What types of big questions do we want to answer?

[rsfive]

Examples:

1. To what extent are donors donating across party lines?
2. What factors best predict how a given donor will allocate funds (i.e. industry, income level, location, individual vs group)

[lilianhj]

Who might our end users be?

• Candidates themselves
• Non-profits (who are other peer organizations donating to? => means we need a general industry grouping for contributions)
• Average voters (also interested in the industries that are giving to a candidate, where a candidate's money is coming from geographically)

What functionality does this mean we need to add?

• Industry info (break out the companies/organizations from the surnames - they have blank first-name fields, group them) [PRIORITY]
• Geolocation (simple question of percentage from in state and percentage from out of state, more complex mapping) [PRIORITY] (October 3 update: use Tableau?)
• A page to view all donors (to see donors who are giving to multiple candidates)
• More complex: identifying associations between campaign platforms and the candidates' industry backers (can start with just linking campaign platforms from the website) [DONE]
• More complex: scorecards of how candidates vote (find and link external ones)
• More complex: identify which donors/industries are the bellwethers in the time series
• Google search activity for governor's race?

[lilianhj]

Other things we could add (discussed September 19):

• Select donations within a date range? (Start and end date)
• An "interesting trends"/example section to give people an idea of what's possible