Unearth

Unearth began life as a marketing consultancy focused on public affairs and candidate communications. As the playing field for marketers has become increasingly digital, the Unearth team has developed a suite of digital products to help its clients achieve their goal of reaching the right audiences with information about candidates, advocacy programs, and ballot initiatives that support informed communities and the greater good.

Among these products is Atlas, an in-house tool that helps Unearth identify activists, political leaders, and other influencers who could amplify their customers’ message. The tool allows Unearth to zero in on influencers across platforms whose networks overlap with their clients’ target audience, allowing Unearth to more effectively share public affairs communications with hard-to-reach communities who might be missed by traditional outreach tactics like direct mail and robo-calling.

To power this tool, Unearth needed high-quality sources to enrich their existing database and fuel Atlas’ influencer targeting. Unearth partnered with People Data Labs to acquire fresh B2B data via the Person Search API and to enhance their existing data using the Person Enrichment API.

Initially, the Unearth team tapped into the Person Enrichment API, to append data to their other data sources; however to make their Atlas solution best-in-class, the Unearth team needed a high-quality data source that would also allow them to centralize their searches for greater efficiency. After developing trust in the data, the People Data Labs Person Search API not only provided a reliable source of fresh, accurate data, but also allowed the Unearth Atlas developers to centralize their searches, eliminating the need for multiple data sources to craft full influencer profiles.

With over 2.5 billion unique records and more than 150 data fields delivered in an easily digestible format, PDL was able to improve the frequency and quality of Atlas-produced matches. PDL data also filled critical data gaps, particularly around employment history and other professional data points missing or unsupported by other data partners. The result was an expanded range of matches that could in-turn expand the reach of Unearth’s client messages while reducing wasted time and effort, both of which are critical to time and cost-sensitive public affairs campaigns.

The impact of the partnership between People Data Labs and the Unearth team can be grouped into two distinct categories, improved outputs, and increased efficiency:

Better outputs: Partnering with PDL allowed the Unearth team to improve the quality and quantity of matches produced by its Atlas tool. In turn, these improved results yielded better outcomes for Unearth’s public affairs clients who were able to utilize a larger number of more effective influencers and thereby distribute their messages more effectively to hard-to-reach communities about upcoming ballot initiatives, public advocacy campaigns, and other critical constituent communications.

Greater efficiency: Working with PDL helped Unearth’s engineers to produce a better product more easily. While other data sources required time-consuming standardization and a dependency on multiple sources required entity resolution before they could be used to enrich results, Unearth engineers reported significant time savings as a result of working with PDL’s data as their Single Source of Truth. Results were visible more quickly allowing the teams building Atlas and other Unearth internal tools to quickly stand up and maintain a proof of concept as well as to make more informed decisions.