Break Something

Nobody loves updating spreadsheets by hand, but for a lot of agencies who are just starting out, it’s the simplest and fastest way to get reports into the hands of your clients. Once an agency starts growing, however, copying and pasting data from your email and donation platforms quickly becomes painful. Once you’re dealing with more than a handful of clients, it’s time to find a better solution.

This was the situation Break Something found themselves in when they decided to work with Frakture. With a single campaign cycle under their belt, Break Something had already grown to serve dozens of clients, and they needed an automated, reliable reporting tool that could take data from a variety of CRMs, email & ad platforms, and ActBlue, and deliver timely and accurate reports for their growing list of candidate and nonprofit clients.

About Break Something

Break Something is a full service digital advertising, consulting, and strategy firm specializing in electing Democrats, furthering progressive causes, and creating change. From raising small dollar donations online to persuading targeted voters, they help progressive candidates and organizations use digital tools to win campaigns. In the 2022 cycle, their team’s email, digital ad, and texting programs have raised over $10 million for high-profile Democratic challengers and incumbents like Tim Ryan (D-OH), Elaine Luria (D-VA), and Sean Casten (D-IL).

The Challenge

When Break Something first approached Frakture, they were using spreadsheets and a manual process for pulling reports out of NGP-VAN, Action Network, ActBlue, and the various digital ad platforms. They were aggressively adding new clients and hiring staff, but reporting was quickly becoming a bottleneck. They needed an automated reporting system that would pull the right data from the platforms, clean it up, and update client-facing reports with accurate, timely data. But even more than that, they needed their time back; every minute spent downloading spreadsheets was a minute they weren’t devising new tactics and strategies to help their clients connect with voters and win their campaigns.

Our Solution

We worked with Break Something to create their own data warehouse and deploy our army of Bots to pull all their client data into a single database, allowing them to not only automate email and ad performance reporting, but also to future-proof their internal workflow and build advanced reports for origin revenue and cross-client reporting. We worked with them to revise their source coding, making it easy for them to integrate their SMS and organic social media programs into their new reporting system. With their clients heavily focused on list-growth, we also leveraged our specialized data tables and reports to track the performance of third-party acquisition sources over time. No more spending money on lists that don’t perform!

Data Warehouse

At the heart of Break Something’s new reporting infrastructure is their data warehouse. Built on an AWS MySQL relational database hosted in the cloud, it’s perfect for aggregating data from multiple systems, and cross-reporting on that data using our source code model, far more reliable than tracking conversions with pixels or cookies. Our Frakture Bots run day and night, pulling data from CRMs, email & ad platforms, donation platforms, and more. Our attribution algorithm automatically matches donations to the email, ad, or text that it resulted from. As with many of our clients, Break Something found that this resulted in an average of 20% higher reported revenue compared to pixel and cookie based tracking!

For Break Something, our bots do all the heavy lifting that strategists used to do by hand. No more logging into ActBlue by hand to get the latest fundraising numbers for a client; just hit “refresh” on your dashboard and it’s done.

The Results

By working with Frakture, Break Something has transformed their analytics and reporting. What does that mean for them?

Accurate, timely data

Reports update automatically all day and all night. They have fresh, accurate numbers for clients first thing in the morning and all day, while their strategists spend their time strategizing, instead of copying and pasting spreadsheets. 

Standardized, beautiful reports

With their new reports built in Google Data Studio, strategists can share real-time reports internally and with their clients, ensuring everyone has access to the latest numbers. They’ve even taken the extra step of branding their reports with their clients logos and colors for that extra touch of personalization that candidates love. 

Quick onboarding, easy data troubleshooting

With standardized source coding and an uniform data structure provided by the warehouse, it’s quick and efficient to onboard new clients. New Data Studio reports can be set up in less than an hour, and the structured data allows for quick troubleshooting of errors or discrepancies in the Frakture Console. If a strategist needs to audit a source code or confirm revenue on an email send, it’s easy to dig deeper into the data and find the whole story.

Frakture has transformed reporting for Break Something, and we’d love to do the same for you!