It’s another Saturday, so for those who tune in, welcome to a diary discussing the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic Campaign. If you’ve missed out, you can catch up anytime: Just visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide. Every week I try to tackle issues I’ve been asked about, and with the help of other campaign workers and notes, we tackle subjects about how to improve and build better campaigns.
On most weeks, I try to cover wide issues that impact campaigns, to provide casual followers a way to see how campaigns work and how we can make them better. Every few months, I respond to email or private messages about what issue you, followers of this series, want to see covered. This week, we’re looking into how to train your door-knocking efforts.
Before we get going into what provides for training a good canvass, there are some real basics to get out of the way. On a good day, your door-knocking effort will have a 20% response rate. That is, one in five doors you knock on will have someone home who opens the door for your canvassing efforts. And that is A-OK. Setting realistic expectations of your door-knocking effort during training makes people feel as though their results are normal and okay.
Ready to look at how to train your canvass? Let’s go.
This subject was part of the initial run of Nuts & Bolts here on Daily Kos, and you can read through a lot of what makes for a good canvass itself in an entry from 2016. Those guidelines for how to make a canvass itself successful still matter.
If you are wanting to know how to canvass, I’d definitely recommend reading through it. Knowing what a good canvassing effort looks like and what makes for a good canvass doesn’t, however, explain what makes for a good way to train that canvass.
Focus on quality, not speed
In a meeting in Washington, D.C., a few years ago, executive directors huddled and spoke about their door-knocking efforts. After an hour or so, the conversation of door-knocking efforts began, and a debate of one-upmanship began. “I can train a canvass in five minutes,” “I can do it faster than that.” The desire for quickly training door-knocking efforts is often used as a metric to evaluate how good the trainer is, and, after all, “there is such a high turnover” of individuals willing to do the work, that the faster you can get through the training, the better, right?
Wrong. Advocacy organizations, unions and even party elements know that the more doors someone knocks, the more comfortable they are with the process. Someone willing to knock on doors throughout an election cycle, or in multiple election cycles will be comfortable at the door and better represent your candidate.
In many states, exceptional volunteers who commit significant effort over a year or multiple campaign cycles receive acknowledgment and even awards for their effort. Training that focuses on “train them quickly” can leave people feeling unprepared and pushed out onto the street. At the same time, training that goes on too long can be boring, monotonous, and drive people away. How do you find the right balance?
Part of making sure that your canvass training doesn’t go on too long is to hold all questions that your canvassers may have to the end of any presentation. Most of the questions will be answered as you explain your door-knocking efforts that prioritize the elements that make for a good canvass.
You will often run into two groups of individuals willing to knock on doors for you. This will be divided into individuals really familiar with mobile canvassing tools, like VoteBuilder, Organizer, or any other tool, and individuals who have never used data entry tools, and may be confused or uninterested in digital tools.
That’s okay! By offering people a separate chance to learn “how the tool works” if you are using a digital tool, or, depending on the willingness of the campaign, providing paper canvassing options for some of your canvass.
If you break your training down into pieces, offering some who need it “how to use the tools” you can lower your time with the main group and still provide others the time they need to learn how to be effective.
Don’t keep a stopwatch plan for your training, keep a plan about how to work with quality.
Do not send out untrained canvassers
Campaigns also have the option of saying well, it’s just too late. You showed up, we aren’t sure if you know anything, but how hard can it be to go knock a door, right? Just get out there and knock on some doors. Never done it before? Who cares. Just take some of our literature and go hit the road.
In the rush to get your door-knocking numbers up, sometimes just flinging people out there seems like a plan.
This, however, can lead to real problems that are hard to put back afterward. Here are just a few of the key reasons why at minimum a basic training of your efforts matters:
- Getting data from your canvass is important.
- Your door-knocking efforts represent the campaign. Bad efforts can hurt you.
- Improperly entered data can cause bad assumptions later.
- Knowing who is canvassing for you and being able to assess their results can help in long-term decision-making.
In other words—as easy as it is to just say “we are desperate, just go out there randomly, here is a walk sheet,” make sure someone can at least walk them through the basics of how to represent your campaign at the door.
Next week on Nuts & Bolts: The DNC Meets in Pittsburgh, PA