Definition
The Social Engagement Score indicates a person's likelihood to attend a protest/rally, convince others to volunteer, or share/discuss issues on social media.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
Which of the following describes an activity that you did in the last few years?
- Attended a protest or rally
- Convinced others to volunteer
- Shared or discussed something related to political, social, or local issues on social media
Respondents who answered yes to any of the above were labeled as targets in the model. Those who did not answer yes to any of the activities were labeled as non-targets.
The Social Engagement Score was trained on polling data from the 2023 Murmuration poll. We collected over 9,000 responses via phone and online from registered voters in 2023. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter will engage in social engagement activities, i.e. attend a protest or rally, convince others to volunteer, or share or discuss issues on social media.
We validated the model using a held-out test set of 20% of the original survey sample. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Social Engagement Score, 33% attended a protest or rally (106% more likely than the average voter), 40% convinced others to volunteer (38% more likely than the average voter), and 50% shared or discussed issues on social media (32% more likely than the average voter).
Use Cases
The Social Engagement Score can be applied in various ways to enhance activism, advocacy, and social awareness campaigns. Below are a few examples for how partners could use this score:
- Protest Mobilization: Advocacy groups can use the model to identify individuals likely to attend protests or rallies. For example, an environmental organization planning a climate march could focus its outreach on individuals with high Social Engagement Scores, giving them a better chance of increasing turnout for the protest.
- Volunteer Recruitment: Organizations that are working to build a volunteer base can use this score to target individuals who are more likely to convince others around them to volunteer. In this case, a GOTV campaign could use this model to identify the highest scoring members in a community and then target those potential neighborhood leaders with messages about the importance of voting and encouraging others to vote (potentially turning them into informal GOTV volunteers), or they could use messages encouraging them to volunteer for the organization's official upcoming GOTV outreach efforts.
- Social Media Campaigns: Political campaigns or social movements can use this model score to identify potential online advocates for issues that are important to their work. In this case, an organization could use the Social Engagement Score in conjunction with another issue score to target individuals who are likely to support their issue and likely to advocate for the issue on social media. For example, this score could be used with the Education Voter Score to build an online presence open to education reform.
- Relational Organizing Outreach: This score can be used to potentially increase the efficacy of relational organizing efforts, which rely on individuals harnessing their own personal networks to help drive change. Partners planning relational organizing efforts can use this score to target those most likely to recruit others to volunteer and share information about local issues on social media. By focusing on those with the highest scores, partners can make their outreach more efficient and give themselves the best chance to reach people who will help accelerate their organizing work.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Social Engagement Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top… | Set the minimum score value as… |
| 10% | 36 |
| 20% | 31 |
| 30% | 29 |
| 40% | 27 |
| 50% | 26 |
| 60% | 24 |
| 70% | 23 |
| 80% | 21 |
| 90% | 20 |
| 100% | 10 |