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
Email & digital fundraising toolkit
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.