GOTV - Part 9 - Micro-Volunteers

by: Grebner

Tue Jan 04, 2011 at 00:37:44 AM EST

Money and volunteers are the two critical resources in running GOTV, and it's hard to say which is squandered more.

People who manage volunteers for a living know the rules for nurturing their commitment over the long haul:

• Let them feel their time is appreciated and efficiently utilized.  Don't tell them to "hurry up and wait".
• For each individual, try to assign them work which they will find comfortable and familiar.  Don't expect them to go into strange surroundings and do something outside their previous experience - especially not alone.
• Show you care about their comfort and convenience.  You don't have to spend a fortune, but free adjacent parking, coffee, padded chairs, and protection from bad acoustics make a big difference.
• Try to make everything a group activity, shared by people who can see they have something in common, whether that's pre-existing friendship, shared values, or just demographic similarity.
• Give them specific, timely, feedback, so they know what difference was due to their effort.  Don't have their experience end with them simply leaving the site and never hearing from you again.

The most effective volunteer activity would take place at the dining room table, or at a neighbor's front door, or during a cellphone conversation with a daughter who's away at college.  Our files contain 500,000 Democrats (or D-leaning) primary voters who should be approached about such "micro-volunteer" opportunities in their immediate surroundings.  Our goal should be to recruit 100,000 of them to help us.

That sounds like an insane target, until you think how little we'd ask.  We would generally ask each of them to look after one or two specifically identified weak Democratic voters - never more than three.  Some of these weak voters can be spotted in our files, while others would be identified with the help of each micro-volunteer.  From our databases, we can see who has previously failed to vote in even-year elections, or has recently moved, or falls into demographic groups with shaky participation (single, young, renters, low-education, et cetera).  We can spot household members and neighbors of the micro-volunteer, but we need their help mainly to identify former household members such as college-age kids or elderly parents.

For each of these weak voters, we need to identify a few steps that need to be taken to get them to vote.  Do they need to re-register at their new address?  Do they need an absentee ballot?  Could our micro-volunteer ask them pointblank whether they're willing to vote and then pick them up on election day to take them to the polls? In many cases, the GOTV effort will need to generate some crucial piece of paper or information:  a preprinted voter registration form with return envelope, confirmation that the AV application was received by the City Clerk and a ballot should have been received at the college address, and so on.  In other words, each micro-volunteer works hand-in-glove with the GOTV drive, not off on their own.

I'm proposing we recruit 100,000 people, compared to perhaps 5000 to 10,000 we normally mobilize.  But consider how little we're asking of our micro-volunteers, and how naturally it fits into their lives.  They already talk to their kids, elderly parents, and neighbors - in fact, they probably talk about politics with them.  All we're doing is sharpening the exchange in ways that are calculated to generate additional votes.  Most of the people we approach will probably agree, not just a few percent.  And once they agree, they'll discover we get back to them with highly-specific, easy-to-fulfill requests for their assistance.

We shouldn't wait until a few days before the election to identify the relationships we'll try to exploit - that work can be done during the summer or even earlier.  In general, our micro-volunteers will be fairly stable (primary voters are generally homeowners and fewer than 10% move each year) while our GOTV targets will tend to be more mobile - in fact their transiency is one of the causes of their low turnout.  As a result, much of our effort will be devoted to keeping track of the targets, perhaps re-registering them, introducing them to their new polling places and so on.  But our relationship with the micro-volunteers should ideally be almost permanent; from one election cycle to the next, we should work with them to update their GOTV assignment, dropping one target and adding another as people turn 18, move away, become self-sufficient, or die.

Finally, as I've explained previously, after each election we should recognize and evaluate the success of each of our micro-volunteers, with a personalized tally of what they promised to do and what actually happened.  Even when they fail - which will be common - they should be thanked for their effort, admitting that 50% of entire the adult population also failed to vote.  We ought also to thank or (mildly) scold the GOTV targets as well.