Why fund innovation?

A framework for answering the question.

How can funders weigh the tradeoff between investing in known techniques versus a risky search for better ones? There isn’t a good answer. Successful innovations produce tremendous impact per dollar invested, but I haven’t found articulations of how this occurs. So here’s a first crack at one.

Funders seeking electoral change can pick from three strategies:

Strategy 1: Invest in existing practices.

Strategy 2: Innovate to earn specific votes less expensively.

Strategy 3: Innovate to make campaigns more efficient.

To illustrate these categories, we’ll use the following “cost curve of votes.” In this oversimplified electorate of 24 people, it costs a campaign the following amount to earn each person’s vote:

Strategy 1: Invest in existing practices

For example, based on the cost curve, one could spend $50 to earn the vote of Voter #5.

Strategy 2: Innovate to earn specific votes less expensively

Innovation is risky, so new approaches should produce votes much less expensively than existing methods.¹ In the example below, someone has created a method to earn support from Voter #18 for $100 instead of $180.

Examples in this category include PushBlack and the Empower Project.²

Strategy 3: Innovate to make campaigns more efficient

Better tools make the movement more efficient, i.e. the same amount of resources can earn more votes. This makes earning each vote slightly less expensive, which looks like this:

Examples in this category include:

• Mobilize, which automated work that had been done manually

• Deck, which facilitates targeting resources more effectively

• Vote tripling, which increases the efficacy of various campaign activities³

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Many types of projects are important but hard to capture in this framework:

• Anything not election-focused (e.g. think tanks or tools for monitoring police abuses).

• Election security

• Multi-cycle infrastructure (the framework above looks at only a single cycle)

Strategies 2 and 3 are some of what people call “infrastructure,” and what my most-read essay calls “the Stack.” The movement badly needs better ways to measure the impact of such investments, even roughly. If the framework above is useful to you, please share your thoughts to help further develop it.

1. My rough benchmark is that something new should potentially generate votes for 25% the cost of existing practice. That allows for some slippage while still remaining quite attractive. Also the calculation is very imprecise.

2. The Empower Project falls somewhere between the frameworks of Strategies 2 and 3.

3. Vote Tripling (now VoteRev) also falls somewhere between the frameworks of Strategies 2 and 3.