The most effective means of both mobilizing pre-existing support and winning fence sitters is door-to-door canvassing. As a general rule or in 99% of cases this is true as supported by the best evidence we have and it is proved time and again. If you believe this is not the case, I’d love to learn your opinion on what the most effective tactic is.
Now that we have established this fact, let’s talk about why it has not received as much emphasis as it should for many campaigns – particularly for the last 60 years or so. First the misconceptions:
1.) It’s dirty. When you think about door-to-door, what do you think about? Most people think about vacuum salesmen getting their ‘foot-in-the-door’ or, more recently, gas utility or roofer salesmen. These are the type of people with fake smiles, and ways to break your ‘no’ into inviting them inside. A common sales tactic with this sort is to say they were ‘just in the area’ to make it seem a casual drop through and reduce the tension. Have a look at this for some tips. (in all honesty, there are some good tricks he speaks about, but it all has to do with hiding your true motive, which makes it unethical)
Political canvassing is a civic duty of the highest order. It, and similar activities, is the small effort that each of us can make to facilitate the continuance of democracy. I know this appears a hyperbole, but given time, if nobody cares to vote or become politically engaged (or just a clique do) the whole system denigrates and people complain that politician don’t represent them, so why should they bother – do you see the circular trap of this argument?
Elected officials and candidates respond to incentives. These incentives are most often, though not exclusively, tied to their perceived understanding of how they got to power. If they believe they were able to move their agenda forward because of large donors, then they will overly listen to these large donors. Volunteers on their campaign are more likely to get the ear of an elected official, than just the general public. Even the most upright and moral official is affected similarly – even if they are only, in their mind, listening, but not committing to anything. They are still affected.
2.) It takes a long time to coordinate. This is true, out of 50 volunteers in one campaign we would organize a walk, sending an email and following up with phone calls to connect with everyone – maybe 30 would make it out to our canvass days. Those sheets of paper the volunteers told us when they were available weren’t all collected in any meaningful fashion so we just guessed the best times to walk around evenings and week-ends. There are always those diehard volunteers you can count on – thank God for them.
Once the date is set, you need to get the walk-list prepared with maps attached. Those clipboards can be a headache to prepare and then when the volunteers finally get there you hand them out and can’t be quite sure who had what, or you take your time handing them out to the groups you’ve divided them up as – and hopefully you have enough drivers!
After finishing canvassing the teams get back together, usually finding each other after about 20 minutes walking back to the car where they started canvassing and drive back to the office. Then they drop off their clip-board with all sorts of awful scrawl on a few, to be inputted into the database whenever the database volunteer ends up making it in next.
3.) TV and Radio have much better coverage. This is also how consultants make money by taking a percentage of your TV or radio buy. The current system is biased towards these mediums, especially if you have the money to spend. There is no proof, however, that these mediums lead to conversion. Whereas door-to-door has a 1:14 conversion ratio, the best evidence we can find shows that TV increases turnout by only 0.5% in the area it is shown. If you are doing it right, this approach takes time doing audience research on several different commercials to know that you have the right message. People guess at the numbers, but it is incredibly inaccurate and the data is incredibly faulty. Check out this article here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1080247/the_myth_about_television_ratings_and.html.
