Local Campaign Focus Form: Simple approach to organising your thinking for a campaign

As we begin to look at the elections coming up in May, many will be looking to start or expand on local campaigns to help improve our chances of winning seats in the election. Organisation of the campaign is key to ensuring that it achieves what it sets out to. The problem with organising a campaign is the number of issues that can be focused on, including all the campaign materials that HQ send through. What we need is something which can focus our attention on the local issues. One technique that can help in this is to look at the worries of the local area, what is working well in the local area, including what people are proud of and once we know this we can look at what needs to happen in the campaign.

The worries are an important aspect of political campaigning and most politicians and local parties will know these well. We spend a lot of time listening to people and the problems they are facing and then look at what to do about it. This can be very effective and has been the cornerstone of community politics and the Lib Dems – keeping the focus local.

However, what is also very important is to honour what people appreciate in the area, what makes them like where they live. Focusing on the worries can often seem like running an area down. In may area we have high unemployment, high levels of deprivation (it is one of the most deprived areas in the country), and many things to complain about such as gangs and violence. But people still like living here. So this can be used as valuable campaigning material showing that we are standing up for the things locals enjoy and like.

These then focus our attention on what we need to do. This is a very simple process used in the solution focused approach and can be used with one piece of paper:

This is a first draft and I would welcome feedback on ideas, thoughts and criticisms to help improve it. The difference between this approach and what I have used before is the simplicity and the local focus. I know we have many resources and emails coming to us about what to put in our material, but this gives me a better focus about what needs to be in, rather than what I can put in because I have it. So to take an example:

The people in my area are not very concerned with some of the issues that we could focus on – such as the environment. While it is important and dear to my heart, the people in my area, at least those who I speak to, do not see it as a concern in this area right now. So it would be better for my local party to focus on other issues.

This approach seeks to simplify the way in which we match our campaign with local issues. It seeks to focus our thinking on the local issues. It seeks to simplify how to draw out what we need for a campaign. Let me know if you think this is something you think could be useful.

Is the Lib Dem poll rating the fault of the members?

Who was more affected by going into Coalition with the Tories? The soft Lib Dem vote who seem to think we have sold out on our principles (see here)? Maybe the many on the political left in general? Or maybe it is actually the Lib Dem core vote? Those who are fully paid up members of the party and who are active members? Perhaps the core Lib Dem vote has been so rocked by this Coalition that it has had a significant contribution to our current poll ratings? Are we, the members of the Lib Dems to blame for our low poll rating?

When looking at recent polling we can see a very interesting development:

We can see that the Lib Dems are campaigning at a significantly different levels in different areas. Where Labour is second to the conservatives we can see we have a significantly lower intensity than that of the Tories or Labour, while where we are second to the Tories we are out performing the other parties. And what is the effect of this?

We see that we are scoring 12% in the polls where we are not campaigning as hard as the other parties, which is where most people quote our poll ratings at the moment. However, where we are campaigning much harder we are recording 31% of support, a significantly higher level of support in the same national context. While areas can’t be compared like for like and one poll doesn’t tell you a lot, this is something which Nick Clegg has been talking about – the fact that it has been the Lib Dem activists which have stopped going out on to the streets and speaking to people about the Coalition, about what we are doing and why.

There are no such things as Lib Dem safe seats and every vote needs to be won. We have a slogan of ‘where we work, we win’ because Lib Dem support is based on people going out there and getting support. We need activists more than other parties to maintain that support but if we withdraw our activism then the support drops away. So it may be that going into coalition with the Tories has affected the Lib Dem members more than it has other groups? I certainly know people who are worried about knocking on doors for fear of hostility. Some members are supportive of the Lib Dems in Coalition but not of some Coalition policies and they wonder how to deal with this on the door step.

This was something Nick Clegg was worried about when I spoke to him and his response was to get people out there again and to give them a script in his speech at conference so we knew what to say. He saw the success of the conference as motivating people to get back out there and maybe he is right? This was the summary of my conversation with him (see here for its explanation if it makes no sense):

But if we do start getting back out there who knows what will happen to our poll rating?

Campaign Scaling Question: A technique to win over swing voters a soft opposition voters at the front door

Door to door campaigning is one of the most successful techniques of increasing your vote yet there are some dilemmas in door to door campaigning when it comes to who you should focus your precious campaigning time on. When someone says they are undecided it is tempting to spend time with that person persuading them to your cause. However, undecided is often a euphemism for unlikely to vote, while the most winnable voters may be soft supporters of the opposition. So how do we know who are the soft support and who to spend our time with?

In 2008 Obama had many volunteers helping him out who went from door to door collecting data and spending a small amount of time persuading people to vote. However, when they came across someone who said they wouldn’t be voting Democrat they quickly moved on spending no time with them at all (or see here). This may be a great opportunity missed.

Currently we use our own personal judgement, previous experience of the person, or party information, yet there is a simple technique which can be used to give us this information as well as important information about what your local party is doing well and what they need to do to gain more votes: it is the campaign scaling question.

I have written about the scaling question before and a video of someone using the scale can be seen here. However, the campaigning scaling question is slightly different. We can offer a voter the scale in a way which will give us a quick answer to how likely they are to vote for the Lib Dems:

Q: If you were to scale your vote, where 10 is you will definitely vote for the Lib Dems and 0 is you definitely won’t, where would you put yourself at the moment?

A 10 means you don’t need to spend much time on this voter and you may want to ask the scale as to how likely they are to join the party:

Q: If I were to ask you to scale how likely you are to join the party, where 10 is I want to join today (please give me a membership form) and 0 is I will never join the party, where would you say you are?

Whereas a 0 (for the first question) will tell you your time will be wasted on the voter trying to persuade them. However, someone on a middle score may be a potential voter not yet tapped into. By asking the supporting questions we can also find out what they like about the party and what the party needs to do to increase the likeliness of their vote.

Q:  You have scaled it at ‘n’, why have you scaled it at ‘n’ and not 0?

This elicits what they like about the party.

Q: You have put your scale at ‘n’ what number would it need to be at for you to vote Lib Dem at this election?

This tells you how they are using the scale in their own mind as not everyone will need to be at 10 to be sure they will vote for the party, some will say 8 or 9. Then we can ask what needs to happen for this number to move towards the target.

Q: What would be different if your scale was ‘n+1’, what would you notice about the party that would move the scale up one point?

Here is an example of the campaign scaling question being used with a 30-something, female voter, who identified herself as a usual Labour voter. This is a snippet of the conversation:

Q: If you were to scale it, where 10 is you will definitely vote for the Lib Dems and 0 is you definitely won’t, where would you put yourself at the moment?

A: A 6.

Q: Can I ask why you put it at a 6, rather than, say a 2?

A: err, I think people should be looked after and cared for if they need it and I think the Lib Dems stand up for this too, they care about education and the NHS and so I put it at a 6.

Q: How high do you think this number needs to get for you to vote for the Lib Dems in this coming election?

A: About 8.

Q: So can I ask what would be different if your number was a 7?

A: What would be different?

Q: Yeah, what would you notice that would be different if things were a 7 at the moment rather than a 6.

A: I think I would see the Lib Dems doing more in this area, not just knocking on doors at election time, maybe letting people know what is going on in the local area.

Q: What else? [this is a vital question to ask]

A: They would have a bigger voice in government as others seem to have a bigger voice than they do at the moment.

Q: What else?

A: I think they could organise things for people to do like have a green day where they could get people together to plant a tree together or some other social gathering which gets people together.

Q: Would you want to get involved in this if it was set up? Would you help out?

A: Yes.

When I was asking these questions I was surprised by where it went. It showed that by using this technique it focused a floating voter on what she liked about the party and she began to think about what she wanted to see from the party. It focused her attention on what she wanted to see in her area and that she was willing to get involved in it (at least a verbal commitment).

I went on to ask the membership question and the answer was 0, but I gained a potential volunteer and a potential voter. I then went on to the usual talk about what the party had done in the local area etc. but what was important was that I gained some useful information about the local party and left the potential voter feeling good about the Lib Dems. This may have been enough to move her scale to a 7 or 8?

Do negative campaign ads work?

Image by gorfor via Flickr

Are voters turned off by negative campaign ads and mudslinging? Some say they are yet it doesn’t stop political candidates or parties from using them. Do we know the evidence about whether negative ads work or do we use them hoping they will work, or because we all know a good negative ad which did work? The results from the research may actually help inform and improve our campaigning.

Research on negative campaigning and negative campaign advertising has produced some conflicting results. Some studies suggest that negative campaign ads are more easily remembered and therefore have a greater influence on voters’ attitudes and vote decisions. Other research, however, provides evidence that the opposite is true. Moreover, while some research suggests that candidates who run negative ads are more likely to win, other research suggests that running negative ads makes a candidate more likely (or at least equally likely) to lose. There are also conflicting conclusions about the effect of negative advertising on voter turnout–some research concludes that negative campaigning depresses turnout while other findings suggest that intense competition (often characterized by negative campaigning) enhances voter turnout. For an excellent review of this research see The Effectiveness of Negative Political Advertisements: A Meta-analytic Review.

While the research on negative advertising in political campaigns is not clear the conventional wisdom among campaign professionals is that negative ads do work. That is, while voters might not like negative ads, their perceptions of candidates attacked in negative ads are tarnished by the information they are exposed to. But that is not to say that they should be used wholesale as there are significant downsides and risks to using them. So what can we learn from the research to improve our campaigning?

• Overall, negative political advertising produces negative evaluations of both the sponsor and the target.
• 87% (in one survey) of people are concerned about the level of personal attacks in today’s political campaigns
• Voters distinguish between what they feel are fair and unfair “attacks” in a political campaign.
• At least 57% (in one survey) believe negative information provided by one candidate about his or her opponent is relevant and useful when it relates to the following:

• Talking one way and voting another
• Not paying taxes
• Accepting campaign contributions from special interests
• Current drug or alcohol abuse
• His or her voting record as an elected official

• At least 63% (in one survey) indicated the following kinds of information should be considered out of bounds:

• Lack of military service
• Past personal financial problems
• Actions of a candidate’s family members
• Past drug or alcohol abuse

• Both younger and older people agreed that negative political advertising is not informative, but older people consider negative political advertising as less believable and have more negative attitudes toward the sponsor than younger people.
• Negative political advertising is more effective with lower income voters. They perceive negative political advertising as more informative and more believable and had more positive attitudes toward the sponsor than higher income level voters.

So voters do not treat all negative information equally and while negative ads have the capacity to weaken political support for a candidate’s opponent, being negative in a campaign can also diminish the attacking candidate’s stature among voters, producing a “backlash” effect, especially when that information is not perceived by voters as relevant to the campaign.

The rule is never use negative campaign tactics unless your have to. You only have to if you feel cannot win simply by presenting positive information about yourself.

Candidates most likely to use negative ads are challengers. Incumbents have generally spent years building positive images of themselves among voters. The longer an image of a candidate is maintained in the minds of voters, the more difficult it becomes to change that image. A challenger hoping to unseat an incumbent must provide evidence that the positive images voters have of their opponents are inaccurate.

The choice that candidates have to make is whether the negative information they want to emphasize in a campaign against an incumbent is important enough to voters to make them disavow their opponents and support them instead. When a negative ad aims at something outside of the bounds of what voters consider to be relevant and fair, the effects just might be opposite of what was intended.

Improving campaigning: What the research says about what works in political campaigning

What works in political campaigning? How many leaflets have been delivered, letters sent, doors knocked on? Remember the prerecorded message from Nick Clegg to 250,000 voters? Is this a reflection that the Lib Dems don’t know what works? Randomised experiments producing reliable evidence in politics are rare and so it is difficult to get the strategy as effective as possible for the resources you have. However, there are some experiments which give us some very specific results to improve our campaigning.

The get-out-the-vote campaign in the states has made extensive use of randomised experimentation since 1998 and have developed what they call the bottom line. While this is focused on increasing the number of people to vote it still offers parties some important lessons. So what does the research say?

Statistically significant results:

Door-to-door: This is considered the most effective method of influencing people to vote with one vote per 14 voters contacted (plus spill over effects).

Phone, volunteer: Getting enthusiastic volunteers and setting up a phone bank results in one vote per 38 contacts.

Commercial live calls: Getting a firm to make calls for voters produced some good results. For those who were trained it produced one vote per 35 contacts and for those who weren’t trained it produced one vote in 180 contacts

Election day festivals: This raised turnout in area by 1 – 2 % (but is based on only a few studies)

Not-statistically significant (in no particular order):

Leafleting: A high intensity job is an ineffective campaigning tool producing one vote per 189 voters reached.

Direct mail: direct mail advocating for a particular party had no detectable effect whereas non-partisan mail produced an increased voter turnout of boarderline significance.

E-mail: No detectable effect

Television: Raises postcode wide turnout by 0.5%

Radio: Raises city wide turnout by 0.8%

Robo calls: One vote per 900 called

The results show that what works is where some sort of rapport or relationship is built up between the voter and the campaigner. Where there is no relationship the results are insignificant and yet we spend a significant amount of time, money and effort on non-relationship based political activities.

Effective political campaigning is relationship based: it builds relationships between the party and the party members;  between the party members and party supporters; between the local party and the local community. Relationship based politics works by building a relationship between the party and the country.

Notes for Activists: Learning from behavioural science to increase the Lib Dem vote

Nudge Theory may have found its way into the government but there are lessons we can learn for activists on the doorstep to increase our campaigning effectiveness. Psychological experiments into political campaigning have shown that about eighty percent of what we’ve done in the past doesn’t work  so what should we be doing?

Behavioural science experiments have shown the following:

• The most effective direct mail might not be the most eye-catching in the mailbox but the least conspicuous. It is better to have an anonymous, chatty volunteer remind voters it’s Election Day than a recorded message from the Party Leader or Jay-Z.
• The most winnable voters may be soft supporters of the opposition, not the voters who polls say are undecided (“Undecided” may just be another word for “unlikely to vote”).
• Voters respond better to everyone-is-doing-it messages emphasizing high turnout
• Traditional telephone calls have no effect at all on voter turn out
• Peer pressure as a motivational tool

See article here.