63 Magazine - Issue 4

Here are the best practices he shared that
you can apply right now.
Recruit volunteers who speak the
native language of your voters.
Be human.
Train your volunteers.
“Having your volunteer make contact with
a voter and be likeable and form as much
of a connection as they can (in the context
of an awkward conversation) is going to
be more mobilizing than any other social
psychological trick you can employ.”
Take the time to thoughtfully train each
of your volunteer leaders and make sure
they take the time to train their volunteers.
Remind volunteers to speak naturally, to take
small pauses, and to adapt the script to their
comfortable language. The most important
thing you can do to increase turnout is to
have high quality callers and door-knockers;
that starts with recruiting and training
neighbors to talk to their neighbors.
Trust your targeting:
focus only on turnout.
When you have a conversation with a voter,
you should ask that person to do only one
thing. You can either ask them to vote a
certain way or you can ask them to turn out
and vote. If you layer on requests, you often
undermine your ability to mobilize. Trust
that your targeting is accurate and don’t clog
up your conversation with multiple asks.
Turnout efforts should work largely the same
no matter what neighborhood you’re in or
who you’re talking to. The one exception to
this rule is language. If you have turf where
the language spoken in the home is Spanish,
ideally the turnout conversation would also
be in Spanish.
So as you recruit volunteers in your turf,
remember this and do your best to match
bilingual speakers with voters who would
benefit from a phone call in their native
language.
Hold people accountable
by thanking them for their
previous votes.
Social accountability, showing voters that
someone will know if they are voting, is an
effective way to create pressure for voters
to show up to the polls. But you can do this
without being rude or intrusive. Instead
of shaming the voter, thank the person for
voting in the past, for registering to vote,
and for taking their civic duty seriously.
Both will hold the voter accountable and
will encourage them to vote, but showing
gratitude will make the conversation kinder,
leaving the voter feeling better about voting.