A former aide to US president Barack Obama has been roped in by PKR vice-president Rafizi Ramli to work with his NGO, Invoke, in their efforts to improve campaigning methods for the next general election.

Andrew Claster, who was the deputy chief analytics officer for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, is now an Invoke volunteer, assisting the group with its voter data analytics programme.

"We use the information available on voters to identify who are our supporters and who can be persuaded, and we will then deploy our resources accordingly," Claster told Malaysiakini, in summing up what the data analytics was for.

He was speaking after a briefing of the programme for Pakatan Harapan in Kuala Lumpur last night.

Claster said the data would be used to craft a message to specifically target the swing voters, by addressing their needs and concerns.

This, he added, would help politicians avoid situations in which they preach to the converted.

Earlier during the question and answer session, Claster said there were also ways to counter vote buying.

However, when approached on this later, he could not give an example of a strategy to do this.

Invoke chief operating officer Shaun Kua (photo) said the Invoke team would be gathering the data it needs by sending volunteers door-to-door.

The volunteers, he said, would be regular Malaysians, whom the average voter can better relate with, compared with a politician.

New insights on what voters want

Rafizi said the data analytics would provide politicians new insights on what voters actually want.

"When you employ a nationwide one-size-fits-all campaign, it doesn't appeal to them (the swing voters). They would not necessarily be 'turned on' to register to vote, or turn up to vote.

"So you tailor your campaign more towards them, instead of what you think is important to you," Rafizi said.

He has found out, he added, that even he did not know what the people wanted until he started asking them.

Pakatan Harapan chief secretary Saifuddin Abdullah said such data analytics would have been useful back in the 2013 general elections.

Saifuddin, who was then with Umno, lost the Temerloh parliamentary constituency to PAS.

"What I didn't expect was the wave of young voters and first time voters.

"If we had analytics then, we would have been able to read the mood. Instead we relied on previous elections data, which means we were five years behind," he said.

Invoke is an NGO meant to support "principled" political candidates in the next general election, regardless of their party.

Rafizi previously said the NGO would provide a much needed avenue for apolitical Malaysians who are eager to contribute to a change in government.

The group had gained notoriety for offering cash incentives to people to register to vote, through a slogan contest.