The end of the election made the benefits especially clear, when analytics staffs had to manage an unprecedented fire hose of early voting data that would have overwhelmed campaigns in past years as they tried to shift tactics to accommodate real-time changes in the electorate.

“You want to exclude people who have voted from your ads so you’re not lighting money on fire,” said Benjy Messner, a Democratic data and analytics consultant. “When 100,000 people are voting early, that’s not so hard. When 100,000 people are voting early per day, it’s another challenge.”

“No campaign or consulting firm is big enough to do that for multiple campaigns per day" without software help, Messner, the founder of New River Strategies, added, crediting that data management for helping Democrats up and down the ballot do better than expected with the Election Day vote because the party was able to focus its resources properly.

The Civis software was in wide use throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, when campaigns tried to mine their data for any advantage in the early states, particularly in Iowa, where the caucus system meant that voters’ second choices were important. Creative use of data played a role in Pete Buttigieg’s surprise first-place delegate showing in the official Iowa caucus results (which were marred by reporting errors from the state Democratic Party).

On the way to that result, the Buttigieg campaign used its data pooled in the Civis Platform to identify and recruit potential precinct captains in lightly populated rural areas, where an outsized share of delegates were available compared to the share of Democratic caucusgoers. That level of organization helped Buttigieg overperform in those areas in the caucuses, which contributed to his showing on Feb. 3.

“We had really wide coverage on precinct captains in Iowa,” said Michelle Zeiler, national data director for the Buttigieg campaign. “Our state data director was able to work closely with the organizing team to really focus on prospects coming in from purchasing merchandise and donating.

“But the donor and [merchandise] databases are separate” from other voter-contact databases, Zeiler continued, meaning campaigns in the past may not have been able to make use of it to identify political prospects the same way.

The laboratory element of the Democratic primary, which featured a bunch of well-funded campaigns testing and using new tools for all of the different aspects of politicking, paid off for Biden when he built up his campaign for the general election, said Anna Carmichael, the Civis implementation manager for the Biden campaign the liaison between the firm and the campaign.

Whenever a Civis client wanted to incorporate a new tool into their campaign and feed the data into Platform, the firm built an integration and then made that available to everyone using the software (it is used by people at more than 150 political and advocacy organizations, the firm said). By the time the general election began, Civis had built integrations and gained experience with most of the tools a presidential campaign would want to use — and streamlined its process for building new inputs into the Platform, which came in handy when the coronavirus pandemic completely upended the process of political campaigning.

Ben Fuller, Civis’ vice president of business development and an Obama 2012 veteran, said the whole point was that campaigns “should be engaging in new ways of getting with voters, and tech should not be an impediment to that.” Campaigns could choose the best tech tools that worked for them and rely on the engineers behind Platform to make sure that all the data that end of their operation could integrate with the other parts of the campaign.

Carmichael pointed to a call in June in which the Biden campaign and its partners at Civis realized they needed to be able to replicate a ubiquitous feature of in-person campaigning — volunteers stalking rallies with clipboards to take down information about attendees — for people joining virtual events via video conference.

“It was about how to create community and do the things we need to do in a campaign, how we can do that really quickly with new tools, and how to make sure we’re ingesting that data very quickly into the campaign,” Carmichael said.