Welcome back, Saturday Campaign D-I-Y’ers! For those who tune in, welcome to the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. Each week, we discuss issues that help drive successful campaigns. If you’ve missed prior diaries, please visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide.
This week we’re talking about voter contact, helping to make voters aware of your campaign and encouraging them to vote for your candidate. In the world of voter contact, any method that you use which reaches voters—whether it is a phone call, an email, or a knock at the door—all of it is about contacting the voter and informing them of your campaign.
While all methods of communication are about voter contact, there are general guidelines to make sure that your voter contact methods are effective and pay off in votes. This is a subject we’ve talked about more than once here in Nuts & Bolts—why? Because there is nothing, nothing at all, more important than actually getting people to vote. Slick ads, great meetings, fun events—all of them mean very little if you don’t get people to actually turn out and vote.
So, let’s look at what effective voter contact systems look like.
Building an effective program
Campaigns begin their assessments of voter contact based on two different methods. The first is an assessment of impact versus effort: what impact will you have on the race versus how much time, volunteer effort and cost your campaign will be required to spend. The second is mass communication means. For this entry, we’re going to talk mostly about the difference, with a focus on in-person contact.
Too often, Democratic campaigns make their most significant mistake early, by failing to sit down and develop a plan that calculates the cost and reward of their voter contact method. Some of this is, frankly, the fault of vendors and consultants who may sell mass voter contact methods. It isn’t their job to sit with a campaign and figure out whether the cost-benefit analysis to a campaign is the best choice, but all campaigns should take a moment and assess every proposal as to what it will cost and what the benefit as a contact method will be for their results.
Every Democratic campaign, in every method, will start in part from this assumption: personal voter contact is persuasive voter contact. That targeted voter contact represents a better return/response and door-to-door canvassing is considered the highest impact voter contact method.
With this in mind, as you build your voter contact program, think accordingly with your budget. Campaigns, even larger campaigns, tilted to change the ratio of how much money put into mass media voter contact over in-person voter contact. The larger the race you run, the more important mass contact is in order to raise your profile, but the reason for that is simple: you start running out of volunteers and workers to contact every single human being within a state or entire country.
The smaller the race you are in, the greater your ability to talk to a higher percentage of voters within your district directly.
The smaller your district, the higher the percentage of your overall effort should be put into direct contact. Don’t plan on running for a city council or state house race through brilliant Facebook and Radio ads—you are going to have to devote a large part of your effort to direct voter contact, in person, at the door. Period.
Method Proposed |
Cost Expected |
Time to Plan |
Contacts Expected |
Workers Needed |
Impact Assessment |
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This is a chart I’ve used for some time to help campaigns determine the value of their voter contact methods. As you build your campaign’s strategy for voter contact, keep track of what methods you are using, how much you plan to spend, how much time it will take to plan, how many voters you believe the method will contact, how many workers and volunteers you will need to implement, and keep track of your overall assessment.
This will seem like extra paperwork to your campaign, but if you keep track of these factors frequently, you can get a good idea of what is working and what isn’t working, and allocate your resources appropriately.
Workers? Why not just all volunteers?
Hey, it is a Democratic campaign. We don’t have big money to back us, why can’t all of this be done by volunteers? Can’t we just figure a 100 percent volunteer effort and lower our cost and then we are home free?
It sounds good—and many Democratic campaigns seem to bank on this idea that the campaign’s at the door canvass can be entirely voluntary. Remember, though, just because you make contact at the door doesn’t mean it is GOOD contact. Unprepared, untrained canvassers have just as much ability to harm your campaign in ways that you don’t see until late as any other failed campaign effort. The difference is you might not know until too late.
Making sure that your ground game is properly managed, trained and prepared to do the work matters. This means that you are going to have some paid staff or paid canvassers you can rely on mixed with your volunteer groups. You need to make sure your voter contact system is properly managed and you keep track of results, and with that in mind, it is impossible—and risky—to be done entirely through a volunteer effort.
Over the years, in volunteer efforts, I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong, but notably:
- Volunteers who do not do the work, but simply fill out score sheets to seem as though they’ve done work.
- Volunteers who anger, bother, or agitate voters from being too aggressive at the door.
- Volunteers who aren’t volunteers for the candidate AT ALL, but instead are just Republicans or meddlers who take work to feed it to your opponent.
How do you prevent these things? By having someone whose job it is to train, manage and monitor your canvass. If you are a small campaign, you can work on this effort with your county organization. Larger campaigns will either outsource this responsibility to a company or their state party.
Total Quality Management
Please realize campaigns and your efforts still follow some basic business models toward success. As a result, I encourage most campaigns to strongly consider TQM—Total Quality Management—as a way to look at their campaign efforts at a door. The eight principles of TQM, adjusted to this purpose are:
- Voter Focused—all efforts must focus on the voter
- Total Campaign Involvement—all elements of your campaign should feel involved in results
- Process Centered—your efforts must be repeatable and focused
- Integrated System—your plan must generate results that integrate with all other methods of your campaign
- A Systematic Approach—you need a repeatable, established method of action.
- Continuous Improvement—assess on a monthly, weekly, daily basis what is working and what is not working. Assess volunteers and workers frequently. Be prepared to make changes to improve.
- Facts, Not Drama, Decide Approach—don’t allow drama or interpersonal issues to divide your efforts. Focus on the facts and data you are receiving.
- Bidirectional Communication—your volunteers will often have information a campaign doesn’t have that they learn at the door. Campaigns may have information volunteers don’t have. Create opportunities for bidirectional communication that allows for continuous improvement.
Finally, a key component of all TQM, all voter contact, and pretty much of life is this: leadership comes from the example at the top. Volunteers and even paid help within your campaigns will work harder if they believe the leadership of the campaign or the candidate is also working hard. Success starts at the top. As a matter of social reality, people will not work hard if the general feeling is the candidate or campaign leadership is not leading by example.
Next week on Nuts & Bolts, we’re going to take on a tricky one: Do Democratic candidates bank too heavily on TV? Digital, Social and Broadcast messaging.
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Nuts & Bolts: Building Democratic Campaigns
Contact the Daily Kos group Nuts and Bolts by kosmail (members of Daily Kos only). You can also follow me on twitter: @tmservo433
Every Saturday this group will chronicle the ins and outs of campaigns, small and large. Issues to be covered: Campaign Staffing, Fundraising, Canvass, Field Work, Data Services, Earned Media, Spending and Budget Practices, How to Keep Your Mental Health, and on the last Saturday of the month: “Don’t Do This!” a diary on how you can learn from the mistakes of campaigns in the past.
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