I’m reading an interesting book called Get Out the Vote by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber. The book dissects every popular “GOTV” activity known to man, and — based on numerous experiments, field tests, and statistical analysis — rates the effectiveness of each tactic.

The chapter on phone banks is particularly interesting.

Care to make a guess as to how many calls it takes to motivate one additional voter to go to the polls from volunteers callers, professional phone banks workers, or (dum, dum, dum!…) robo calls?

I’m going to keep you in suspense until the end of this post. First, take a look at an interesting analysis of live polling versus robo call polling. (Keep in mind that this article is debating the merits of polling by phone, not turning out voters. I’ll come back to the “live versus robo” GOTV discussion, as promised, at the end of this post.)

Polling Budget Dilemma: Robo vs. Live

by Tyler Harber in Politics Magazine

Low-budget campaigns are always in search of cheap alternatives to execute big-budget tactics. This begs the question: robo-poll or live-interview survey?

Robo-polling will always be the cheaper option, but many consultants and candidates don’t really understand the difference and may be surprised by the final product.

Let’s put aside for the moment the fight that has been raging for years between pollsters over the validity of robo-polling and assume that both live-interview and robo-poll surveys produce equally accurate results. Choosing which survey approach to employ largely depends on what you need. Robo-polls provide you with a quick, cheap way to test who is winning at that moment. Robo-polling surveys have to be short, generally less than 15 questions, because the drop-off rate is higher when the respondent is listening to a recording. This provides just enough questions to ask the necessary screening questions, basic demographics and a ballot.

Live-interview surveys are going to cost you at least twice as much, but allow you to test messages, themes, images, in-depth issues, biographical narratives and ballot positions, building a data set that can identify key voter segments and a communication strategy that can move voters toward your candidate and away from your opponent. In short, the live-interview approach is meant to be more of a strategic planning tool and less of a quick measurement of where the race is at that snap-shot in time.

If you’re looking to determine who is winning the race, you may just want to go with a cheap robo-poll. However, if you’re looking to gather data to build a campaign plan complete with messaging, targeting and understanding the tactics needed to win, I suggest spending the money for a live-interview survey. Either way, you will get exactly what you pay for in each instance.

Tyler Harber is vice president and director of the political division for Wilson Research Strategies, a public opinion research and political consulting firm for Republicans. You can follow Harber at www.w-r-s.com or on Twitter @tharber.

Now for the findings from Get Out the Vote on the effectiveness of various phone bank strategies:

1. “Robo calls have a very weak effect on voter turnout. …based on the experiments involving more than 1 million voters, [the vote production of robo calls is] somewhere in the neighborhood of one vote per 1,000 contacts, but given the shaky state of the evidence, robo calls may have no effect at all.”
2. “Volunteer phone banks are often effective, but their quality varies, and their capacity to contact large numbers of people is often limited or unpredictable. The average volunteer phone bank generates one vote for every thirty-eight completed calls, but there is significant variation among volunteer phone bank efforts…[ranging from one vote for every 11 calls to one vote for every 60 to 70 calls.]“
3. “Live calls conducted by professional phone banks typically produce weak effects...A standard commercial phone script of approximately thirty seconds in length…[generates one vote] for every 180 completed calls.”

So there you have it: volunteer callers take the prize, robo calls bring up the rear. Do these findings surprise you? Agree? Disagree?  Obviously, results vary depending on the real world execution of these GOTV tactics, but the researchers conclude: volunteers call best.

Tags: Get Out the Vote, phone banks, Politics Magazine, robo calls

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Campaign Tips, Get Out the Vote, Winning Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.