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.

Our basic script framework (that has general applicability in fundraising and sales, too):
*Intro - Name and organization
*Engage – Make it relevant – hot issue
*Viability – Credible statement to show we can win
*Personalize – Why their action or inaction is pivotal
*Call to Action – This is called “The Ask” in sales.
*Logistics – Where, when, do they need a ride?
*Confirm- Repeat their commitment
*Close - Goodbye

This article titled Nudge the Vote is an overview of several techniques used to motivate voters.  

Impressive results have been demonstrated by communicating to voters that their voting history is public.  This article summarizes one such social pressure experiment in Michigan

The best book on the subject is the classic “ Get Out The Vote” by Donald Green and Alan Gerber, now in its second edition. 

Here are our tips that combine conclusions of these sources and others.  Use words like "now" and "last chance".  Use days of the week rather than month and date; that's how people think.  Get their commitment to vote and talk to them about the details.  How will they get there?  What time?  This visualization alone makes them more likely to vote, plus it uncovers any problems so you can solve them in advance.

To engage, demonstrate viability, and personalize:
*Ride the wave:  “Turnout is expected to be high in this important election.”
*Social pressure:  "Many in your neighborhood have already voted." 
*Emphasis on civic duty:  "The issues are too important this time; as an American you must vote in this election." 
*The power of their vote:  "Recent elections have been won or lost by as few as 30 votes; yours may make the difference."

Apply these concepts to your voter mobilization efforts to maximize their impact.

Our call center activities over the years have included both paid and volunteer workers, in-person and online, in both business and political endeavors.  Here are the scheduling tools and processes we have used, which have also been successfully applied to a variety of volunteer and shift work scheduling.

An awesome free tool is Doodle, which allows groups to be scheduled completely online.  This works when a group is seeking a mutually agreeable meeting time, as well as for scheduling large groups for planned activities.

A more feature-rich system, suitable for almost any shift scheduling for pools of volunteers or employees, is Shiftboard.  Their basic $50 monthly service is a fantastic way to manage and schedule a group of workers.

Set up your schedule in one of these systems, then distribute the invitation to volunteers far and wide through your website, email, and facebook.

Step 1 (apparently this process is in reverse chronological order) must be the calculation of how many person-hours are needed.  As a rule of thumb, assume 50% turnout for volunteers. 

Productivity varies widely depending on many factors, but for estimating purposes, think 20-30 dials per hour for a manual phone bank.  Canvassers can knock on 10-15 doors per hour, and a two-person yard sign team can install about 10 per hour.  If experience in your neighborhood or district is different, then, by all means, use your numbers.  Build an Excel worksheet to calculate the number of person-hours, shifts, etc.  Email us for examples from other projects.

The last month before an election is crunch time.  Use these tools to get the most impact from those dedicated volunteers working on your campaign.

Starting today, make sure you record everything you learn about people through event sign-in sheets, canvassing notes, phone banks, and automated polling.  Merge email lists, web sign-up and online donations data.  We recommend salesforce.com as a confidential and permanent place for candidates to keep and work with their data both during and between elections.  Service is offered free to qualified 501(c)(3) organizations, and there are low cost options for others.

As for the source of the data, there’s no one-size-fits-all that we can recommend.  We’ve researched the alternatives for our clients and would be happy to point you in the right direction.  Just give us a call and explain your situation.
1. We partner with certain Texas companies who provide customized voter files and lists for political campaigns.
2. We can get public data from the county, then process through post office and telephone databases to add current and usable addresses and phone numbers. 
3. We can combine local county data with a purchased voter list from one of the national vendors of voter files.
4. Texas Democrats—even running for non-partisan office—may use the Texas Democratic Party’s voter file for a very reasonable price.   txdemocrats.org/resources/van

The technical details are less important than the prioritization and commitment of your organization to building and maintaining this critical asset on an ongoing basis.  Make the collection and entry of data a priority during the campaign.  After Election Day, organize the data, keep it fresh, and use it to stay in touch.  Databases are one of the few things that actually get better with use!

In addition to outages, users risk having their online accounts hacked, too, and we all know that there is really no responsive human tech support in the cloud.   So, first go to facebook, Google, and the others and change your passwords to something different at each one and complicated with numbers and punctuation that no one will guess.  Then continue reading.

The basic strategy can be summed up as the 3-2-1 backup plan.  You should have three different copies of everything, in at least two different media formats, with one being off-site.  The American Society of Media Photographers provides in-depth resources on this subject. 

For users of web-based email such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo!, you must first enable IMAP in your online account.  Then install Windows Live Mail 2011, Thunderbird, or another email program on your computer.  Enter the recommended IMAP settings of your service provider in your email program, and be sure you set up intervals to sync automatically.  It will then copy every email and folder on your PC. 

Now let's make sure your precious pictures, music, videos, and documents are safe, too.  Get an account at mozy.com, and it will work completely in the background, copying everything in your Documents folders to Mozy servers.

The third copy of your data should be local on an external or network drive.  Use the free Microsoft program SyncToy.  Do not use backup programs that lump all the data into a proprietary backup file.  SyncToy will copy the files in their original form so you can see them and know that they have been copied.

The photos on your PC will flow through this overall backup process quite nicely.  But what about photos uploaded directly to facebook, flickr, or other services?   You can use their backup and export capabilities manually, or you can set up daily automatic backups of Gmail, Google Docs, facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and others through Backupify.

The important point to understand is that keeping everything in the cloud today is just as dangerous as it was 10 years ago when people had only one copy of their files on the PC.  The odds are against you.  Please act now.  If you have any specific questions, we'd be happy to answer them.

TRENDS.  Telephone town halls have become popular in the U.S. Congress among Representatives who want to keep in touch with the folks back home.

Congress Members Embrace Telephone Town Hall

HOW IT WORKS.  The number of target households ranges from 10,000 to 100,000.  When the meeting starts, auto-dialers call and invite voters to press 1 to join the meeting.  Participation is entirely voluntary.  Messages are played for answering machines.  From that point, the call works very much like talk radio.  Everyone listens to the program.  Those who want to participate can press 0 to reach a screener who puts them in queue to ask their question live.  Polls are conducted inviting participants to press 1-2-3 in response to a question; the results are tabulated real-time and appended to the individual data as well.  At the end of the call everyone is invited to leave a voicemail with their comments.

Explained:   How do you hold a "virtual" town hall meeting?

ISSUE ADVOCACY.  These calls can be used for various strategic purposes, including issue advocacy.  In this example, thousands of Idahoans participated in a telephone town hall led by Gov. Butch Otter and other advocates of school reform.

Statewide School Reform Discussion

EXPLAINING CHALLENGES.  Communicating budget cuts to constituents is a universal challenge these days.  In this call, two elected representatives discussed strategies for surviving the state's massive budget shortfall.

More deep cuts ahead, Fifth District legislators warn in telephone town hall

RURAL OUTREACH.  Rural districts are the perfect application for this technology, where the voters are spread out geographically and are impossible to visit in one week, much less one weekend.  This congresswoman in eastern South Dakota reached thousands of people in one call.

Tele-town hall links U.S. representative with 14,000 in S.D.

In all of these examples, large groups of people were reached instantly to talk.  It’s the next-best thing to being there, according to an old AT&T slogan.  And voters have given overwhelmingly high praise for the opportunity to be heard and to get answers.  Expect to see telephone town halls emerge as a common constituent outreach and voter contact approach.