Chicago Forward used Focaldata AI’s rapid message testing for winning campaign

The campaign was starting from a low base. Six months prior, 80% of Chicagoans said they opposed the initiative. With two months to conduct research, there was no time to conduct the usual research loop of focus groups, large-scale A/B testing and more focus groups. The campaign team needed directional insights straight away to immediately create and distribute persuasive, needle-shifting messages.

Focaldata’s industry-leading social and political research team used Focaldata AI to collect 700 in-depth interviews with Chicagoans over several waves. We designed this qualitative to understand voters’ innermost thoughts and test specific language, using this to iterate and refine messages. We used our AI-powered data querying tool, AskAI, to extract high-level insights and dived into the raw transcripts to fine-tune tone and wording.

Once we had several dozen messages, we piped these messages into waves of A/B message testing. Overall, we surveyed over 6000 voters in Chicago over the course of the campaign. This level of coverage meant we could test messages among small audience groups, enabling tailored messages specific to each audience we needed to persuade to secure the win.

Focaldata AI meant we could gather qualitative insights at speed and at scale. We weren’t trapped in the ‘qualitative trap’ - the fact that focus groups are uniquely placed to discover new messaging pathways, but the number of possible pathways is limited by the fact that the qualitative process doesn’t scale. Thanks to Focaldata’s AI-powered platforms, Chicago Forward developed hundreds of messaging strategies, tested then and targeted them at key audiences. Despite the uphill battle, the campaign was successful. The final result was 52% to 48%.