Bringing Polling to Local Campaigns

We’ve been very pleased lately with the value of information delivered by low-cost automated polls conducted for our clients engaged in local campaigns. People often think of polling as something that only big campaigns can do with expensive Washington D.C. consultants. In fact, an automated poll empowers even municipal campaigns to explore the issues that their voters care about, and to measure a candidate’s standing. Over the years, we have conducted polls using both live agents and recorded voices. Granted, for a long and complex interview, you must use live agents. However, we are getting very useful information and good participation rates with well-designed automated polls, and we’ve found we can ask as many as eight questions of voters in those calls. 

It’s human nature—people want to express their opinion and to be heard. All you have to do is make it easy for them. Write a script that is short and to the point; don’t go overboard apologizing or trying to be polite. We’ve found through testing various scripts that the most economical wording, while still maintaining basic respect for the voter, gets the greatest participation. 

Of course, the community, the issues, the timing, and the environment result in different degrees of enthusiasm by voters for any survey. But in general, calls to a group of voters will reach a person about one third of the time. Of those people, we typically see about one quarter responding to the first question and about one fifth staying through the seventh question. This gives a big enough sample to get meaningful information about the important issues of your campaign. 

Without going into the formulas used to calculate margin of error, let me say that we recommend starting with a target list of 10,000 phone numbers to end up with a sufficient sample size. If your area of interest includes more households, then we take a random sample. If it’s less, than we work with what we have. The resulting participation will give you a very good idea of where voters stand on the issues. 

We also use the call logs for another purpose—identifying supporters. The call logs are uploaded to the voter file to mark supportive households as well as those who favor the opponent. Individual household responses on issues can also influence future communication with that household. This bonus results as a byproduct of the polling activity. 

Finally, if there’s still anybody out there who questions the accuracy of automated polls relative to live polls, all you need to do is to check Public Policy Polling and Rasmussen’s polling results on the national stage. Their automated polls have been among the most accurate. If you want to go deep on this subject, I recommend a multi-part series of articles written by Nate Silver on nytimes.com:  The Uncanny Accuracy of Polling Averages*, beginning with Part I: Why You Can't Trust Your Gut: http://nyti.ms/An2Umz.