About the Client
Topplr was a self-serve voter microtargeting, analytics, and ad-delivery web application that connected directly to political campaign’s Facebook and Instagram pages.
Setting the Stage
About the Project
Down-ballot political campaigns often have small budgets and lack marketing expertise that is essential to effectively promoting their message. Candidates for positions like school board, city council, and county judge seats are running campaigns themselves with the help of friends, family, and part-time consultants. Topplr quickly discovered that each political consultant who joined the platform would bring multiple campaigns with them, and recurring business the following year.
These updates helped differentiate the product and enabled Topplr to win the Gold Pollie for Best Ad Technology Innovation from the American Association of Political Consultants in 2020 and earn a nomination for Campaigns and Elections’ Most Innovative Product award in 2019.
What Were the Goals
How might we help consultants more effectively manage and successfully implement their digital ad campaigns?
Team Structure
Product Designer, Brandon Geib
Full-stack Developer
UX Researcher
CEO / Data Scientist
Product main page I designed showing the status and performance of ads sent to Facebook and Instagram.
Key Activities
Product Roadmap Development
Competitive Analysis
UX Interviews
Interface Testing
Wireframe Creation
UI Design
Interactive Prototypes
Developer Collaboration
Identifying Problems
How Problems Were Identified
When I started working on Topplr the product had yet to launch and the first lines of code had just been written to connect with Facebook. In addition to the standard recurring cycles of developing research plans, conducting interviews, running interface testing sessions, and administering surveys I helped support all aspects of the business.
This knowledge helped inform product planning meetings I co-led with our full-stack developer where we assessed and prioritized opportunities for improvement.
Who Were the Users
Political Consultants: Running campaigns for multiple candidates or issues at once.
Designing Solutions
How Solutions Were Designed
To address the problems we discovered I was constantly iterating on and validating user flows, wireframes, and prototypes with users. I coordinated with the developer to see each of these solutions through launch, and assessed them after the fact to measure impact.
Highlight
Managing Facebook Accounts
Interface showing the Facebook pages a user manages and can connect to Topplr during or after account setup.
Problem
Consultants faced frustration logging in and out of different accounts to check the status of each of the campaigns they were working on.
Solution
I designed the means by which users were able to add multiple Facebook accounts to the same profile.
Highlight
Clarifying Expenses
Figure 1) Product main page after additional sorting and filtering options for ads were added. Figure 2) Example of the csv export users could generate showing their account expenses.
Problem
Once campaign ads could be managed from the same account, consultants initially had to manually add up how much money was spent on each campaign to ensure they met strict financial records management requirements.
Solution
I designed updates to our expense reports for users that allowed them to segment their spending based on campaign and export that information as a CSV. I also designed updates to our product's main page that better allowed users to sort, filter and search their ads.
Highlight
Adding Voter Audiences
Figure 1) Interface showing the voter audiences associated with a user's account and the different options for adding an audience. Figure 2) Interface for creating and adding a voter audience to a user's account.
Problem
Each audience's information was previously displayed as a large single card in a grid. Individual campaigns with maybe two audiences had little trouble with this layout, but consultants who were creating and managing dozens of audiences found it difficult to scan for information and to compare audience data.
Solution
I redesigned the audience management page to be searchable and formatted audience data into a list display. I also introduced updates to the self-serve audience creation tools to support the larger volume of audiences that were being generated. This included the ability for users to create their audiences based on public voter file information.
Highlight
Facilitating Political Disclaimers
Form for collecting user information based on their personal or campaign political authorization status with Facebook.
Problem
Political campaigns were navigating an evolving digital advertising environment as social media companies introduced everchanging verification, disclosure and content requirements.
Solution
I designed new onboarding flows for stepping users through Facebook’s political advertising requirements to ensure new and existing users were able to continue communicating with constituents and voters.
Upon Reflection
Project Status
Complete - All updates I worked on were managed through launch and beyond.
Topplr was a live product for 4 years and helped campaigns across the United States more effectively communicate with voters. Topplr won the Gold Pollie for Best Ad Technology Innovation from the American Association of Political Consultants in 2020 and was a nominee for Campaigns and Elections’ Most Innovative Product award in 2019.
Personal Retro
I worked extensively on a wide range of updates for Topplr. One thing that became increasingly clear over time was that our reliance on Facebook was a double-edged sword. Their dominance in the social media space meant they were the most efficient means by which to connect with the largest volume of voters. However, every issue they had, we had. Sometimes their solutions became our problems. In retrospect, I would have pushed harder for us to integrate with other digital ad platforms during my time there. Moving forward, I am always cautious of building products that are solely reliant on another independent product to function.
