CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Are you still interested in getting funding for this project?

Well I do a lot of political campaigning outside of my current job, although my job limits for who and in what ways I can campaign.  I think I could round up some interest in this subject for you if you are willing to take instruction and advice from some political operatives/campaigners.  I've read the spec and it is very good but I think hearing from some of the people I assisted in this cycle could help a lot.  I was campaigning in Iowa for one of the candidates in the US presidential elections and one of our major problems was getting together a good phonebanking system quickly.  We hacked something together that just wasn't any good.  If we had the system described here I'm sure we could have done better.  I've run into this problem a lot at the local level as well.  I think I could talk to some people and get a little funding for this because I believe we are going to have some campaign funds left over and we are already planning for local and state races in 2010.

Currently unless you are running or assisting in an election that gets the attention of the national party leadership you are out of luck as far as decent funding and operatives goes.  This kind of system could really help our get out the vote campaigns.  Do you know if there is any system that runs on top of Drupal, Joomla, or CiviCRM that could tell people their voting prescient and location based on their address?  There are lots of little variables in this system one of which is that certain automated reporting functions need to be present, such as if I am phonebanking in a get out a vote campaign and I speak with someone who needs a ride to their voting place I need to be able to enter that code and then have it go automatically to one of the campaign coordinators at the end of the day.  I'm getting ready to set up a test CiviCRM but from the Sandbox it seems a little weak on "Reporting" functionality.

In the final days of the Obama campaign, we ended up needing features to generate walklists and phone lists.  There were a couple of kinds:

a.  Walklists -- needed to have people who were doing blockwalking to specify a street or group of streets, odd or even sides of the road  or even a particular address (in the case of large apartment houses) and then generat printed lists that gave demographics by household in street number / apartment address order and that had places for data capture so the info could be entered back in the office.

b.  Phonelists -- we originally thought we needed them for volunteers in the office, but it turned out that we needed a feature whereby volunteers at home could "pull" a list of 25 people and for each:

• get a script of what the caller was supposed to say
• get phone number, demographic info on voting history, age, etc for the person they were calling
• have the script, based on the voter's location, determine the polling place and address for the voter and, using Google maps, create a map and list of directions for getting to the polling place.
• During our two-week early voting period, use a great-circle algorithm to find all early polling places withint 3 miles of the voters address and use Google to generate maps and direction lists for all of them
• Read the information to the voter if they wanted it
• offer the voter a sample ballot
• offer the voter transportation to the polls if they needed it
• if the voter wanted to supply their email, sending a personalized email to them that included:
  
  • link to sample ballot
  • link to personalized maps to get to polling place(s)
  • basic information about what was and was not permitted at polling places (no political buttons or shirts, for instance
  • links to other election materials
  • invitation to post election celebration party
• the program was set up so the data could be entered as the volunteer did a call and they got a cute little 'succcess' icon for each call completed
• when they logged on, there were also various messages (after 9 at night, there was a 'do not call the voters message' because we had some volunteers in different time zones, for instance
• our transportation coordinator could get lists of voters who needed rides and schedule who needed to be where and when to transport them
• and we had management reporting so we could tell who was calling, how many of our first time voters had been called in any precinct or district, etc. etc.

Obviously, as a side effect of the effort, we got at LOT more email addresses, which is great as well, that was part of the point of it.

I don't know if civiVoter or civiCanvasser does any of the above -- we needed what we needed very quickly, I don't do PHP well and I didn't have time to dig through a bunch of code to see what it did, so I simply created a normalized table and wrote new code for the function, but now that the dust has settled I'd love to work with whomever is interested in the civi modules to see if we could, in the future, use the civi modules for something like this and, if what we did is not what civi does, see about getting some of these ideas integrated into it.

FYI, the opposition was using robocalls and got a lot of flack for it.  Using people and the technique above was much more personal and we got much more positive results.  Also, it was cost-effective.  Also, our candidate won...

Best,
Nancy

K.  Is there anything I can do that would be useful or shall we let it be?

What is the status of this project? It would be incredibly useful.

We're extremely interested in civiVoter & civiCanvasser!   Many of the community organizing groups we work with - and especially those in our PowerBase pilot project (http://ourpowerbase.net) - do voter engagement work and have to jump through hoops, or are not even able to integrate the voter data they've collected during a campaign into their organizational database. As groups are looking at 2010 and 2012, in addition to their local elections, this is an important piece.  We do plan to figure this out in our pilot - but if there's already thinking for this in an upcoming version, we'd be happy to contribute to the specifications since we know what groups are doing and need to do.   

I see that this string started in  2008 - is this still on the map for v2.3 or an upcoming version?

thanks - and I'd love to hear more of where things are.

Alice

Not sure where this has gone, but I'm interested too for state and local campaigns in Massachusetts.  We think we can develop what we need to expand CivicRM, but if there are others out there working on it, we'd like to partner.