GRIMES and Phone Canvassing - A Campaign Resource

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By Mark Kersten on 18 August 2009 - 5:19pm

Dear Green candidates and campaigners,

I decided to make this section of Kersten’s Kolumn for the same reason as the section that provided answers to common policy questions for candidates. Candidates and campaigns will almost surely not receive as much support in the next election as before. Hopefully, this can help.

There are few – if any – more important aspects of a campaign than identifying voters. Speaking with top-level campaign organizers and they will tell you just how critical it is. Many will argue that without identifying most of a given district or riding, a campaign doesn’t have a chance at winning. As a wise man once exclaimed to me, campaigns are all about persuasion and mobilization. Identifying voters and getting them to the polls on voting day (Get Out the Vote, GOTV) does both.

What many Greens don’t know is that the party has one of the most effective, in-house built voter identification programmes, called GRIMES. It was developed by Craig Cantin, currently Manager of Technical Services.GRIMES is the single most important tool the Green Party has developed in years, and probably the most important campaign development in the party since Jim Harris and his staff managed to run a full slate of 308 candidates in 2004.

GRIMES is easy. GRIMES is interactive. GRIMES is effective. The more that campaigns use it the better this party will be in the short, medium and long run. While improving current campaigns GRIMES also builds the member and information infrastructure that the Green Party so desperately needs.

You may be wondering why I am sharing this information here. When GRIMES was first created, I was one of its “guinea pigs”. I co-ordinated its usage in the Vancouver Quadra by-election in March 2008 and was also amongst the top callers. Amongst my many responsibilities in the Guelph by-election in summer 2008, I co-ordinated phone canvassing. We managed to make over 5,000 calls, a record at the time. In the last 10 days of the Federal Election of 2008 I coordiinated the phone canvassing push into Elizabeth May’s riding of Central Nova. With a team of dedicated volunteers from across the country we made over 10,000 calls, identifying hundreds of Greens. On election day, we went through the identified Greens list in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, Guelph, Vancouver Centre and Central Nova numerous times. It was a huge success.

I’ve seen the difference GRIMES can make. The campaigns that use it receive the best results in the party. I also developed a number of resources for GRIMES – and this is what I’d like to share with you. All of what you will find on this page was developed  for the various campaigns I worked on, and adapted to be accessible to any Green campaign teams interested.

I sincerely hope that the candidates, campaign managers and campaign teams that read this will consider using GRIMES in the next election and that the resources available here will help you in achieving the best results possible.

http://kerstenskolumn.wordpress.com/grimes-and-phone-canvassing-resources/

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Good luck and all the best!

Mark

Comments

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Can you throw up a screen shot?

Submitted by Matthew Day on 18 August 2009 - 5:20pm.

 

Hi Mark,

Thanks for putting this up. I must confess that I have a lifetime of professional experience in managing phone banks/sales/canvas/etc. I would really like to see some screen shots of GRIMES. I have several different iterations of canvas databases, with autodiallers etc. and I'm very curious to see the interface, and if it warrants dumping my old Access, and Act! databases.

Also, just a suggestion, but your scripts should be prompting for 'what Party will you vote for', as opposed to the leading question, 'is there any green support'. If you 'lead' the elector, you are going to get flawed data, like undecideds, or leaners giving a more positive response than they really mean. Also, one day we'll grow up, and know what to do with ID'd supporters for the other Party's, so the other Party's supporters should be identified, and recorded as well.

Thanks for GRIMES feedback Matthew

Submitted by Mark Kersten on 18 August 2009 - 5:44pm.

Thanks for the feedback Matthew - I figured I might elicit some thoughtful comments from you!

I will look into getting a screen shot and posting it here or at Kersten's Kolumn. 

I will also draft up a new, revised script with your suggestion. It would be great if you could let me know what you think about it when it is done.

Good point about growth and beginning to know what to do with other ID'ed support. We did actually get to that point in Guelph and the script was flexible in that depending on the ID'ed or undecided voter the script would use various compelling talking points based on each partisan leaning, that callers could use. I considered sharing that script, but crafting that level of phone script is simply far too riding/region/candidate specific.

Hi Matt, Leading the elector

Submitted by Dan Grice on 18 August 2009 - 5:56pm.

Hi Matt,

Leading the elector is not necessarily a bad thing, as one of the objectives is to call back "likely" and "leaning" green voters towards election and to preserve their support.  Sometimes it is enough just to ask them to vote for you (or your candidate) later on, even if they were previously undecided.

For instance, the Conservatives will ask people is they think that Stephen Harper is doing a good job or some broader question. (Or at least they did when he was their primary asset pre-November)

No problem Mark

Submitted by Matthew Day on 18 August 2009 - 7:45pm.

Mark:

If your' objective was to distract me, it worked!

If you email me your' script, I'll be happy to comment/annotate. Generally, users will start deviating from the script, and sometimes they even improve it while they're at it, but generally, having a word perfect script will make it a lot easier on neophytes.

I think I commented on GRIMES on one of the other blogs a few months back. If it can be fine tuned, and start capturing data on issues, for example, it will be the most important tool introduced to the GPC to date. I'll caution everybody though that capturing reams of inaccurate data is worse than useless. It can lead you to draw inaccurate conclusions, and waste resources chasing chimera's. Careful thought needs to go into idiot-proofing so that it becomes difficult to enter erroneous data. Better to have a simple tool that ID's the vote than to have a thousand bells and whistles that don't quite work properly.

 

Dan:

Good data is clean data. What you want is to discriminate between the actual, self-reported level of support, and record that data in a consistent format. It is very important to be accurate. You want to know 'leaners', 'committed', and virulently anti, and retain that data. That way, your subsequent usage is predicated on facts. Many Canadians are too darn polite to tell you what they really think, and if you jolly them along, you will find life-long Reform type Conservatives telling you they'll consider voting Green, because they don't want to hurt your feelings. That does no-one any good, because you'll waste very precious resources (volunteer hours) getting out the oppo's vote for them.

The Conservatives can afford to be more sophisticated in their usage, because they have long ago identified the overwhelming majority of the voters in Canada. It would probably surprise you to know that some Conservative activist on the other end of the phone was updating a very targeted list of names with a particular objective in mind. If it was you who recieved the call, they already knew your voting history, your income, marital status, education level, and had targeted you for special attention based on more or less sophisticated analysis.

One day, we'll be able to direct our efforts to where they will do the most good as well, and GRIMES could well be the tool that starts us down that road.