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Gathering Info

Your GOTV efforts should begin well in advance of Election Day.  Over the course of the campaign, your staff and volunteers should be collecting the names and information of voters in your district who plan to vote for your candidate.  At the very least, your campaign should end up with a list of voters that equals 10% of the total number of votes you need to win on Election Day.  Ideally, your list will be much larger, especially in local campaigns, where it may be possible to garner a list with 50% or more of the voters you need.

The means for gathering these names are several.  Your campaign should certainly collect this information during all of its other activities.  During events and fundraisers, be sure to ask for names and information to add to your database.  For many events, especially fundraisers, you will already have this information.  If so, there is no need to ask for it a second time.  Your campaign should also note which voters plan to vote for you during candidate door-to-door campaigning and lit drops, if possible.  Try to gather the name, address and phone number of each of your supporters.

The campaign should also conduct activities specifically to identify supporters to add to the list.  These activities may include phone banks, or even door-to-door, if the campaign has a plethora of volunteers.  One person on the campaign staff should be responsible for maintaining a database of GOTV supporters.  This list should be started at the beginning of the campaign, and may be part of a larger campaign database.  Be sure to add the names of staff and volunteers who reside in the district, and that you only add the names of people who are actually registered and able to vote.

Organize

No later than thirty days before the election, the campaign should have its GOTV team in place.  The get out the vote team should include one GOTV director who is responsible for the overall GOTV effort.  The team should also include the person who is responsible for the GOTV/campaign database, as well as enough staff and volunteers to reach each voter on your list of supporters at least once, preferably several times, before the election.  The team should come up with a get out the vote plan detailing the tactics it will use to reach these voters, as well a budget for these activities.

Contact

The key to GOTV efforts is contact.  Your goal is to make sure that each and every supporter that you have identified actually makes it to the polls on Election Day.  In the next installment of this article, we will detail the ways that your campaign should go about contacting these voters, the timeline you should use, and the Election Day activities that need to be performed to make sure that your get out the vote campaign is a success.

Read Part II of this Article