Digital Readiness

What Is Digital Readiness?

Running for office has always required reaching voters where they are. Today, that means online. Voters search for candidates on Google. They encounter political ads on Facebook. They visit campaign websites to decide if someone is worth their time and money. They sign up to receive updates – and they notice when a campaign goes quiet.

Digital Readiness is a measure of whether a campaign has built the digital foundations to do these things well. It isn't about having the most sophisticated technology or the biggest ad budget. It's about having the basics in place: a website that works, a way to collect and contact supporters, a presence in the spaces where voters spend their time, and the visibility to be found when voters go looking.

Research shows that campaigns with stronger digital foundations perform better at the ballot box. Not because any single tool is decisive, but because these capabilities compound. A campaign that collects email addresses can follow up with donors. A campaign with properly configured email authentication ensures those messages actually arrive. A campaign that ranks on Google controls what voters find when they search the candidate's name. Each layer of digital readiness makes every other layer more effective.

The Center for Campaign Innovation monitors Digital Readiness across a defined set of measurable indicators – organized by website, email and SMS, paid media, and search. Together, they provide a clear picture of how prepared a campaign is to communicate, persuade, and mobilize.

Research

Democrats' Edge In The Partisan Email Divide

Website Biography Text and Electoral Performance

Digital Campaign Tools and Performance in Virginia’s 2025 Elections

One Weak Link: Why Third-Party Cybersecurity Matters in Political Campaigns

How Campaign Logos Shape Voters' Opinions About Candidates

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What We Measure

Website

A campaign's website is its most important owned digital asset. It is the place a voter goes to learn who the candidate is, decide whether to donate, and figure out how to get involved. The metrics below assess whether a campaign's site is built to perform that role effectively.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's official thresholds for measuring real-world user experience on the web. They assess three things: how quickly the main content of a page loads (Largest Contentful Paint), how stable the page is as it loads – whether text and images shift unexpectedly (Cumulative Layout Shift), and how responsive the page is to user interactions (Interaction to Next Paint).

Google uses Core Web Vitals as a direct ranking signal in search results. A campaign website that fails these thresholds is penalized in organic search, making it harder for voters to find. Poor performance also leads to higher bounce rates – potential supporters who land on the site and leave before it finishes loading.

We assess Core Web Vitals separately for mobile and desktop, since performance often differs significantly between the two.

Page Performance

Beyond Core Web Vitals, Google PageSpeed Insights provides an overall performance score from 0 to 100 – measuring load time, rendering efficiency, and related factors for both mobile and desktop visitors.

More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. Research from Google found that as page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the probability that a visitor leaves without taking action increases by 32 percent. A slow campaign website doesn't just create a poor impression – it actively costs the campaign supporters who would have signed up, donated, or volunteered.

Email and SMS Capture

Does the campaign's homepage include a visible form where a visitor can provide their email address or mobile phone number?

Email and SMS lists are owned channels. Unlike social media followers, which exist at the discretion of a platform, subscriber lists belong to the campaign. Supporters who opt in are significantly more likely to donate, volunteer, and turn out to vote than visitors who never sign up. Without a visible capture form on the homepage, a campaign misses every visitor who would have joined.

About Page

Does the campaign have an effective candidate biography – and is it written in a way that voters will actually read?

We measure the About page using two criteria: word count and reading level (assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease Score, a standard measure of how easy a text is to understand). Voters actively search for information about candidates, and the biography page is consistently one of the most visited pages on a campaign website.

CCI research on candidate biography text has identified target ranges for both length and readability that correlate with stronger electoral performance. Bios that are too short fail to build voter trust. Bios that are too long or written at a high reading level lose readers before they engage.

Email and SMS

Email and SMS remain among the most cost-effective tools available to campaigns for direct voter and donor contact. But their effectiveness depends entirely on infrastructure – whether authentication is in place, whether the campaign follows up, and whether supporters actually hear from the campaign after they sign up.

Email Authentication

Email authentication refers to two technical standards – DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – that tell receiving email providers whether a message is legitimate.

Without proper authentication, campaign emails are more likely to be flagged as spam or blocked entirely before reaching a supporter's inbox. In 2024, Google and Yahoo began requiring DMARC authentication for bulk email senders. Campaigns that haven't configured these records risk having their communications silently discarded – with no indication that anything went wrong.

We assess DMARC at three levels (missing, configured but not enforced, and at full enforcement) and SPF as either missing or configured.

Confirmation Email

When a supporter signs up on a campaign's website, does the campaign send a confirmation or welcome email within 24 hours?

Welcome emails generate dramatically higher open rates than standard campaign messages – often three to five times higher – because the supporter is at peak engagement in the moment they opt in. A timely response confirms the relationship, establishes the communication channel, and creates the first opportunity to ask for a donation or volunteer commitment. Campaigns that skip this step lose their best moment to turn a casual visitor into an active supporter.

Receiving Messages

After a supporter signs up, does the campaign actually send them emails and text messages?

This may seem like a low bar – but it isn't universally cleared. Campaigns that collect contact information and then go dark are leaving significant value on the table. Regular communication keeps supporters engaged, drives repeat donations, mobilizes volunteers, and ultimately turns out voters. We monitor whether campaigns are actively using the lists they build.

Paid Media

Paid digital advertising allows campaigns to reach specific audiences with targeted messages at scale. The ability to run digital ads – and to do so – is increasingly a baseline expectation in competitive races.

Facebook and Instagram Advertising

Has the campaign run paid advertisements on Facebook or Instagram?

Both platforms are part of Meta's advertising network, and together they reach nearly every voter demographic. According to Pew Research, 68 percent of U.S. adults use Facebook, with more than half logging in daily. Meta's ad platform allows campaigns to target by geography (down to the zip code level), age, and matched voter files – reaching low-propensity voters and persuadable audiences with tailored messages.

We assess this using the Meta Ad Library, a publicly available database of all political advertisements run on Meta platforms.

Search

When voters want to learn about a candidate, most begin with a Google search. Where a campaign's website appears in those results determines whether voters find accurate, campaign-controlled information – or something else entirely.

Google Organic Rankings

We track where the campaign's website appears in Google search results for four of the most common voter searches: the candidate's name alone, the name combined with the office they're seeking, the name combined with their party, and the name combined with a key issue.

Studies consistently show that more than 90 percent of search clicks go to results on the first page of Google. A campaign whose website doesn't appear in the top ten results for its own candidate's name is effectively invisible for that search – leaving voters to find news coverage, opponent content, or nothing useful instead. Strong organic rankings ensure the campaign controls the first impression voters receive when they go looking.

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