regression analysis

The campaigns of 2008 are now over and many organizations are left with a nice amount of data from their outreach programs. This post will give a brief introduction to the use of regression analysis to look at your data in new ways.

Simple regression allows you to isolate a single variable, in most of your cases probably a contact action.

When you have a lot of data you can group it into sets where all of the variables match except for your chosen dependent and independent variables.

For example, you would create a set of data of 20-year old female voters from the same precinct. You could then look at that data to see how effective your contacts were with that specific demographic. Once you have created a few data sets you can identify some new relationships. It's possible that a specific contact action was more effective with women than men, or with students than young professionals.

Regression analysis allows you to restrict your attention to a single explanatory variable, which may allow you to see something you might have missed otherwise.