VOTER CONTACT METHODOLOGY
VOTER CONTACT METHODOLOGY
It is important to remember that you can often use different resources and different methods to accomplish the same objective. Suppose you decide that you need to persuade 10,000 voters to vote for you. One thousand reliable volunteers can go door to door tomorrow and persuade 10 voters each to vote for your candidate (no time, no money but lots of people). By yourself, you can personally talk to 10,000 voters, at 50 voters a day over the next 200 days (no money, no people but lots of time). Or you can contact all 10,000 tomorrow without any help by airing a great television commercial. It will cost you a lot of money (no people, no time but money).
These are extreme examples, but they illustrate how interchangeable the resources and the methods are. You need to first figure out what you want to accomplish and then figure out which of the many ways is best for you to achieve your objective. If one method does not seem possible, you can often find another method. This is why planning is absolutely necessary. It is the campaign that does not have a written plan which often finds that it cannot raise the money it needs, does not have the volunteers it needs and has squandered its time.
EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR VOTER CONTACT
Each type of voter contact can accomplish three things to varying degrees – persuade target voters, identify supporters and turn out your vote these varying degrees determine the effectiveness of your voter contact effort. It is important that a campaign choose methods that, when combined, accomplish all three of these tasks.
Now that you have a clear, concise and effective message, it is important to use that message to persuade your target group of voters that your candidate is the best choice. Voters need to know what your message is and they need to hear it many times for it to register with them. You must repeatedly communicate a persuasive message to people who will vote.
Finally, as the election period draws to a close, there comes a time when you can no longer persuade voters and your efforts should be spent on making sure that those people who support your candidate turnout to vote for your candidate.
In order to do this, you must have some way of identifying who supports you and who has been persuaded through your voter contact effort to support you. Well before Election Day you must have spent time identifying your supporters. It is also important to know how you will reach them in a very short period of time.
