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FAQ

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Where do we get our data?

Goods is becoming immensely popular, with ~2 million users since the election! Now that so many people are using the platform, we often get asked about specifics like where our data comes from. To start, we hand curate all of it. This takes time but it ensures its accuracy. We don’t have bots out there scraping the web; we employ researchers to determine the parent company of each brand and then tie that to the actual political donation data.

Where Do You Get Your Data?

We aggregate the past 3 election cycles of FEC (Federal Election Commission) political contribution data.  During that process, we differentiate between donations made by the corporate PAC and those made by senior executives. This ensures that our numbers reflect how the company itself is playing politics, not just sampling the political lean of its labor force. After all, it’s the senior executives who sign off on the way the PAC money is used.

Next, we show what percentage of the sum of PAC & Exec donations goes to each party. Using several cycles of data ensures that companies won’t be able to game our numbers by donating large chunks to either party at the end of a cycle, giving a better representation of their overall political footprint.

How Do I Read Your Data?

Each brand’s page has 3 tabs containing 20 data points. We’ve had plenty of questions about how to interpret these, so here’s a guide to each tab:

Info

This is the tab you’ll start on for every company. It contains info on the brand’s political support, amount of political funding, impact on campaign finance reform, substitute brands, and the way our users feel about the brand’s political behavior.

Issues

This section is included in Goods Premium and shows what the brand’s donations actually pay for, in terms of support, opposition, or neutrality, on 8 major political issues. These cover the votes (or positions if the candidate has yet to vote on any bills) that politicians receiving money from the brand have made on each issue.

Politicians

How Often Do You Update?

We’re updating constantly. After all, we’re a data company, this is our core mission, and donations are happening even when campaigns aren’t right around the corner.

We plan to put a date on each brand’s page soon, to show how recent the numbers are and to avoid any confusion.

Why Do You Only Show Red & Blue?

Because, by and large, Republicans and Democrats are the ones receiving donations.

There are of course, other parties (Independent, Libertarian, and Green to name a few). These have existed in our code as variables just like Republican and Democrat since we launched the app. What we’ve found is that one of two things tends to happen: Either the politician runs as a member of a minor party but so reliably caucuses with one of the 2 major parties that it doesn’t make sense to differentiate (Sen. Sanders (I-VT) & Sen. King (I-ME)) or they don’t raise enough money from major brands to appear in our data.

This seems to be the result of using a winner-take-all voting system. Voters begin by supporting candidates and parties most representative of their beliefs. If those candidates and parties reliably fail to win elections, their voters either stop participating in elections entirely or vote strategically: Support whichever party is closest to their own beliefs but also capable of winning an election. As a result, the two major parties shift their platforms over time to build the largest coalitions possible, which creates a political duopoly and relegates most third parties to the electoral hinterlands.

In the same way, corporate brands, wanting their money to be well-invested, mainly give it to the two political brands that reliably win elections, rather than riskier, upstart ones. So, the vast majority of political donations go to Democrats, Republicans, or those who caucus with them so often the distinction is irrelevant.

To be crystal clear, we’re not making a value judgement here, just giving our best guess as data analysts as to why most of the money donated to politics ends up in the 2 major parties. If at any point this changes, we’ll change how we display our data to reflect the new status quo.

Why Don’t You Have Every Politician?

Not all politicians receive donations from brands. Many self-fund their campaigns or rely exclusively on small dollar donations. Our goal is not to discourage the financing of campaigns. They’re expensive and have to be funded somehow. What we focus on is corporate entities getting involved in politics, since brands have enough money to match the influence of 100, 1000, or 100,000 people, depending on their size. This naturally incentivizes politicians on both sides of the aisle to pay a little more attention to the big donor, rather than the average voter, which makes our government less representative for all of us.

Why Are There Ads?

Our two goals are:

  1. Making this data available to the largest number of people
  2. Keeping the lights on (to support Goal 1)

As with many apps before us, we’ve found that the middle ground between offering a free tier for our product and ensuring we can pay for the work it takes to make it, is to serve ads. We know they can be annoying and work very hard to ensure they don’t detract from your experience. But the server costs, labor, and general workings of any organization require funding.

For anyone who can’t stand the ads, there is a reasonably-priced ad-free option and a premium tier which includes no ads. We also hope that once our user base gets large enough, we can find alternate and less intrusive ways to keep things running.

Do The Ads Interfere With Your Objectivity?

No.

We don’t choose the specific ads that get shown, which are chosen by our ad service. This means there is no way for brands to purchase influence with us.

Our whole thing is about shining light on the purchase of influence. It would really defeat that purpose if we could be bought.

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