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Campaigning Wiki

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Summary

The set of methods campaigns use to reach individual voters — door-knocking, phone-banking, peer-to-peer texting, relational organising, mail, and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations.

Body

The modern voter-contact menu: door-knocking (the gold standard for relational depth, especially when done through volunteer-led walks), phone-banking (volunteer or vendor; declining per-contact cost-effectiveness outside competitive races), peer-to-peer texting (high open rates, conversational, low-cost; rules vary by jurisdiction), relational organising (leveraging existing social networks through volunteer texters and call tools), targeted mail (still relevant in lower-propensity demographics), and GOTV (the concentrated final-week push to known supporters with a turnout plan). MobLab’s Campaign Accelerator integrates voter-contact into the broader distributed-organising arc and treats each channel as a step in a ladder [source: moblab]. The NDI Campaign Skills Handbook covers the standard electoral ground: voter contact, message development, polling, field operations, paid media, digital and GOTV [source: ndi-campaign-skills]. The Commons Library publishes the principles — relational contact beats broadcast [source: commons-library]. The VoteEuropa 2024 GOTV Toolkit is the European multilingual reference [source: voteeuropa-gotv].

Green & Gerber’s Get Out The Vote (Brookings, 4th ed.) is the empirical synthesis of hundreds of RCTs ranking voter-contact methods by measured effect size: face-to-face canvassing > phone banking > direct mail > robocalls > leaflets. The book is the academic anchor for the field menu above and grounds the relative-cost / relative-effect decisions every campaign faces [source: get-out-the-vote]. NDI’s Voter Registration Handbook covers the pre-election funnel: finding unregistered voters, ID requirements, and online-vs-offline registration [source: ndi-voter-registration]. The UK Labour Party’s Running Effective Door Knocking Sessions documents the European tradition’s target maps, volunteer briefing templates, board-runner logistics, and accessibility considerations [source: labour-doorknocking-guide].

The Analyst Institute is the working research-and-training hub for US voter-contact RCT evidence, with a Share Research library translating academic findings into actionable field guidance and a W.A.R. Room Masterclass professional-training curriculum. The W.A.R. (Wins-Above-Replacement) framing is the practitioner-level reframing of the “which tactic to fund?” question — measured effect-size reasoning applied to budget allocation decisions [source: analyst-institute]. The Institute’s evidence base is the empirical companion to Green & Gerber’s book: Green & Gerber provide the academic synthesis, the Analyst Institute the ongoing working library of replications and contextual adaptations.

Use it for

Designing a GOTV plan; choosing the right voter-contact mix; building a volunteer phone-bank team; setting per-voter contact targets.

Examples

  • get-out-the-vote — Green & Gerber’s empirical synthesis
  • analyst-institute — the practitioner-level RCT library and training curriculum
  • campaign-math — the operational application of RCT effect sizes to budget decisions
  • door-to-door-canvassing — the canvassing sub-discipline
  • peer-to-peer-texting — the digital outreach method most consistent with younger voters
  • reach-app — Reach is the canonical relational-organising app behind the AOC 2018 canvassing model; cross-link T5 voter-contact-and-gotv for the vote-contact-method side.
  • higher-ground-labs — Higher Ground Labs’ 2020 tool-vote-share evidence (Mobilize +3.6%, Impactive +4%/100 volunteers, Deck +3.5pp) is the rare quantitative case for relational-organising tech at scale and is load-bearing for voter-contact-and-gotv.

Open Questions

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Sources & verification

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.

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