Dennis Peterson
Member
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2007
- Messages
- 47
Why aren't our canvassing and phonebanking getting us the votes?
Read these two links:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_and_paul_the_kings_of_the_web_election.php
http://techpresident.com/blog/entry/21119/is_the_obama_campaign_a_model_for_online_politics
There are commercially-available databases, built up from data on magazine subscriptions, warranty cards, supermarket purchases, etc etc. They break populations into demographic and cultural groups. From there, they can predict peoples' attitudes, based on their group.
The Obama campaign (and probably others) bought the databases and used them for targeted marketing. They had tailored messages for different groups. Depending on their data, they would phone, or send mail, or send someone knocking. For their supporter database, they knew who was strong, who was weak, and they followed up.
By contrast, what did we have? My meetup got a walking list from the campaign, which was just Republican voters. Free public information. They gave us a neighborhood to walk that basically wasn't walkable - it was a bit rural, houses were far apart, dogs were running loose everywhere. And a lot of these people were diehard Bush supporters. How many independents and former democrats do we have in our ranks?
After that, we picked our own neighborhoods. We picked dense upscale areas that had friendly people. But now we had no information at all. We didn't even know who was a registered voter...but we still got better results than that first time.
It's probably too late now, and hindsight is 20/20. If there's still time, or for next time...buy the databases, poll to see who we do well with, and give lists of voters to volunteers, grouped according to the database, with targeted scripts for that particular group. We shouldn't have phone lists with no idea who's on the other end. We shouldn't have to argue on forums about who we should target. The campaign should figure that out empirically. If nobody on staff has those kind of skills, hire somebody. Those guys charge a lot of money but we've got it and they're worth it.
Read these two links:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_and_paul_the_kings_of_the_web_election.php
http://techpresident.com/blog/entry/21119/is_the_obama_campaign_a_model_for_online_politics
There are commercially-available databases, built up from data on magazine subscriptions, warranty cards, supermarket purchases, etc etc. They break populations into demographic and cultural groups. From there, they can predict peoples' attitudes, based on their group.
The Obama campaign (and probably others) bought the databases and used them for targeted marketing. They had tailored messages for different groups. Depending on their data, they would phone, or send mail, or send someone knocking. For their supporter database, they knew who was strong, who was weak, and they followed up.
By contrast, what did we have? My meetup got a walking list from the campaign, which was just Republican voters. Free public information. They gave us a neighborhood to walk that basically wasn't walkable - it was a bit rural, houses were far apart, dogs were running loose everywhere. And a lot of these people were diehard Bush supporters. How many independents and former democrats do we have in our ranks?
After that, we picked our own neighborhoods. We picked dense upscale areas that had friendly people. But now we had no information at all. We didn't even know who was a registered voter...but we still got better results than that first time.
It's probably too late now, and hindsight is 20/20. If there's still time, or for next time...buy the databases, poll to see who we do well with, and give lists of voters to volunteers, grouped according to the database, with targeted scripts for that particular group. We shouldn't have phone lists with no idea who's on the other end. We shouldn't have to argue on forums about who we should target. The campaign should figure that out empirically. If nobody on staff has those kind of skills, hire somebody. Those guys charge a lot of money but we've got it and they're worth it.