Overview

How do we understand the influence of political influence in our electoral democracy? “Follow the money”. Robust public oversight of campaign funding is vital to reduce the temptation for law-makers to defer to generous campaign donors (and vendors). Campaign Finance is our newest app which allows the public to closely monitor the ways in which candidates for office and Political Action Committees raise and spend money. Before beginning design and development, the Civera team embarked on a discovery process which involved surveying the campaign finance public portals in all 50 U.S. states. We found a pattern of user interface (UI) limitations across those other states, which we resolved in our solution by tapping into paradigms from the best banking and other consumer-oriented finance products.

The Result

We’ve built one of the most easy-to-use and powerful campaign finance public portals in the nation.

Features

Sunshine outperforms most statewide systems.

Feature Existing Systems Campaign Finance App
Search Siloed search, separate pages for each entity: candidates, PACs, donors, etc. Full, flexible statewide unified search, keeps user on one page. Collapsible panels for each entity.
Clickable Entities Static, plain text entities can’t be clicked to explore more information. Clickable entities which will instantly search by that entity.
Results Style Report-centric search results which require click-through to see the transactions therein. Transaction- and report-centric search results that the user can toggle. Transactions easily click through to their parent report. Reports can be expanded with a click to show their child transactions.
Data and Statistics Limited ability to download data. Raw CSV/Excel files of your exact search results, including all transactions and links to all reports.
Page Sharing Pages don’t have shareable URL links. Every search result creates a shareable permalink URL.
Summary and Data Viz No “big picture” summary, simple table output. Usually primitive or absent data visualizations. Combined “big picture” summary visualizations at the top followed by granular transaction-level data.
Update Cycle New data may take days or weeks to show up on the site Live updates every hour. Can show freshest “draft transactions” with disclaimer before they are officially filed.

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