotiated by campaigners, in an effort to reconcile political motivations and engagement data.
