Lewis Atkinson

2. Use peer group effects to drive voter turnout

As long as I’ve ever been involved in Labour campaigns, our standard GOTV message has been a more or less version of the following:

• ‘We think it is going to be very close tomorrow, we need you to come out and vote’
• ‘If you don’t vote today, the Tories will win’
• ‘It looks neck and neck around here – it could come down to just a few votes’

I suspect the reason that our GOTV message hasn’t really changed is not because we’ve rigorously tested it before every election and found it to be optimal. We just don’t have the resources to do to the level of research required to do that.

Thankfully resources are not something US campaigns are generally short of, which means they can afford such research. It falls to us to try and adapt/steal their research for UK usage. Sasha Issenberg has helpfully written a book about some of the ways that (and other) research is being applied by the likes of the Obama campaign. In this snappy article he identifies some ways that campaigns are moving away from using the type of GOTV message that argues people should vote because it will secure a certain outcome (i.e. the examples above), to a message that relies more on peer group effects, which encourages people vote because of their instinct to be part of something that others around them are doing. Think of it as using subtle peer pressure for enlightened means – turning out the vote. Using the same psychology that makes you feel pressured to have that extra pint because your mates are buying another round, the idea is that you feel pressured to vote because you know those around you are voting, and your natural inclination is to want to fit in.

Evolving our GOTV messages to use peer group psychology might mean we subtly change our messaging to say things like the following:

• ‘Almost all of the people we’ve spoken to around here say they’re going to come out and vote tomorrow, because they think it’s going to be close.’
• ‘The majority of people living here on Attlee Avenue voted here last time, and turnout might be higher again this time’
• ‘I’ve spoken to lots of other mums/dads/students who say they’ve been to vote today to make sure the Tories don’t get in’

Crucially, the technique emphasises that voting is the norm in the social groups of which the voter identifies of being a part. Feedback from the Obama campaign suggests these type of peer-influenced messages are finding their way into standard doorstep and phone GOTV scripts. We should be thinking of doing this.

I’m also interested in whether we can go further and micro-target our GOTV message in personalised printed literature too. With marked registers entered into Contact Creator, we could try using peer group effects to hone the effectiveness of the GOTV message for someone who didn’t vote in the last local election, by presenting them with very local statistics about the voting habits of their neighbours, e.g.: ‘Mr Smith, we noticed you missed out on voting at the elections last year – so please let us know if you need a hand getting the polling station this time. 60% of residents here in Attlee Avenue regularly vote, please join them this Thursday so together we can keep the Tories out.’

Of course the medium perhaps most naturally conducive to taking advantage of peer effects is social networking. In the 2010 US Congressional elections, Facebook introduced and evaluated the effect of putting an ‘I voted’ button at the top of users’ news feeds, which not only reminded people it was election day (and gave links to polling stations etc.) but also, crucially, provided details of your Facebook friends who had voted. The evaluation showed that this Facebook-delivered peer effect boosted turnout by a not-too-shabby 2%. This is estimated to have led to 340,000 extra people voting in that election. You can read more about that here.

At the Facebook fringe event at Labour Conference this year, Facebook staff confirmed in response to my question that they are in discussions with the Electoral Commission to use the ‘I voted button’ in future UK elections, which is great news. Peer-group influencing as part of GOTV is coming – Labour’s challenge is to think how we can maximise it across all of our GOTV channels, not just online.

This is part two of a series. You can find part one, on localising the organisation of GOTV, here.

Remember the Labour Party have an extensive range of campaign training modules available online (through membersnet here) and a variety of other support available through the Campaigns and Technology support team (contact details through membersnet here).

If, like me, you’ve been addictively refreshing the likes of PoliticalWire for the latest US election news, then you’ll be looking forward to Tuesday night with both excitement and nervousness.

One of the things I always enjoy most about following US elections is hearing about the latest campaigning and organisational approaches and techniques. Let’s face it, the US is the world-leader in election innovation (you’d expect that from the $billions spent). From my US election reading over the last few months, I’ve tweeted links to some great articles about the organisational approaches the Obama campaign has been putting in place. In the next few days, I’m going to blog about some of the lessons I’ve taken from what I’ve read and heard from US friends, along with some rough initial thoughts about how Labour might be able use these lessons to hone our organisation in the run-up to the next general election.

Despite the much more meagre financial resources we have available to campaign with in the UK, the insights I’ve chosen can be adapted for UK use without significant spending. So much of this is not about cutting edge technology breakthroughs, but it is absolutely about having the management of a campaign focusing relentlessly on consistently executing what works, not just in a few pilot areas, but everwhere you need to win.

1. All politics is local: so your GOTV should be as local as possible

The Obama campaign’s ‘ground-game’ has received all sorts of plaudits from in-awe political journalists (e.g. here). What really struck me from this purposefully boastful Obama memo/press release though is the scale, and hence the level of localisation of the operation: they’re running GOTV (get out the vote) in 9 states from 5,117 ‘staging locations’, i.e. local campaign centres / committee rooms.

Well that seems like quite a big number, but of course you might argue that the US is a pretty big place. So to put that into context… the combined population of those 9 swing states is 66.2 million, which means if they were evenly distributed, these GOTV centres each would cover just under 13,000 residents (NOT voters). So on average that’s the equivalent of about a committee room per 2 UK electoral wards.

But of course, within each swing state, there will be areas that are heavily hostile, so the Obama campaign won’t be concentrating much GOTV resource there, but putting much more resource into swing or favourable areas. I reckon this means they’ll often have a local GOTV centre for about each 5,000 voters in swing or favourable areas. That’s the equivalent of 1 local campaign centre per UK electoral ward.

I imagine there are only a handful of Labour constituency campaigns that ever manage anything near this level of localised GOTV at a general elections. Remember, the Obama campaign are not just doing this in a few of their best organised areas – they are delivering this consistently across ALL the swing states.

The benefits of such localisation are legion. As the Obama campaign says:

Unlike campaigns of the past, our volunteers are not driving to some large office miles from their homes and handed a phone and a call sheet. Instead, Canvass Captains, Phone Bank Captains and scores of local volunteers will be knocking on the doors of the very voters they registered, have been talking to for months and know personally. And they will be directing them to polling locations in their communities – the schools their kids go to, the places of worship they attend each week and community centers they know well.

Now that sounds good, but crucially it is supported by the evidence base. Middleton’s 2006 study (summary here) demonstrated a level of GOTV effectiveness from neighbour-to-neighbour contact  that hasn’t been matched from other techniques. You can also speculate on additional positive effects of having a more localised GOTV operation: a more visible and accessible presence in local communities at election times, when political engagement is highest, so there may be positive effects on member and volunteer recruitment; there’d almost invariably be less time spent travelling backwards and forwards on election day from the central campaign centre in the middle of a constituency, leaving more time for the actual knocking of doors.

So, perhaps when planning our election GOTV here next time, we need to shift the focus away from  having a central committee room in the middle of the constituency, from which we deploy volunteers across the constituency irrespective of which ward they live in. As long as training is done and ward organisers are clear on what is required, running devolved, localised GOTV is more possible than ever. There are risks – devolving the organisation doesn’t mean devolving the message (we can’t have each ward just write their own GOTV scripts for example, all of Obama’s GOTV centres are massively standardised in that way) and we certainly don’t need a full-time volunteer in each ward with their time taken up making the tea or sandwiches. But done right, delivering our GOTV on a consistently local basis, as the Obama campaign is doing, will mean we are best placed to take advantage of our activists’ relationships with their own communities and to turn out the vote we need to win in 2015.

Having thought about the organisation of GOTV, in my next post I’ll talk about some of the emerging lessons from the US about the psychology of GOTV messaging.

Remember the Labour Party have an extensive range of campaign training modules available online (through membersnet here) and a variety of other forms of support and advice available through the Campaigns and Technology support team (contact details through membersnet here).