Last weekend a group of St. Louis Deanistas and I ambled on down to the local SEIU office to do Iowa phone canvassing from the heart of Gephardt's home turf.
Let me tell you...I have done phone canvassing before...though the difference between what I have done in the past and what I did last weekend was the difference between using an electric light to read by instead of sitting by a fire and squinting. The SEIU are some pretty savvy high-tech folks. I now know one reason why Dean worked so hard for their endorsement. They run an incredibly tight ship.
First off, there was no phone in front of any of us. Instead, we each sat in a little cubie with a computer screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and a headset. No dialing for us. The script was on the screen. We were just fed calls with live people on the other line.
And this is how it is supposed to work--and by golly it did for the most part: the phone list is entered into the main server, that server dials out on several lines continuously and listens for the response on the other end of the line. At this point the predictive calling software takes over and tries to figure out if the pick up is a human being based on the words and pauses it hears. If the response is "human" then the software sends the call to one of us in the cubbies to answer it. We get a beep in our ear, a name flashes onto the screen, and we need to answer ASAP. The whole point is to not waste any time; to make sure as many conversations happen as is (certainly more than humanly) possible.
Our phone list had about 2300 names. There were about a dozen of us. We ran through the entire list, yes, the entire list, twice over the course of three hours. Maybe the twelve of us talked to somewhere between 600-700 folks on the other end. If that means that we each answered around fifty calls, then out of that average I only had four non-human dial ups. Pretty darned good, if you ask me.
Of course, our script was right up on the screen and we typed (or clicked) our results right in as we were talking for the most part. It was cool, easy, and fun, since about ten to twenty seconds after hanging up, you would get another call.
And the kicker...well the kicker was that we were calling a list of folks who had been identified as Gephardt supporters...made sense since we were calling as Dean supporters from St. Louis...
I'd tell you the results, but they would send Guido after me. What I can say is that everyone who participated in calling was quite pumped at the end of three hours. Pumped up because I don't remember anyone saying that they had a terrible call and most of us had some nice chats with our neighbors up north. Pumped enough to do a flash mob prior to the Rams game. Perhaps it was because we reminded everyone who said they were supporting someone not Dean before getting off the phone that any of the candidates running was better than Bush.
Had several nice conversations. Iowans, you are, for the most part some incredibly polite and "good" people.
Now I need to go pack for the weekend of canvassing ahead of me. Wish me luck, shed some mojo on me, think warm thoughts.