Shovel Data
Data Science and Engineering for Progressive Campaigns
My Background
Joel Shuman
I am an independent consultant working with progressive aligned political organizations. My goal is to help your organization by:
Sharing best practices and strategies proven by rigorous testing in large campaigns, especially with regards to fundraising
Maximizing usage of technologies like ActionNetwork, ActBlue, Mobilize, and VAN
Creating long-lasting data pipelines from scratch or working with TMC to utilize existing infrastructure
Distilling data into important metrics; visualized onto dashboards
Writing automation using Python and SQL to simplify manual processes
My clients are political campaigns and progressive non-profits using the tools of the progressive data ecosystem
My background includes data science for Bernie Sanders 2020 where I spent time:
Modeling donors, volunteers and email appeal amounts
Architecting dozens of dashboards - executive and role specific
Automating onerous tasks and speeding up ill-performing SQL
Before that with BlueLabs Consulting LLC I analyzed surveys and built turnout and persuasion models
Even before that; I cut my teeth in startups in San Francisco at a startup
Ready for a free consultation?
My approach
What is the story of your data?
Creating a story from a tangled forest of databases and dashboards can make you feel lost. In my most popular Medium post I walk you through step-by-step how I create a story from any data, by asking questions and proving—or disproving—my hypotheses.
Email & digital fundraising toolkit
The most important metrics for your email program
A video explaining how active readership will change the way you measure the day to day success of your program.
The most important analysis for any digital fundraiser
How segmenting your donations by acquisition channel, previous donation status, and recurring type gives the best at-a-glance view of your program’s health
How to build the cheapest end-to-end data pipeline
Do you really have big data? Using only Stitch, AWS and Google, build out a complete data pipeline for any small organization at a fraction of the cost of traditional platforms
Ask your donors for the right amount
Use machine learning to optimize your conversions across every digital fundraising source. In this article I show you the business case for machine learning fundraising maximization.
Need any free advice? Let’s schedule 30 minutes.
People always ask “Why ‘Shovel Data’”?
I had gotten together a few folks to play music and we were going out to an Open Mic to play a couple songs we had learned—one of which was by a band called Hole. I had to put down a band name to reserve a spot so I thought: Hole>>>Shovel.
Well, the name stuck with the band, but in the end it became more personal to me. So when I needed a company name, I chose ‘Shovel’. I really like the image of digging into the data. SQL and machine learning are my tools to dig.