Canvassers Interactions – 3 Tips

Whether door-to-door fundraising or advocacy work, it is imperative that your canvassers have the tools they need to engage subjects and keep the conversation moving forward. If your canvassers fail to engage potential supporters, your run the risk of not meeting your orgs. goals. Here are 3 tips to ensure your canvassers are having meaningful, on-point conversations and gathering the information you need to succeed:

1. Figure out what data you need to collect:

First things first, figure out what data is imperative for your organization to collect; what are your main goals and what do you want to get out of the conversations your canvassers are going to be having? Once you have that information, you can create your “rap”. After your rap is created, you need to figure out the best way for your canvassers to communicate it! We recommend ditching the clipboards and using a mobile canvassing solution like the one Grassroots Unwired offers.

2. Ensure your canvassers have the right talking points:

Using a mobile canvassing platform with survey branching abilities is a game changer. This tool will ensure that your canvassers are staying on track and have talking points for wherever the conversation goes. Grassroots Unwired’s branching feature can be configured to skip to specific questions based on the subject’s last response. Additionally, our question restrictions feature tells the app whether or not a question displays at all depending on specific criteria you enter; for example, if your data specifies that a person isn’t registered to vote, the app knows to show them the voter registration slide, if they are registered to vote, the app knows to skip the voter registration slide and get right into the candidate discussion.

These mobile survey features make the conversation more targeted for your subjects. It also drastically reduces the time it takes to train canvassers as the app will do all the work for them – all they need to do is ask whatever question pops up next on their tablet.

3. Send a follow-up email:

Acknowledge your donors with a Thank You email, keep them involved. Even for those subjects that did not donate that day, reach out to them and get them involved. With the Grassroots Unwired platform, you can send emails based on participant responses as soon as a survey is submitted from the tablet. Our email restriction feature allows you to create groups based on just about any variable in your survey and send specific emails out accordingly. So send supporters one email and undecided voters another.