I expanded on these thoughts at Medium: https://medium.com/@ChrisMarkl/w...
I'm incredibly excited that Advocate PAC is on product hunt. Advocate PAC is a federal Super PAC my team created. I'm a full-time faculty member at Florida State University previously working as a quantitative analyst and entrepreneur in solving social problems mostly in Africa.
I helped found Advocate PAC because there are issues that make me incredibly angry/sad, specifically, because there are people and animals that unnecessarily suffer. One of the most effective ways to solve these problems is to change laws. Despite the prevalence of social problems, it is quite difficult to find a beneficiary political organization that is transparent and relies on data to optimize a donation’s impact.
If you think gun violence is a major problem in our country (which it is), and you wanted to do something about it, what would you do? Where would you donate money? Maybe you could donate to the Brady Campaign, but how much do you know about the organization? How do you know that your money will be used effectively?
Typical political campaigns and 501c4 organizations are bloated with unnecessary expenses, and are are largely removed from expert political literature, that conducts randomized field experiments to figure out how to optimize a campaign’s impact. Once you donate, you will likely never hear back from the organization until they are asking you for more money. What if I wanted to donate to multiple issues? Would I be forced to find multiple organizations? I don’t have time to do that. I also don’t have much money, and will likely forget to donate.
Super PACS and political organizations largely do two things, collect and spend money to influence elections and policy. Advocate PAC is designed to transform both.
For collection, we already built an amazing financial technology app, that makes donations automatic and empowers anyone to automatically give spare change. The app is incredibly secure, built with .net government level security by actual people we know well, and not outsourced to a random website.
When spending money, we rely on data and academic literature optimize each donation's impact. While a cynic would state, ‘statistics can be manipulated’. This is correct for a single data source, that is viewed by someone without expertise in data analysis. In opposition, Advocate PAC will rely on a distribution of data sources, placing weights according to any bias or validity concerns. This method is similar to Nate Silver’s work in accurately predicting all states for the 2012 Presidential Election.
We are committed to complete transparency, letting donors know specifically how your donations are spent, the data behind our decisions, and the impact your donations created. What I love about transparency, is simply by committing to it, it ensures that Advocate PAC will do the right and optimal thing. Because we know that we have to explain to our donors how we are spending your money and that many of you will analyze our results.
Anyways, I'm really excited to be here and appreciate you reading my something long post.
@cfrascl totally agree. Thanks for your support Chris!
It drives me nuts that we are asked to give money but never hear what happened to it or the impact those funds created. My background is as a quantitative analyst and I left a Ph.D. program in Political Science to start my first business in Kenya. Advocate PAC leverages fantastic tenants of academics: relying on logic, data, and transparency. Instead of just treating donors as a checkbook, the team and I envision donors as fellow founders who can help us make better decisions. We feel this is what political donors want and we hope others agree. Your support really does mean a lot as today is the first time we put this out there.
Feel free to reach out anytime.
Cheers,
Chris
@fletchrichman thanks Fletcher! We need to bring that out in our messaging: "Round up to legalize marijuana. Round up to end gun violence. Round up to create better public transportation. Round up to help low-income workers." Overall we want to make it easy for everyday Americans to change laws.
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