Election Donor Dashboard

A major project I undertook in the program was a campaign finance dashboard in my data warehousing course (IST 722). Building on many of the concepts I was familiar with and combining similar disciplines to create something such as this was an interesting challenge to take on. Combining my background knowledge of SQL and relational database techniques and management, building data pipelines for extraction, transforming, and loading data from complex formats to generate actionable insights truly took my learning and understanding to the next level. Our group campaign donor data from the Federal Election Commission in text format and converting it into readable data using Snowflake and Data Build Tools (dbt labs). My contribution to the group project was to ensure our table structure in SQL/Snowflake was properly in place for our data warehouse. From there, we created data pipelines to extract, transform, and load the data into a more digestible format for analysis and visualization. Our pipeline went straight from Snowflake to a PowerBI dashboard that could be updated over time and as campaign financing changes. We found that many of the sizable campaign contributions across both parties to various sized political action committees (PACs) came from retired individuals, an interesting insight to find on those that put their fingers on the scales of American elections. Many of the donations also came from typically non-swing states, with many sizable Democratic donations coming from California, and Illinois, and a lot of Republican fundraising coming from Texas and Florida. The learning outcomes fulfilled and demonstrated in this project were most exemplified by “Communicate insights gained via visualization and analytics to a broad range of audiences (including project sponsors and technical team leads” since politics has arguably one of the largest audiences in America and the world, accurately and effectively communicating any better understanding is effective and essential to helping any and all American citizens make a sensible decision at the ballot box, while also providing critical indicators to experts on how to best increase fundraising and momentum.