Worst. GOTV. Evah.

[yesthattom]

If Scotch Plains district 9 has sucky GOTV you can blame me. I was the driver, and Vicki and Veronica were the two sisters that I drove around. Unlike the NJDems training I had received on how to do effective GOTV, we were set up to do what has got to the be the least effective way to do GOTV in the planet.

When I went to the NJDems training a few weeks ago they had an excellent scheme:

• Visit each house on your list:
  • Knock on the door and ask if they’ve voted.
  • If they have then mark their name on the list.
  • Eventually the list will be used for phone-banking (the high-tech method would involve wireless PDAs feeding back to the phone bank system) to call people that haven’t voted yet.
  • If they haven’t voted, offer to drive them, feed them, etc. Whatever it takes to get them to the polls.
  • If they aren’t home, put a “door hanger” on the knob.
• Second pass:
  • When you are done, re-visit each house.
  • If the door hanger is gone, you know they are home and you can knock and ask them to vote.
  • Drive around until either everyone on your list has voted, or the polls have closed.

What the local Dem organization had us do was:

• Start so late it will be dark before you can finish the first pass.
• On the first pass, just put the door-hangers out.
• There is no second pass.
• Throw out the lists when done.

What were the people on the phone banks doing? They were calling with a script that was completely ineffective, but I was in no position to suggest what should be done instead. The script was something like, “Hi! I’m calling from your local Democratic HQ to find out if you’ve voted. Have you?” Who isn’t going to say “yes”?? Shit! They were so impressed that everyone was saying that they had voted. I wanted to scream, “No, you are getting a high rate of people that are smart enough to say ‘yes’ to end the conversation quickly.” A better script would be, “Hello! I’m taking a poll and would like to know whether or not you have voted today. Have you?” If they say “yes,” thank them. If they say, “no”, say, “Well I’m calling from the local Democratic HQ and I’d really like to see you vote. We can send a car to help you get to the poll or give you any other help you might need. How can we help you?”

Why do it the easy way instead of the effective way Well, my guess is that the effective way would be too difficult. Doesn’t this just SCREAM software development would fix the problem?

Remember in da book I have this chart like this:

Easy / Small impact (3)	Easy / Big impact (1)
Hard / Small impact (4)	Hard / Big impact (2)

Obviously you don’t want to do anything in (4). Duh. And anything in (1) you should do right away. But then the question becomes, give the choice between (2) and (3), which should you do first? Well, the answer is quite clear: you do the one with the big impact. It’s all about impact. Say it over and over with me: Impact, impact, impact, impact, impact, impact! Geeze! Jumping up and down screaming impact!

Now check out this chart:

The right thing, the wrong way. (3)	The right thing, the right way. (1)
The wrong thing, the wrong way. (4)	The wrong thing, the right way. (2)

You want to be in quadrant that is doing the right thing the right way. Right? And when that isn’t possible, hopefully you do the right thing the wrong way; at least you made a good effort but failed. I used to work at Lucent Technologies which was excellent at being in quadrant 4 with the occasional 2. Look at their stock price.

So how does this relate to the campaign I was working on? Well, we were small. Very small. If we couldn’t afford to do the right thing the right way, nor the big impact thing that requires a lot of work, what should our second option have been? I don’t know. Do nothing? That would suck.

However I do know that this is the kind of thing that could be solved at the federal level. The DNC keeps boasting about the database of voters and opinions that they’ve developed. If its really good, it needs to be accessible to the local campaigns. Local campaigns would “earn” access by doing the hard work to update the database, and in return be able to access it and software that could generate better GOTV walker packets, etc.

Comments

[composerjk.livejournal.com]

and I would be one of those people that just says "I don't answer surveys/polls nor accept unsolicited calls*. goodbye."

* except from friends, of course.

[xeger.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've had a great deal of fun coming up with different responses to unsolicited calls. One of my favourites remains "No, I'm afraid you can't talk to . They don't exist. Never call us again. Thank you!"

[marmota.livejournal.com]

sigh. Yep. I did some phone work for both the kerry campaign and for moveon, and I was impressed with neither. The Kerry folks had a script that they made everyone stick to... it was longwinded and dry enough that we got hung up on a lot. Moveon had a database glitch and had handed out identical number lists to who knows how many different phonebanks, so succeeded in annoying a lot of people on both sides of the phone. Once that was straightened out, the condensed version of their spiel had the same fatal reasoning flaw you mentioned; of course they'll say yes to end the conversation. A marginal improvement over banging my head against the wall, I suppose. Here's hoping we all wake up tomorrow morning in a democracy, not a dictatorship. :/