It’s easy to have a love-hate relationship with get out the vote tactics. We have all heard crazy GOTV stories, and just like the movie “Groundhog Day,” these bad GOTV tactics tend to repeat themselves across the country, no matter where you live.
Every year these “tactics” appear on campaigns and folks typically shrug their shoulders and offer up some platitude like, “it’s always been done this way.” But the truth of the matter is these tactics do nothing to help campaigns. They are a waste of money, effort, time, and in some cases they hurt the candidate and the staff’s reputation in both the short and long term.
These lousy GOTV tactics are just bad politics, no matter which side of the aisle you are on, and it’s about time we call them out. Every strategist may not agree completely with the list below, but here are the most common tactical GOTV mistakes I see cycle after cycle.
The Sign Blitz
It happens in many campaigns. Early on someone thought it was a good idea to order 5,000 signs for your city council campaign. Now your campaign headquarters smells like ink and you’re sick of tripping over boxes of signs on your way to the bathroom. So you hire a group of hourly workers you found from Craigslist and tell them to go put signs up any place they can.
I hate signs. That’s not because they can’t be useful, but because they are so often misused, over-ordered, and create an organizational and financial drain. Since name recognition alone is not the deciding factor in many races, signs are rarely a useful strategic communication medium. Further, signs these days cost around $3 a piece, plus the cost of labor. That means you can often spend up to $7 per sign.
Before you order signs, take the time to figure out how many you actually need. Force your staff to compile a list of sign locations and polling places so you know the actual number. How many campaigns do this? Unfortunately, not too many do. But it’s a much better idea to plan first and order later. Hiring unvetted hourly workers, even for simple tasks, is also a bad idea. If you need to hire folks for a last minute GOTV push, make sure you take the time and vet them properly beforehand.
Rent-A-Canvass
Another bad GOTV tactic is the rent-a-canvass. Campaigns will hire a “canvass consultant” who will have a crew working with them. You are not sure how many people the canvass consultant actually has and you never get a real answer. All you need to do is write a check and they will take care of pulling the list, door knocking, and everything else. When you ask what the voter universe is or for some measure of the results, the canvass consultant will simply tell you he or she “has it covered.”
With all the technology that is available to campaigns, it blows my mind that some folks refuse to change the way they canvass. With tools like NGP VAN, Organizer, Grassroots Unwired, and many others, you can easily track paid and volunteer canvassers in a way you could not have a few years ago. This means that any canvass can be a measurable exercise with a real understanding of what the return on investment is.
Using these tools, you can easily track how many doors were knocked on, how many people were spoken to, and how many were driven to an early voting site. That’s why any firm you hire for GOTV canvasing must be measured. When hiring a GOTV canvassing firm, you should be sure they are complying with local and state laws and fully managing any necessary permitting.
The Lawn Chair Brigade
In states where campaign volunteers are allowed to have a presence near the polling location, there often develops a “lawn chair brigade.” This brigade includes a group of campaign “volunteers,” often paid but sometimes not, who sit in lawn chairs around polling places and listen to talk radio on Election Day. Every once in a while this group may greet a voter they know or yell at somebody they don’t like.
I understand the idea of getting folks in the community to greet their neighbors and persuade them at the polls. Unfortunately, in many places this is just not what is actually happening. If you are in a state where you can get close to a polling place, make sure you use volunteers who have a good relationship with the community and ones who are trained beforehand. Phone calls and canvasing are likely a better investment, but if the option is available to you, using polling place volunteers can be useful, if done correctly.
The Honk and Wave
It’s GOTV time and someone in the campaign insists the candidate spend five hours waving at traffic. This may cause an accident but “folks love the honk and wave.” And hey, voters won’t get angry about a couple of fender benders.
The honk and wave is finally being phased out by most modern campaigns, but there are some holdovers. There are countless news stories about accidents caused by the honk and wave. Many more stories have gone unreported. The bottom line here is that the honk and wave is not a measurable exercise and there are many better uses of the candidate’s time. Door knocking and phone calls, while tedious at times, are incredibly measurable and generally more effective tactics.
GOTV Slash and Burn
It’s time for GOTV and your field director has set up seven canvases around your district. She has the people and the lit but has run out time for canvass training. So she sends the canvassers out with literature and says, “Go knock on some doors” and “You know what to do.” Inevitably one of these volunteers gets into an argument at a door. Without knowing they shouldn’t, another puts some of your campaign’s lit in a mailbox.
Training volunteers is key but in a rush to do “something” during GOTV, campaigns often send canvassers out into the field without proper preparation and training. Campaigns need to plan for what happens if they have more people than they need or if everyone shows up at once. If you have a plan, these issues are easy to solve. Without a plan, you could have your best volunteers be underutilized and you could lose them when you need them most.
So what approach should you take? As with any technology, GOTV is getting better all the time as long as we adapt to new approaches. Below are a few of these techniques that can help maximize your GOTV program.
Think Measurable and Scalable Tactics
This is what separates good GOTV campaigns from bad. You need to try to have measureable results for everything you do during GOTV. A well-run GOTV operation has real, measurable components, such as the number of doors knocked, number of phone calls made, and the number of cable TV spots up during early vote. For mail and canvass operations pulling control groups is another useful way to judge success. Making sure your team is accountable for goals will help you measure success and optimize the best performing tactics in your GOTV program.
Social Pressure
In a low-turnout election, using positive reinforcement to remind voters they have voted in the past and they should turnout again is an important step forward in the science of GOTV. With lots of research around social pressure messaging and its effectiveness, it is a useful tool to be incorporated into your GOTV communication program.
A Modern Canvass Operation
Mobile has continued to become a must for politics, and that includes an ever-expanding set of options for canvassing. Using mobile devices to track canvass crews and input data in real-time has almost become the norm. With multiple products available, the ability to manage and track canvassers makes GOTV easier and more accountable than ever before.
Whether you are building an in-house canvass operation or hiring a canvassing firm, you can now have a fully measured operation where you know how many people knocked on doors, how long they were out for and how many total doors they knocked on.
SMS
Text messaging and SMS has been used by organizations for turnout and mobilization for years and the simplicity and ease of use makes it an effective technology for GOTV. SMS can be used to communicate with and move core supporters to action, as long as you are collecting opt-in cellphone numbers from the very beginning of your campaign.
Mobile Geofencing
Mobile geofencing is a great potential GOTV tactic, with the ability to identify a geographic location and serve ads to phones in that location. You can even track phones once they leave the set location. This is an ideal technology to use to target worksites and early voting sites. Facebook is also a great tool to mobilize volunteers and engage your base. It continues to be a hallmark technology for helping recruit volunteers and canvassers.
Digital Ads
Using digital ads for turnout is another good option for campaigns and groups. IP and cookie targeting allows you to precisely target potential voters and make digital ads all that more effective.
Phones
Lastly, don’t forget phone calls. While seemingly low tech, click-to-call digital ads, pledge-to-vote phone programs using recorded pledges from voters, and the predictive dialer have made phone programs more tech savvy and effective.
Joe Fuld is President of The Campaign Workshop, a political and advocacy agency that provides strategy, digital advertising and direct mail to nonprofit and political clients.