It’s that crazy time in Kenya again – elections near and campaigns have already started. Political parties are spending millions upon millions trying to convince people that they are the ones that should be in power. Faces smile down from expensive billboards on the highways and television.
But one important aspect in any campaign is data analysis.
As much as politicians dismiss opinion polls in public, they are not idiots and know the scientific principles behind the statistics have been proven over time.
In 1936, the literary Digest, one of the most respected magazines at the time, conducted one of the biggest opinion polls ever.
They interviewed 2.4 million respondents and concluded that Republican candidate Alfred Landon would win the vote by a landslide.
They gave him a 57% win while his closest rival Franklin Delano Roosevelt was estimated to take 43% of the vote.
George Gallup took a scientific approach and interviewed only 50,000 respondents and concluded that Roosevelt would carry the day.
Eventually, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president with one of the biggest landslides in election history (62%).
The Literary Digest ceased operations two years later, and although George Gallup has since died, the company he founded is one of the biggest pollsters in the world today. He essentially established modern day election data analysis.
And as Kenya moves to the next age, politicians have started appreciating the importance of not just opinion polling but overall election data analysis.
Many Kenyan companies are offering such services to political parties, but one stands out – SiasaFeed.
Using complex algorithms and data collection tools, SiasaFeed offers graphical simulations of a particular campaign’s progress.
The regions or counties are mapped and candidates can get a real time view of their popularity.
The candidate is able to see which areas he/she is losing or gaining grounds, and when SiasaFeed’s inbuilt artificial intelligence compares to IEBC voter registration data, it can suggests areas where the campaign needs to concentrate their efforts.
The candidate doesn’t have to worry about data collection, as most of it is automated.
People can interact with the politician giving him/her essential feedback. The voters from a politician’s region can even suggest development projects via a project channel.
The messages can be overwhelming but SiasaFeed’s AI makes a simplified report available on a dashboard, ensuring the politician/user doesn’t manually sift through all of them.
The politician too can interact with the voters by sending targeted bulk SMSs.
There’s so much more SiasaFeed does for political campaigns.
Source: Nairobi Wire
