Charities Apply Scientific Approach to Evaluate Get-Out-the-Vote Tactics

If a charity works hard to get a particular group of people to the polls, and those voters turn out in record

numbers, should the organization declare success?

Not necessarily, say some election experts. Perhaps those voters were swayed by the issues at stake, or the candidates, or the nice weather.

And even if the charity’s efforts did produce more voters, does the group know which of its tactics — phone calls, door-to-door canvassing, mail — worked best?

Donors and charities are increasingly asking such questions as they plan voter drives focused on November’s presidential contest. Influenced partly by philanthropy’s growing interest in measuring results, they are trying to add a dose of science to get-out-the-vote efforts that has been lacking in years past.

“If you don’t have that precision, it’s very foggy,” says Ryan Friedrichs, executive director of State Voices, in Detroit, a new group that will act as a hub for state coalitions representing a total of more than 350 advocacy groups that seek to get voters to the polls. “Groups don’t feel like they can tell their story with accuracy or strength.”

State Voices will help its partners test their approaches to see which are most cost effective — and to enable them to get credit when they succeed in turning out voters, he says.

The group will be tapping into a relatively new field that studies voting behavior the way that scientists test the effectiveness of drugs — by comparing a group that has been the focus of a particular effort with a similar group that has not.

100 Studies

Among the leading proponents of that kind of “treatment and control” experiment are Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, professors of political science at Yale University, who have just published the second edition of their book Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. The book, published by the Brookings Institution, reviews more than 100 studies on the effectiveness of tactics like canvassing, phone banks, e-mail, events, and leaflets.

They have received grants from foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation and the JEHT Foundation, both in New York, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia.

The James Irvine Foundation, in San Francisco, has been working with Mr. Green on experiments to analyze the effectiveness of the California Votes Initiative, a project to get infrequent voters, especially in poor and ethnic neighborhoods, to the polls.

The grant maker has allocated about $7-million from January 2006 to June 2009 for the project, which helps nine nonprofit groups try techniques such as voter forums, multilingual materials, live phone calls, and working through religious congregations.

One of the project’s major goals is to analyze how effective each method is and share the findings with other grant makers.

“As we developed this initiative we realized that Irvine didn’t have the resources to conduct voter outreach to all infrequent voters,” says Amy Dominguez-Arms, program director at the foundation’s California Perspectives program. But, she adds, it can collect information that will help ensure that “whatever resources are spent in this area can be spent most effectively.”

Irvine published a report last September, “New Experiments in Minority Voter Mobilization,” highlighting some of its initial findings. It plans to publish another report in late summer to analyze voter-outreach efforts for the presidential primary election in February and a state primary in June, and in 2009 on next November’s contest.

Preliminary results from the February election confirm previous findings that personal contacts — for example, canvassing or volunteer phone banks — work much better than indirect tactics such as direct mail or prerecorded phone calls, Mr. Green says.

“What’s nice about these particular results is they suggest that groups that were previously ineffective when using direct mail or robotic calls, leaflets, impersonal tactics, became much more effective when they switched tactics,” he says.

The Irvine study, and the experiments analyzed by the Yale professors, have concluded that the following tactics work best at getting people to the polls:

Door-to-door canvassing. Dozens of experiments have found that “face-to-face contact with voters raises turnout,” generally producing one extra vote for every 14 people contacted, the Yale professors report.

Irvine also recommends the tactic, adding that it works best when the canvassers are from the neighborhood a group wants to influence and are trained well.

Some phone calls. Phone banks can succeed if the callers use a conversational tone and personalize their message, the Yale professors found. Volunteer callers produce better results than professional ones, attracting one voter for every 38 people contacted — but groups must be prepared to invest time and money to train them, they add. Follow-up calls to people who say they plan to vote in an initial phone conversation can significantly boost turnout, the Irvine study found.

Events. Election Day festivals draw voters to the polls, as do seminars for young people that explain how to vote and why voting is important, the Yale professors found.

Among the least effective tactics:

“Robo calls.” Prerecorded calls urging people to vote have minimal or even zero effect, the Yale professors say. That is true “even when recorded by a person whom voters considered to be a trusted source,” the Irvine study found.

Direct mail or other written materials. Direct mail on average generates only one vote for every 500 recipients, the Yale professors found — although nonpartisan get-out-the-vote mail works better than partisan or advocacy mail. Postcards with polling information, leaflets, or door hangers were also generally ineffective, the Irvine study found, “even when using ‘homegrown’ local voter guides or handwritten letters.”

Mass e-mail. Studies have consistently found that e-mail messages do not increase voter registration or turnout. While recipients of e-mail messages often link to sites where they can register online, the Yale professors say, experiments have shown that they would have registered online anyway.

“Premature” canvassing. Canvassers should not go into the field until four weeks before the election, the Irvine report says. “Voters are unlikely to recall or be influenced by get-out-the-vote messages made several months before the polls open,” it says.

Some of these findings are detailed on the Get Out the Vote Web site of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Mr. Green says the next “gold mine” for researchers is how effective “friend-to-friend mobilization” through online social networks such as Facebook are at getting people to the polls in November.