As you consider which outreach tactics to use, you are going need to weigh the benefits between (1) the cost to use the tactic, (2) how likely are you going to be to reach someone and (3) what will be the treatment effect of the tactic in relation to the universe. It is also useful to think about what contact methods are best for what people. For example, young people are a lot more likely to respond to a text than a phone call. Different contact methods can also be useful for different types of outreach. Its hard to have long persuasion conversations over text because voters tend not to read past the first few sentences of a text message. But texting can be very useful to schedule volunteers, remind people to vote on election day, or ask if they have turned in a ballot.

<aside> 💡 Treatment effect: the average impact of a treatment. In the case of campaigns, the treatment can be something like a persuasion message or a turnout message.

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🚪 Knocking Doors

Knocking doors as a method to connect with voters has been the hallmark of campaigns for at least a generation or two. There are some real pros to door knocking - you meet your voters where they are and it can yield higher contact rates (and treatment effects) than other methods. However, as seen in 2020, sometimes door knocking is not an option.

The treatment effect used by Deck by universe for doors is as follows:

*To get to this treatment effect we have reviewed resources from a variety of groups to create this assumption. It might be higher or lower in your district but this should be a good starting point for your campaign.

Another number to consider with doors is the contact rate. Contact rate can vary greatly between the day, time of day, neighborhood and universe. A standard contact rate assumption is 25%.

<aside> 💡 Contact rate: how many people can you expect to talk to? It is typically presented as a percent. For example a contact rate of 15% would mean for every 100 doors knocked you could expect to talk to 15 voters.

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Not all voters can be reached via door knocking. A few considerations when deciding if or how you want to decide on which voters to contact via doors:

• How rural or urban is the turf?
  • A rural turf can take 1+ hour for 10 doors depending on density of houses and road quality
  • A dense urban turf could translate into 25+ doors/hour
• What is your volunteer capacity?
  • Who will be knocking on the doors?
  • Are your volunteers able to get to turf and knock on doors?
• Are these groups of voters best contacted via doors?
• What has been the average contact in your district?

If you're wondering how you'll get started with your door knocking program, VoteBuilder, OpenField and other tools will be able to help!

📞 Calling