How to Increase Voter Turnout with Campaign Phone Calls
Identifying the most effective campaign strategies to use in local elections is sometimes a crap shoot, since a lot of techniques are very difficult to research and assign a success level.
Increasing voter turnout with phone calls is one of these tough-to-quantify tactics: while we know it works, there a lot of different ways to make campaign calls that could result in different levels of success. What should you say to the voters? How long should you keep them on the phone? Which voters should you call, and how many times should you call them?
Sometimes it seems like every veteran political campaign consultant and manager has a different opinion about the psychology of getting out the vote with phone calls, and it can be tough for new candidates to settle on a single strategy.
That’s why I love seeing scientific, quantified data about exactly what works: like this interesting political campaign study mentioned on the Research Digest Blog.
After targeting more than a hundred thousand voters in Pennsylvania, two psychologists found that turnout increased significantly if the voters were asked to tell the caller exactly what date and time they planned to go to the polls.
There were more great observations from the study that I’ll let you read about yourself. It offers some really great insight into how a political candidate can increase election turnout by slightly modifying a commonly-used campaign strategy.
Hat tip to Delaware Liberal for bringing our attention to this useful study.
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