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The Institute Gathers Data on State-Level Campaign Financing and Makes It Widely Available

• Assessing the impact of this resource is about more than counting hits on a website.
• The institute's broad goals are to raise awareness, inform, and enable insight.

Many Third Parties Have Discovered and Leveraged the Institute's Data

• Those using the data include academics, the media, and the public.
• The fact that so many and so varied users find value in the data and transform the Institute's resource into new efforts and new ideas is a testament both to the importance of the data themselves and to the Institute's efforts and impact.

The National Institute on Money in State Politics collects, processes, and makes public information on campaign contributions made to state-level candidates for public office. The Institute asked the RAND Corporation to probe user perspectives on the Institute and its data, on how the data are being used, and on how the utility of the data might be improved in the future. Drawing on experiences of a variety of users, as well as a review of the publications that have used the Institute's data and research reports, this report provides an evaluation of the Institute's impact on the public discourse over campaign finance at the state level. It is our view that the Institute serves an important purpose — to undertake the collection, centralization, and dissemination of state-level campaign finance data. No other organization has been successful in this effort or is likely to be so. All the audiences that the Institute seeks to engage have found value in the Institute's efforts. The most successful of these are the scholarly, journalistic, and advocacy communities. The interviewees we spoke with were impressed, felt indebted to the Institute, and expressed an inability to do the sort of research, reporting, and advocacy on state campaign finance without the Institute. Overall, a variety of influential users engaged in campaign finance and public policy view the Institute's work as being of high quality and adding value.

• Chapter One

  The Problem is in the Data: Bringing State Campaign Finance Out of the Shadows

• Chapter Two

  Summarizing the History, Function, and Value Proposition of the National Institute on Money in State Politics

• Chapter Three

  An Ecological View of Impact Reveals the Role of the Institute in Supporting Informed Analysis of Money in State Politics

• Chapter Four

  Recommendations and Conclusions