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Over the last few years, Call-From-Home programs have become popular for presidential and large statewide campaigns because they allow volunteers to help their favorite candidates without having to drive to a campaign office. Today, this same technology and convenience is available to campaigns on a tighter budget thanks to Voter Gravity.

To start a call-from-home program based on your Voter Gravity account, there’s just a few quick steps to get going:

1. Add your volunteers

If someone is going to be making calls for your campaign, they’ll first need to be a user. In the Portal, go to Manage > Team and drop them in there. If they’ll only be making phone calls for you, you can give them the role “Phone Bank” but if they’ll be canvassing as well, you’ll want to go ahead and add them to the “Volunteer” role.

2. Create your lists

Have you ever had problems getting different databases to talk to each other? Many campaigns run into problems with contact information or documents on only one platform or device and not another. In a fast-moving campaign environment, this can be a train wreck.

On top of that, it makes information significantly harder to find as you have to check in multiple places for it. For the same reasons, data tends to get lost or misplaced. One consolidated, integrated information center where all data is located — that can be accessed by anyone who needs it anywhere, anytime — is critical to leverage data to win elections.

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In the political world, more and more people are talking about the idea of data tags. These tags are little pieces of information that fill out what you know about a person. One tag might be age. One might be party affiliation. Another might be most important issue facing the United States today, etc. These little bits of information, when analyzed and utilized effectively, can lend extreme power to a campaign.

This, however, begs the question: What is required to effectively utilize a data tagging system? There are many ways to effectively utilize data tags, but they all are based on one overarching principle. That principle is standardization. You must have a standardized tag that means one thing.

If you want to use any tagging system effectively, your primary focus should be standardization.  This is because the primary purpose for data tagging is so you can easily categorize groups of individuals at a glance. Consider this example: You want to find out how many people in your constituency are primarily concerned with taxes. Naturally, since you have data tags on your voters, you search for the tag “taxes.”  However, people entering the data have used all kinds of different tags for the issue of taxes.  Some have used “lower taxes,” “small business tax breaks,” or just “tax breaks.”  You are now either missing significant portions of your constituency, or you are being inefficient by having to search four different terms.

Having said this, there is nothing wrong with the tag, “lower taxes,” for example. Think of your tagging system as a very narrow search term. Will you ever want to send this person a mailer about what you plan to do with taxes generally? Then use the tag “taxes.”  Do you want to send this person information about how you are specifically going to lighten taxes on small businesses? Use “small business tax breaks” also. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t have more than one tag about an individual topic, but make sure that you cover all your bases.

Think of data tags like hashtags on Twitter. You can put multiple hashtags in one tweet about a single topic. All that means is that your tweet will turn up in a few different searches. But if you want to search for all the tweets regarding a particular conference, for example, wouldn’t it be nice if that conference had one standard hashtag? No one searches all four random hashtags that people come up with for events. Standardization is key to any tagging system.

Voter Gravity can do many things to help improve your understanding of what’s happening on your campaign at any given time. Here are a few of the things that you can watch in real time as the results come in from the field:

1: Doors Knocked

You can watch the number of doors that your ground game is knocking, as they come in. This allows you to keep track of how productive your volunteers are being and if they are moving faster or slower than anticipated. It can also help you know whether you will need to make more walklists for your volunteers without requiring them to contact you.

2: Supporters

This allows you to view exactly where you are in relationship to your overall campaign goal at any given time. It also gives you your conversion rate, enabling you to set accurate goals.

3: Surveys Completed

This is important. Not only does this inform you as to the general effectiveness of your volunteers and the reach of your survey, but it also indicates how many data points had been collected allowing for targeted messaging campaigns.

4: Survey Snapshot

This is a pie graph that shows you in real time the basic results of the main question to the survey of your choice. You can know at a glance which issues are most important to voters for example, by simply looking at you dashboard. This is an easy way to keep a hand on the main data points your campaign is focusing on.

5: Track Your Top Volunteers

Finally, you can follow your top volunteers as they work. Look at all the stats available on the dashboard for each individual volunteer and see who is being more effective. Then find out why. This feature also allows you to see if a particular area in your precinct is being particularly responsive on a particular day, giving you the option to redeploy volunteers there to capitalize on that.

Like any tech startup, we love getting user feedback. And from what we’ve heard over the past few months, one thing keeps coming up — how can campaigns bring all of their data together in one place?
 
That’s the question we start off with every morning, and our (only slightly unhealthy) obsession with solving that problem has led us to release several new features in Voter Gravity over the past few days. Take a look at some of the powerful new options available to users today to integrate data, persuade voters, and win elections:

Contact-to-Voter Matching

Last fall we released our Contacts module, letting campaigns manage donors and non-voter supporters in our system, and became the first app in politics to integrate with Zapier, bringing users access to hundreds of web apps.
 
Today, we’re excited to bring you the ability to connect your contacts with their voter record. Now you can bring together your web signups and match them up with voter data, creating rich profiles of the voters you want to reach most.
 
In the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out even more ways to search, segment, filter, and define target audiences across both their contact and voter records. This makes Voter Gravity the most integrated data management platform available for conservatives, and we’re excited to see how you will use these tools to make an impact.

Append Voter Data
 
We’re always happy to import data for our users and match tags to the voter file, but campaigns can’t always wait for an engineer to prepare a custom upload. They need their data in NOW. 
 
So we’ve built a tool to allow you to do just that. With the new Data Import feature, you can upload your own files, match them to the voter file, and then tag the matched voters. You can also add phone numbers, email addresses, and notes at anytime, right from Voter Gravity.

New Phone System
 
You asked for more robust options in the phone bank, and we’ve delivered. In April we released a series of updates to our Phone Bank Module, bringing you:

• A better headset calling option
• Improved dial in option, so you now stay connected to the system between calls
• Leave pre-recorded voicemail messages
• More robust admin options

A Note on Data
 
As we all know, voter data is messy. But we do our best to wrangle that data into a usable format so you can better build relationships with voters. Toward that end, we have partnered with several data providers across the center-right to be sure the data available in Voter Gravity is the best, most accurate information available. This is an on-going process and we will continue to work at it. Our ultimate goal is to make data accessible to campaigns on the ground, and we are working with some awesome, brilliant data providers to make that possible.

1. Clearly define the purpose of your survey.

First rule of order is to know what it is you are trying to discover before you build your survey. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to know or communicate in your survey, then it is impossible for you to get the results you want. After all, you don’t get what you don’t ask for, and you can’t give what you don’t have. The more clear your purpose, the better.

2. Keep the survey short and focused.

Five minutes, they said. Won’t take long at all, they said. We all know that there are very few things more irritating than excessively long surveys that we don’t have time for. Don’t perpetuate this evil. Surveys should take LITERALLY 2-5 minutes. If you can’t get the information you want in that time, the data you’re trying to collect is too complicated, and you aren’t going to be winning any favors with the voters you are contacting.

3. Keep the questions simple.

Use a series of simple questions to arrive at the destination you want to. Complex and long winded questions can be confusing to the respondent. With so little commitment for the respondent to finish, you want to make filling out your survey as simple, and enjoyable, an experience as it can be.

4. Use closed-ended questions whenever possible.

Closed-ended questions help to simplify things for your respondents. Having closed-ended questions force the answers to be concise and direct. While they may seem to cause issues to be oversimplified for the respondent, it makes their answering process easier, and quicker, also allowing for conveniently quantifiable data afterwards.

5. Pre-test your survey.

As the famous proverb says, “If you want to know what water is, don’t ask the fish.” It is always a good idea to run your survey by several uninvolved respondents before full use. You can’t assume that the respondents will have any idea where you or this survey is coming from. It has to be understandable to someone who has never given a first thought to the issues it is dealing with. On the flip side, you are so immersed in your topic that you don’t even realize that some things are just not common knowledge. A little outside perspective can do wonders.

Every week we speak with dozens of candidates and potential clients who are addicted to paper. A typical paper addict is either in denial that they have a problem, or acknowledge the problem and have been unable to remove this terrible addiction from their lives. The Republican paper addiction applies to walk lists for door to door efforts, phone lists for phone calls and even personnel lists.

Side effects of this terrible affliction include: loss of data, unnecessary expenditure of campaign funds, countless lost hours spent on data entry, a lack of understanding on key issues and in many cases – loss of volunteers.

5 signs you or a friend may be a paper addict:

1. Preferred status with your local Office Depot or office supply store means you’re definitely wasting money – proof of any paper addiction.

• Office supply stores are usually where paper addicts go to get their fix and stock up an various paraphernalia associated with paper addiction
• Only paper addicts continue to spend money on these items when a paperless solution exists
• If unsure of status with Office Depot, note the look in the manager’s eye when you enter the store. If greeted with “Welcome back (your first name here)” – you may have a problem.

2. Bags under eyes, morning thirst coffee wont quench and general malaise in campaign meetings.

• These symptoms indicate you’ve been up all night entering data because your campaign does not have a paperless voter contact solution.

3. Busywork side effect: Knowing how many surveys you’ve keyed or scanned into a computer, but having no idea how voters feel about any issue or your candidate.

• This is what happens when the task consumes your time, leaving little or no time for analysis of the work

4. Regular “dumbfoundness” – this is the moment when you can’t answer questions like:

• What is our best issue with voters?
• How many supporters have we identified with our field program?
• How close are we to our vote goal?
• How many voters have we taken off our target mail list because they don’t support us?
• What is our top issue with under 40 voters?
• What do millienials think about our candidate?

5. Expert in begging when volunteers and staff leave because of burnout and disorganization.

• While an extreme symptom of Republican paper addiction, this happens more often than most addicts admit
• In this scenario, people under 30 will not touch the campaign and if they do – chances are high they will leave after great stress and advise all friends to stay out of Republican politics because its “stuck in the 1980’s.”

The good news is – paper addiction is treatable.

At Voter Gravity, we spend every waking moment treating as many Republicans as possible who suffer from a paper addiction. Voter Gravity saves campaigns money by eliminating hard supply and personnel costs, in addition to facilitating more effective targeting and messaging.

Through a mobile application and integrated phone system that take in real time data, we eliminate paper, ink and manual data entry completely. With this real time information, you will save money immediately and make better decisions on your mail and media buys because you will know exactly what voters need to hear, the moment they tell you.

You can overcome this disease. The Dems did it, and if they can do it – goodness knows, anyone can do it.

Republican paper addiction treatment plans through a Voter Gravity subscription start at just $99/month. Set up your consultation today.

I was door knocking for a campaign one day and I finished all addresses in this one neighborhood. The walk list then indicated that I had several more addresses in a neighborhood to the north, just on the other side of a major highway. So I crossed the road and finished the walk list only to discover that my next list had me right back in the same neighborhood where I was before I had crossed.

Multiple lists and multiple crossings later (multiple exasperated exclamations as well), I realized what was going on. These walk lists were all oriented vertically (i.e. north, south) and were therefore grabbing addresses based on proximity. It didn’t take into account the fact that these were two completely different neighborhoods.

The walk lists were created based on some system or algorithm that made sense spatially, but made absolutely no sense from a practical, efficiency standpoint. I know that my experience was not a blue moon event. Based on my work with various different campaigns, and talking with multiple volunteers, this sort of inefficiency is not uncommon.

When you create a walk list with Voter Gravity, you literally look at a map and draw a circle around the houses you want in any given walk list. As an intelligent, experienced individual, you can evaluate each situation and decide on the best break up of a neighborhood. You can guarantee that the walk lists work well together, moving seamlessly between each other with the least amount of backtracking or unnecessary delays possible. Map-based walk list creation will save you, your staff, and your volunteers significant amounts of time as you work in the field, making you a more efficient and productive campaign. This is the kind of efficiency required for victory.

This kind of walk list creation is so easy it only takes a couple of minutes. (And I really mean a couple of minutes, not one of these, “Let me put you on hold for a couple of minutes” uses of the phrase.) Here are the 6 basic steps required to create the kind of walk lists that you have been wanting.

1. After logging into the Voter Gravity portal, go to Walklists > Create.

2. Next, you will see three selection boxes. Select the county, city, and precinct you wish to create walk lists for and click ‘Submit.’

3. Narrow down your walk list based on specific criteria such as election history, party affiliation, age, gender, and tags. These categories are to the side of the window, and you can use as many or as few as you would like, giving you the ability to target each list.

4. Once you have filtered your walklist, you’ll then want to select an export option. This is towards the bottom of the sidebar under the “Step 3” heading. Here you can choose to export to walk list or to file. Selecting either will enable you to then draw a polygon around the households on the map you wish to include in your walk list.

Start with the logical place on the map where a canvasser would start. This could be a convenient parking place, like a park or church, the entrance to a subdivision, or a major intersection. Then, create your first walklist there.

Next, create another walklist in immediate proximity to the first list. Move through the precinct creating walklist that are close to each other, just as a canvasser would.

By creating your walk lists in this order, the individual lists flow together more smoothly and just become natural checkpoints for a canvasser as they move through a precinct.

5. After you have selected which households you wish to target, you then need to name and save your walk lists.

6. Clicking ‘Save’ will allow you to choose whether or not to ‘Export and draw more walk lists’ or Export and optimize walk list.’ If you choose to draw more walk lists, you can continue filtering walk lists based on the first 5 steps above. If you decide to optimize your walk lists, you’ll then be taken to the Optimize screen. The Optimize screen allows you to manipulate the specific order in the list each address will appear, making certain that you have the most efficient route.

At Voter Gravity we’re all about making campaigns faster and more efficient. Using technology, we’re always looking for new ways to streamline campaign management and operation. We’re excited about our volunteer tracking system which allows campaigns to keep track of metrics for each volunteer. Here’s how it works:

Each volunteer is given a unique log in. When tasks, such as walk lists and call lists, they get an email, letting them know that they have been assigned tasks. They can then go to voter.mobi and log in using their personal username. When they complete their tasks, the data is uploaded into the database, which then keeps track of all information uploaded from a unique user.

With this system in place, campaigns can maximize a volunteer’s time. View how regularly they turn in results and adjust their tasks accordingly. If one of your volunteers is very efficient on phones, but not at going door-to-door, you know what to do next.

In addition to data on your volunteers, tracking their activities gives you insight into the responsive and unresponsive areas in your district.  Let’s say, for example, that you have a volunteer that consistently turned in good results, but on this particular day he/she was working in a new region and turned in very poor results. This probably is possibly not an indicator of the quality of the volunteers work, but of a less responsive area, or a bad time of day, etc.

We love the ability to do all of this in real time. If you see that a particular volunteer is not having any success making contacts in a particular area, you can change them to a location where another volunteer is having greater success. You can also view when volunteers are beginning to run low on lists, and assign or create more for them before they run out. This kind of real time control places the efficiency of campaign operations on a whole new level.

Good luck!