Stef Monson ☰

July 2020 – Nov. 2020

Florida Democratic Party • Remote

Lead Deputy Data Director (Coordinated Campaign) - With the election rapidly approaching and the stakes in the battles for the White House, Senate, and State's Legislative Branches growing faster than the pandemic itself, I joined the Coordinated Campaign on the Data Team for Florida to take the lead on in-state reporting and analytics.

⋘ Notable Project ⋙
Structured Office Hours

Problem: With 39 regions and 234 organizers spread across Florida, reporting was in high demand. It was too much for one person, but our 6 Regional Data Leads(RDLs) and the other 3 Data Deputies lacked the experience necessary to fulfill the needs of their assigned pods.

Solution: What started off as a 1-off SQL training in the basics of Postgres and using Civis Platform, grew into an weekly structured-learning call that began with a lesson on reporting using SQL, Civis, or Google Sheets and ended with a freeform Q&A session where the team could ask questions or bring their code in for review. Each session had at least 4 of the 10 Florida Data Team members in attendance and garnered enough interest to go over time.

May 2020 – Jun. 2020

Organizing Together 2020 • Remote

Wisconsin Data Manager - Fresh from a large national campaign, I joined OT2020 to take care of all inter-departmental data needs, from creating reports to setting up ETLs to make sure that information from tools the campaign was using were properly being transferred into SmartVAN.

⋘ Notable Project ⋙
Personalized Field Organizer Exit Emails

Problem: As the campaign was winding down and organizers seeking new positions, they needed hard numbers to include in their resumes. Normally this information would be sent in a Google Sheet where each organizer can copy their information for their records, but as part of union negotiations we were not allowed to share organizer statistics with anyone other than the organizer themselves.

Solution: I put together a list of organizer metrics that I pulled from Civis Platform, Google Forms, and SmartVAN. I put them into a Google Sheet and drafted a template email with column names inserted as markers. Then I used a mail merge script to automatically send an email to each organizer's personal email address customized with their numbers.

Sept. 2019 – Feb. 2020

BERNIE 2020 • Des Moines, IA

Iowa Data Project Manager - With the staff in Iowa growing at a rapid pace, the need for data became too much for one person. I was hired to split the data responsibilities with the Data Director, so allowing each of us to play to our strengths. The Data Director was able to focus on data modeling while I took on report creation, software administration, training, and hiring further members of the data team. My ingenuity surrounding the reports I created earned me a position on the national team that was very report-focused.

⋘ Notable Project ⋙
Turf Trackers

Problem: With 89 Organizers across Iowa, each managing their own set of volunteers, the field staff needed a way to keep track of which areas within their region had been cut, canvassed, and committed into VAN.

Solution: I created a collection of 17 google sheets, one for each assigned region of the state, reducing the number of active users for each tracker to 4-6 staffers. Each regional spreadsheet had a sheet dedicated to tracking the cutting and auditing of turf packets, with checkboxes for unworkable areas, dropdowns for staff names and packet status, and auto-generated naming conventions. They also had a sheet for tracking MiniVAN lists from generation to completion, giving dropdowns for packet name and list status, areas for canvasser contact information and checkboxes for syncing and committing data into VAN. Thirdly they each had a sheet dedicated to tracking each regions progress by pulling information from the other two sheets and forming a table with metrics like number of packets cut, number of packets audited, number of lists generated, and number of lists by status. Finally the 17th google sheet was a state-wide progress-to-goal tracker that pulled in regional toplines from each individual spreadsheet.

July 2018 – Nov. 2018

DIGIDEMS/PA DEMOCRATIC PARTY • Philadelphia, PA

Digidems Organizer (Deputy Digital Organizing Director) - Provided by DigiDems to the PA Dems as a technology expert, I became instrumental in keeping the party's digital platforms integrating and operating effectively by communicating with PA Dems staff as well as campaigns throughout PA, learning what the party needed them to do and finding a creative technical solution.

⋘ Notable Project ⋙
Volunteer Driven Textbank

Problem: Many volunteers wanted to communicate with voters via text, but the party didn't have a way to manage volunteer involvement in SMS messaging.

Solution: I developed a system to recruit, signup, train, set up, and communicate with volunteers using Mobilize America for the volunteer enrollment, Google Forms to gather information from volunteers, Adobe Premiere and YouTube to create an upload an instructional video, Hustle for peer-to-peer texting, and Slack to create a community where volunteers could talk to one another as well as members of the PA Dems staff regarding questions, concerns, issues, and sharing their favorite stories. Our final textbank lasted 4 days. We had more than 700 volunteers, sent 489,208 messages to 317,190 voters, received more than 50,000 responses with less than a 4% opt-out rate, and logged over 12,800 voters as commited to vote.

Sep. 2012 – May 2015

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN—EAU CLAIRE • Eau Claire, WI

Front Desk & Operations Program Associate/Business Automation Analyst (Parking and Transportation Department) - Functioning under two separate, but simultaneous roles, I focused on my goals of improving office workflow and efficiency, and earned a position newly devised for assessing, attaining, managing, and updating technology which improved performance and satisfaction of colleagues.

⋘ Notable Project ⋙
Cash Journal Report

Problem: Budgeting requirements dictated that any revenue generated by permit sales needed to be allocated to lot maintenance, and any revenue generated by ticket payments needed to be allocated to enforcement staff wages. The financial reports provided by the Automated Issuance/Management System (AIMS) software used by the parking office, did not include a way to determine separation of funds in this fashion and it was calculated manually. This process took 3-5 hours per week, and custom AIMS reports from the retailer were priced at $1,300.

Solution: Using the AIMS Report Designer's export function, and a DataDictionary provided by the AIMS support staff, I was able to construct custom XML files detailing queries to be loaded by a new report, thus paving the way for reports that were tailored to the needs of the parking office, starting with a daily Cash Journal Report that listed each drawer's individual transactions, and a totals section on the bottom that not only showed the total revenue broken down by payment method, but separated the funds into categories for easy deposit. This report turned 3-5 hours into 15 minutes per week.