Cedar Rapids firm develops new campaign tool

By James Q. Lynch

The Gazette

CEDAR RAPIDS – A Cedar Rapids firm will roll out a new campaign tool at a Washington trade show hoping to appeal to people running campaigns for everything from City Hall to the White House.

AdTrack Corporation will unveil SmartVote, a web-based political campaign management system developed, tested and proved in Iowa, at “Crash Course in Political Campaigns: What Republicans and Democrats Can Learn from the 2008 Campaign.” It's a trade show sponsored by Campaigns & Elections/Politics Magazine in Washington, DC Oct, 22-23.

“We hope to become the one-stop shop for voter data management,” said Marcia Rogers of Cedar Rapids, whose husband, Dan, has been with AdTrack since 1981 and owned the company since 2007. SmartVote, she explained, allows campaigns to work with voter information – party registration and voting history, for example, as well as other data to generate targeted communications that enable a campaign to deliver the right message to the right constituent at the right time.

Rogers, who is active in Democratic politics, is quick to say SmartVote doesn't create the message. It's non-partisan system.

“We help campaigns manage the way the deliver their message,” she said. “We're split right down the middle. We've helped both sides.”

SmartVote, she said, is the only web-based data management system that directs all of a campaign's activities in one, easy-to-use technology with the goal of reaching constituents more effectively and efficiently. SmartVote identifies, targets and converts a candidate's supporters into voters.

It's based on AdTrack's SmartLeadPLUS, a web-based lead management and sales force automation system that seamlessly manages a company's sales leads increase sales, turning prospects into customers, Rogers said. AdTrack's clients include Fortune 500 companies, she said.

“So to Dan it made sense that this would be perfect for the political world, integrating voter information and helping campaigns turn prospects into voters,” Rogers said.

SmartVote has been tested in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and California. Rogers sees real potential for the program in small campaigns, such as ballot initiatives, that are relatively short, often non-partisan and often operate on a shoestring.

At the same time, Rogers said, AdTrack hopes to be attractive to the presidential campaigns that will be coming into Iowa for the 2012 precinct caucuses as well as candidates and organizations preparing for the 2010 elections.