Success Guide: Get Out the Vote
(6 min read)
You’ve done the hard work of identifying your supporters and making sure your message gets heard; now it’s time to make sure your voters get to the polls and show their support!
An effective Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort builds on all the work you’ve already done. During this time, you will need to:
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Identify voters who have already taken action so you can focus your efforts on those who have not yet voted
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Reach out to targeted supporters to remind them how important their vote is to you
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Provide your supporters with the information they need about the voting process
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Follow up with any supporters you have not been able to reach
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Assist voters with troubleshooting ballot issues
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Make sure you are using multiple channels to reach supporters (phone, leaflet, text, and so on)
Our Get Out the Vote tools are designed to help you with every step of the process. You can enable them to automatically filter out the voters who are finished voting and focus on the supporters you still need to reach in the final days and hours of your campaign. To make the most of your final efforts, you need to understand which tools to use and how they work together to help increase votes.
Focus on the right contacts
The first step in your process should be to make sure your lists and target audiences are focused on supporters who have not yet voted. You can use the Early Voting feature in My Voters to identify voters who have submitted their mail-in ballots or participated in early voting. This feature helps you filter out or flag anyone who has already voted when you create your target universe for your last-minute voter mobilization efforts.
Read an overview of Early Voting
If you are using SmartVAN, early vote data will automatically be added to My Voters via TargetSmart. Otherwise, you can upload the early vote data released by the Secretary of State or elections office in your district using Bulk Upload.
Read more on uploading Early Vote data
| Tip! |
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| You can ask Customer Support to add Exclude Anyone Who Has Early Voted as a default when you Create A List. This will automatically exclude all contacts who have already voted and make sure lists only include voters who still have not taken action. |
Driving voter turnout
Once you are able to narrow your lists to supporters who still have not voted, you should begin reaching out to them to remind them how important their vote is and to provide information about how to submit their ballot. You can give them details on how to request a mail-in ballot, where they can go to participate in early voting, the location of their local polling place for election day, and how they can check on the status of their mail-in or early vote ballot.
You can continue using the tools that you are probably already familiar with like MiniVAN and Virtual Phone Banks to reach your supporters, but you will want to make sure they are set up to help your volunteers during GOTV.
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If you are not already familiar with these tools, be sure to learn our best practices for using MiniVAN and Virtual Phone Banks.
Read more on best practices for using MiniVAN
Read our Success Guide for Virtual Phone Banks
Watch more about creating Virtual Phone Banks
Watch more about making Virtual Phone Bank calls
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Make sure that the searches you create for your target universes automatically exclude anyone who has already voted when you are using MiniVAN or Virtual Phone Banks.
Read more on early vote searching
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Create scripts for MiniVAN and your Virtual Phone Banks that stress the importance of voting and provides voting information like mail-in ballot instructions or voting locations. If you are using MiniVAN or Open Virtual Phone Bank, you can include branching scripts that will let you customize responses based on answers to questions.
Read more on creating and using scripts
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Upload a list of Polling Locations and then add them to your Virtual Phone Banks or MiniVAN canvassing to make it easy for callers and canvassers to share the correct polling location with voters based on their registered address.
Read more on updating polling locations
Read more on displaying polling and early vote locations
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If you are doing lit drops using MiniVAN, use the Distributed Contacts tool in MiniVAN to help canvassers pull the closest doors out of your designated universe based on their current location. Be sure to also enable the Lit Dropped status in your script so volunteers can mark which supporters received your literature.
- Use Turf Cutter to select groups of households from a target universe for canvassing efforts by drawing on a map. You can then generate list numbers for or send turfs directly to MiniVAN users, export lists, and create and print turf packets.
Maximizing your outreach
We have many add-on features that augment the basic outreach tools you’ll be using during your Get Out the Vote effort. These tools help you reach more voters quickly, using more channels. Some of these tools only require a one-time setup fee, while others are free to set up and you will only pay for the time you need.
Creating a better volunteer experience for GOTV:
When hours are precious, holding an online webinar or meeting can help you quickly train and on-board phone bank or canvassing volunteers. If your volunteers are far-flung or not able to meet in person, you can also help keep morale high by hosting virtual meetings during activities like Virtual Phone Banks or peer-to-peer texting to let volunteers troubleshoot problems or share their successes with each other.
With our Zoom Integration, you can link your Zoom webinars or meetings to your Event signups. You’ll be able to easily track who has attended your training or who is available for a virtual meeting and integrate that information with your other Event records.
Watch more on Zoom best practices
Finally, if you are a Mobilize user, you can promote a Mobilize event within MiniVAN so volunteers can sign up for new shifts at the end of their canvass.
Read more about integrating MiniVAN with Mobilize
Enhancing your Virtual Phone Banks:
VPB Connect is our browser-based dialer that simplifies phone bank dialing for OpenVPB. Volunteers can dial numbers directly from their browser and you will not have to deal with individual phone plans or devices. This helps quickly on-board your volunteer callers and reach more voters in the final hours of your GOTV effort.
Improving your phone outreach:
If you find that volunteer time has been maxed, you can reach more supporters using our Robocall tool. With this feature, you can send automated recordings or surveys to your segmented contact phone lists, reminding them about the upcoming vote.
Adding SMS texting to your GOTV effort:
If you are using SMS texting as part of your outreach efforts, we have integrations with several SMS vendors that will help you easily share your supporter lists to them.
Read more about our SMS integrations
If you are not already working with an SMS vendor on your texting outreach, we also offer Mobile Messaging which is an all-in-one tool that lets you reach your My Campaign contacts using SMS broadcast texting. You can text right from your pool of subscribed supporters and messages can be sent right from our platform, without any other SMS vendor involvement.
Mobile Messaging works best if you begin using it during the early stages of your campaign so you have time to opt-in the supporters who want to stay in touch. When you reach the GOTV period, you can then quickly reach supporters to remind them about important voting deadlines and remind them why their vote matters.
Read more about Mobile Messaging
Watch more on using Mobile Messaging
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