Political Mobilization

Maximize The Impact of Political Mobilizing

Political mobilization maps the journey of a group within the community transitioning from passive bystanders to active participants in public and political matters.

Political mobilization is the origin of active political assembly and the formation of a grassroots political campaign strategy. This typically begins at the local level but develops to have national-level ramifications and outcomes. 

Here are some approaches to mobilizing grassroots groups

1. Identify the Issue 

A critical starting point of all grassroots community engagement efforts is to understand the issue directly affecting the community and incorporate this into political messaging.  

Recognizing this issue helps lay the foundations for future campaigning and community organizing. These understandings help inform your political strategy, filter your contact base accurately, and pinpoint key trends to mobilize your community better. 

This stage of identification is key to data gathering and statistical review. If you do not have data before beginning this step, Ecanvasser and L2 Data have an intuitive integration that allows you to instantly import voter data into your Ecanvasser account. 

2. Begin Recruitment Process

Recruiter onboarding and motivation are cornerstones of mobilizing organizations. 

There are many variations of recruiting volunteers, these include:

1. Online recruitment via. your election website, social media, and, virtual events

2. Relational recruitment through peer-to-peer networks 

3. Community Leader outreach within your community

4. Segment the current voter base and send out an email communication to turn voters into members

Organize regular training for your newly recruited volunteers and supporters. Train supporters on how to accurately engage in doorstep and phone banking conversations, approach community conversations, raise awareness about your campaign, accurately use organizing software, and how to mobilize others to join your campaign. 

3. Implement Campaign Strategy and Mobilize your Team

With community assessment and recruiters onboarded, you can now begin mobilizing your campaign volunteers. 

Ensure you have accurate software in place to ensure there is no delay in taking action. Generate a segmented walk list for your door-knocking campaigns, and use real-time analytics so you can take fast action when your organizers are in the field. 

Raise Awareness 

During the awareness stage of political mobilizing, it is important to define what methods of outreach are the most value-adding to your campaign timeline.

Raising awareness should aim to help your political positioning within the community, increase your supporter engagement, increase voter turnout on election day and support the overall objectives of your campaign. 

The methods of awareness through mobilizing include: 

1. Field Canvassing

2. Phonebanking

3. Events

4. Rallies

5. Social Media  

6. Political website

7. Political emailing 

8. Ads in local media outlets 

9. Creating relationships with community leaders

Mobilizing Timeline 

Organize an effective mobilizing timeline for your campaign. Set out clear time-sensitive actions for each segment of your organizing base. This makes it easy to manage and delegate tasks and supports your tracking goals. 

To accurately create a mobilizing timeline, here are some questions you may consider: 

1. How long is the recruitment process?

2. How long will you spend door-knocking?

3. How long will you spend phone banking? 

4. When do you plan on beginning your GOTV strategy?

Mobilizing Goals

Set goals for organizers to reach to assure your team is actively mobilizing within their dedicated timelines. 

This makes analyzing the results of your campaign strategy easier. With Ecanvasser’s organizing software, you can track your team in the field and mobilize them with their statistics to achieve your campaign goals. 

Goals can be internal, these are aligned with your objectives and support your campaign strategy, your awareness objectives, and more. Other goals may be external. These goals typically focus on the community issue you identified and the change you can bring. 

Some goals may include:

1. The number of doors to be knocked on by your field canvassing team 

2. How many calls do you want your phone banking team to make in how much time? 

4. Evaluate the Outcome

Apart from voter turnout on election day, the data gathered and the insights produced by your mobilizing activities should be evaluated for two main reasons:

1. This outlines areas of your political mobilizing that generated the best results for your campaign. This evaluation also provides insights into key areas to improve.

2. Data gathering and analysis allow you to display your successes to stakeholders in a meaningful way. 

Leveraging intuitive software tools such as Ecanvasser will supply you with quick and easy ways to track and gather data. 

Areas to track include:

1. Contacts created

2. Houses visited

3. Interactions logged

This list is not exhaustive, there are many methods of political mobilizing that can help boost your campaign forward.

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