Cygnal Grows Team to Serve Exploding Customer Base
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Cygnal today announced the addition of David Wolfson as Director of Client Strategy and Jacqueline Boggess as Director of Insights and Communications. Additionally, longtime Cygnal team member, Kay Aguilar, has taken on the additional responsibility of Culture Ambassador. “With Kay’s promotion and the addition of these three new team members, Cygnal’s roster […]
Read MoreVoters Are People Too: The Importance of Human Connection in Crisis
Every election year, someone – actually most everyone – says: “This will be the most important election of our lifetime!” Well…2020 might actually be. While all of us practice social distancing and self-quarantine, we all wonder when this will be over. I guess that’s the toughest part about all of this: the uncertainty. It’s been […]
Read MoreP2P SMS Is Hot – But Not All Platforms Work the Same
The fastest expanding campaign technology last cycle was peer-to-peer text messaging, known as P2P or P2P SMS. Dozens of companies popped up offering the service with billions of messages sent. It has only expanded since then, and, much like IVR, has become a race to the bottom to see who can offer the lowest rate […]
Read MoreCombining Polling with Modeling to Drive Cost Savings
Toward the end of the 2018 election cycle, we had multiple clients and committees complain about the high cost of conducting both polling and predictive analytics (often known as – modeling or scoring). They wondered why these projects couldn’t be done at the same time. The cumulative results were great to have – thorough understanding […]
Read MoreWhat Does a Swing Voter Look Like?
With an extremely polarized political environment, it’s hard to believe anyone would be a swing voter – an individual who voted for one party in a certain election then another party in the next election. In the 2016 election, more counties switched from Obama to Trump than from Romney to Clinton in 2012. If you […]
Read MoreThanks, FiveThirtyEight, for the #2 Ranking
Every year, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight releases its Pollster Ratings. As he recently opined, “Polls just had one of their best election cycles, ever — but challenges abound in the industry…” We agree! (And it’s not just because Cygnal was ranked the #1 most-accurate private pollster, we promise…) What excites us more is the fact that […]
Read MoreHow SMS Responses to Surveys Differ from Phones
In hundreds of conversations with consultants, committees, caucuses, and even voters, not a single person has said, “Oh, yeah, telephone calls are the future of polling.” Cygnal has spent the last 19 months scientifically testing the use of peer-to-peer text messaging as a tool for inviting voters to participate in a political survey. Heck, we […]
Read MoreHow to Reach Low-Propensity Voters for Polling
With iOS 13, Apple gave iPhone users the ability to send all unknown numbers instantly to voicemail. Many Android devices have this same option. Add this to all the people who ignore numbers they don’t recognize, and non-response bias continues to soar. For pollsters who rely 100% on telephone calls to field their surveys, this […]
Read MorePolling Is Changing (aka How to Go Beyond Phones)
The accepted norm in polling is now higher costs as fewer people are willing to pick up their phone – even their cell phone – and talk to a stranger on the other end of an unfamiliar number. Even so,it is still very possible to get good samples of voters via live phone calls if […]
Read MoreMulti-Mode Survey Nails Kentucky GOP Primary Results
So I was wrong. We listened to what everyone else was seeing in the field and adjusted our Kentucky Republican primary turnout model, which we should not have done. Our original multi-mode survey results were 0.4% from where Governor Matt Bevin ended up with on primary election day. I think it was Mark Twain who […]
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