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Using Catalist data in Reach
Catalist is a nonprofit technology company building broadly accessible, radically affordable, high-quality data and technology for the progressive community. Catalist compiles, enhances, stores, and dynamically updates data on over 256 million unique voting-age individuals across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Reach is working with Catalist to offer easy and affordable access to voter file data for Reach customers.
What does it cost?
If you are an existing Catalist customer (or want to become one) you can get access to Catalist data in Reach by paying Catalist a $650 fee per cycle per state you are working in. This billing and agreement will be handled directly with your Catalist Account Rep. Once the fee is paid and you are clear to use access data, Catalist will communicate that to Reach and we’ll be able to turn on access to the data for your campaign.
If you are not a Catalist customer and plan to use Catalist data only in Reach, Reach can re-sell that data to you for a 15% surcharge on your Reach subscription. This will be included in your Reach invoices and paid to Reach.
What is included in Catalist data in Reach?
Catalist data includes all the core fields from their national voter file, as well as State File ID, Vote History, and Contact Information. This data will be updated periodically to keep it fresh for you. The primary unique ID for Catalist Data is their “DWID”.
The Catalist data you see in Reach should match up directly with Catalist data you see in other software based on it like America Votes VAN, State Voices VAN, LAN, Universe, etc.
Will Catalist data work with Reach’s VAN Integration?
Yes! If you are using an instance of VAN that is also based on Catalist data, then Catalist is the best source of data to use in Reach and you will be able to use the VAN integration based on DWID. If you are using a VAN instance that is based on a different data source (like VoteBuilder which is based on State Party data or SmartVAN which is based on TargetSmart data) you can set up the VAN Integration to be based on State File IDs instead. Since this is not the exact same data set, there may certainly be cases where a voter in Catalist data does not exist in VAN or vice-versa, but generally things should work ok.
What about Data Sharing? What data is sent back to Catalist?
When you decide to use Catalist data in Reach, you will have an option of whether or not to opt in to data sharing. If you opt-in to this data sharing, Reach will send data about and collected by your users back to Catalist for their own use.
