Surveying the territory for your campaign
In an electoral campaign, territorial outreach is crucial to reach voters and persuade them to support your candidacy. One of the most common and effective tactics is canvassing. In this guide, we’ll show you how to plan your canvassing actions effectively.
Canvassing
Canvassing is an electoral campaign strategy that involves direct contact with voters, usually through door-to-door visits, conversations in public spaces, or phone calls. The goal is to inform voters about a candidate or a cause, present the ideas, persuade them to support that candidate or cause, and motivate them to vote.
Advantages
- Personal connection: Direct contact can create a personal connection between voters and the campaign, which can increase the likelihood that voters will support a candidate or a cause.
- Direct information: It allows the campaign to share information directly about a candidate or a cause, which can help counter misinformation or misunderstandings.
- Voter identification: It helps identify voters who support a candidate or a cause, which can be very useful for voter mobilization efforts on Election Day (remember to always get people’s contact information to provide updates on the campaign)
Disadvantages
- Resource-intensive: Canvassing can be costly and time-consuming, since it requires a lot of hands-on work.
- Negative reactions: Some voters may see canvassing as an invasion of their privacy, which can backfire.
- Variable effectiveness: The effectiveness of canvassing can vary depending on several factors, including the quality of the interaction and the broader political climate.
Tip: Make sure you have all volunteers participate in a training session presenting best practices and narratives for the approach beforehand (try to get someone who’s done it successfully before to facilitate).
Canvassing can be done at any point during an electoral campaign, but it’s especially effective during the voter mobilization phase, which usually takes place in the weeks and days leading up to Election Day. However, canvassing shouldn’t be carried out on Election Day itself in certain jurisdictions, due to laws that prohibit campaigning within a specific radius of polling stations.
Persuasion rate
Imagine you’re running in an election where your main campaign tactic is canvassing. You know you need 3,000 votes to win, and the campaign lasts 60 days. How many people do you need to contact to get elected? The answer depends on your persuasion rate.
The persuasion rate is the number of people you convince to vote for you when you talk to them. A persuasion rate of 40% means that if you talk to 10 people, 4 of them will vote for you.
There’s no simple way to calculate a persuasion rate. One straightforward method is to send your entire team out into the field for one week and ask them to record:
- how many people they contacted, and
- how many people reacted very positively or said they would vote for you.
At the end of the week, divide the number of positive responses by the total number of contacts. The result will be your persuasion rate.
Canvassing plan
To design your canvassing plan, you can start by assuming a low persuasion rate (10% or 20%) and then adjust it according to the reality as the campaign progresses. Let’s build a canvassing plan for our imaginary example.
If you need 3,000 votes to win and your persuasion rate is 20%, you can use a simple calculation to estimate your target number of contacts. That gives you a total of 15,000 required contacts (X = 3,000 * 100 / 20 = 15,000).
If we divide our contact target — 15,000 — by the 60 days of the campaign, we see that we need to contact 250 people per day in order to win.
This number, in turn, helps us calculate how many people we need doing canvassing on the streets (field organizers or volunteers). Let’s assume that each canvasser can talk to 6 people per hour. If the daily shift is 6 hours long, each canvasser will speak with 36 people per day (6 people × 6 hours). Since we need 250 daily contacts, we’ll need at least 7 canvassers working 6 hours every day (250 contacts divided by 36 contacts per canvasser).
Of course, these numbers will vary depending on weather conditions, energy levels, and campaign events, but they’re very useful for setting clear contact goals.
To recap, the steps to build a canvassing plan are:
First, calculate the number of contacts you need to win the election by multiplying the votes you need by 100 and dividing the result by your persuasion rate.
Second, define the length of the canvassing shifts and the number of contacts each canvasser can make per hour. Multiply these two numbers to get the total contacts per canvasser per shift.
Third, divide the number of daily contacts needed by the number of contacts per canvasser per shift to calculate the minimum number of canvassers required on the ground each day.
Call volunteers into action, starting with a briefing meeting where you should present this strategy and provide them with all assets needed to start.
Final notes
Canvassing is usually the most effective tactic for persuading people, but it also requires a significant logistical effort. In general, the fewer voters there are in an election, the more important canvassing becomes, because every single conversation can change the outcome. When there are many voters, social media and mass media tend to be a better tactical choice.
