Counts and Crosstabs is a VAN feature that lets you analyze and compare various data types in your list or in your committee's universe at large. 


This article will show you how to use Counts and Crosstabs using DNC Support Scores by age and gender as an example, but there are a variety of ways to parse the data including by: home districts, organizer, certain survey questions, likely party, ethnicity, voting history, targets, and more. 


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There are two ways to use Counts and Crosstabs: on a specific list or in your committee's entire universe of voters. 


To run Counts and Crosstabs on a specific list, create your list and then click "Counts" >> "Run Quick Counts and Crosstabs"



To run Counts and Crosstabs on your whole universe, go to the Main Menu and click "Report Manager"



Then click "Counts and Crosstabs" on the left-hand side and select "Run Quick Counts and Crosstabs"



From here, we can generate our report as a table, based on whatever criteria we choose. Again, in this example we'll be using DNC Support Scores by Age and Gender. 


Counts and Crosstabs generates and table based on the criteria you choose. 


Columns is the criteria listed on the right hand column, and that criteria runs across the table in each row. Crosstabs are the criteria at the top of the table, and those criteria run down the length of the table. 



In our example, let's first breakdown DNC Support by age.


First, we'll select DNC Support as our column 1



Next we'll select age as our Crosstab 1.



When we run the report, we get the following table:



We can now see that, for example, there are 76,590 people ages 25-34 with a DNC Support Score of 60-69.99 in the 2020 Coordinated Campaign Committee


Note here that Counts and Crosstabs automatically creates the ranges in this table. 


Also note that we could have use Age as our column and DNC Support as our Crosstab. This depends on your layout preference. Note: This is not true for all criteria. Home Districts (Congressional, House, Senate, County, Precinct, etc) are only accessible in Columns


Now we can take our analysis one step further by adding a new criteria to our table. From our example, we know that 76,590 people ages 25-34 have a DNC Support Score of 60-69.99. What if I wanted to know how many of those 76,590 are men?


To break down the data further, you add a new subfield. In this case, under Crosstab 2 we can use Gender



Now when we run our report, we get the following:



Note that now each age range is further broken down into columns by gender. We can determine that there are 28,360 men, age 25-34 with a DNC Support Score of 60-69.99


Odds and Ends


Here are somethings to keep in mind when using Counts and Crosstabs:


  • As stated above, Home Districts are only accessible in Columns and not in Crosstabs
  • If you are running a report of over 50,000 people, VAN bases the report on the most recent daily VAN Sync. That means that your counts may be slightly off if you made any manual changes since the last sync
  • If you'd like to do additional visualization such as bar graphs or pie charts, you can click Export to Excel in the upper right corner. This will export your current report and you can work with it as an excel file for additional uses.


                                                                                                                                                                                                 


Questions or feedback? Please email us at voterfile@dfl.org 


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