November 18, 2015 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Canvassing can quickly spread awareness of a cause and raise money from a large swath of people. Large nonprofits like Greenpeace use canvassing to quickly acquire donations, signatures for petitions, and email addresses from large numbers of people. Smaller advocacy groups also can use canvassing to build relationships with community members and “assess who could be a more engaged activist,” says Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy. The canvassing interaction is an opportunity to ask “Is this somebody who could become a leader in the local chapter?”
But doing it right requires nonprofits to invest time to train canvassers and money to purchase appropriate technology, according to “Seeding Justice,” a new report by the Center for Popular Democracy.
“Even though so many organizations use canvassing, most organizations are not succeeding at raising money” using this method, Ms. Archila says. “They’re not employing the best tactics and the best discipline. They often don’t have the technology and are not really able to understand the difference among vendors and the consequences of [using] different technologies.”
The Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that partners with 43 nonprofits to help develop resources to carry out their missions, began encouraging its partners in 2013 to raise money from individuals, in part through canvassing. The center published the report to explain the basics of canvassing, outline the best methods employed by their partners, and describe the benefits and drawbacks of different donor databases for tracking donations acquired through in-person appeals.
The report also summarizes what happened when seven of the center’s partners received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Casey Foundation to test new tactics. Although the results differed, a common theme emerged: Effective canvassing costs money.
“It requires up-front investment that can be recovered over time, but it actually can take a good chunk of time to be able to recover it,” Ms. Archila says. “We want to make the case to funders and people who care about the social justice field: These are important investments that can expand the base of people activated.”
Building Relationships
To make canvassing more effective, nonprofits should build relationships with their canvassers, the report says. That means training them, paying them fairly, and making them feel valued as employees.
“In the traditional canvassing model, the relationship was very ephemeral,” Ms. Archila says. “Organizations would just churn through canvassers.” Shifting to a structure “that actually makes the canvassers a smaller but more integrated piece of the organization” improves quality and results, she says.
Investing in canvassers makes especially good sense for nonprofits that advocate for social and economic justice, Ms. Archila says.
“We can’t have a team of people talking to folks at the door feeling disconnected and disconcerted,” she says. Organizations are seeing that, she says, and improving the way they employ canvassers.
