New Tools & Techniques

Since the beginning of the year, there’s been substantial energy and investment by us and many others in innovating, and in expanding the progressive technology ecosystem. That means many new apps and methods of voter contact and volunteer organizing, some backed by firms like Higher Ground Labs, used Virginia’s 2017 elections as a testing ground.

Distributed Canvassing

Our own product team saw Virginia as an opportunity to pilot a new ‘Distributed Canvassing’ tool on MiniVAN — and reached out to a group of field organizers working with the Virginia Coordinated campaign to partner on the pilot test.

Essentially, Distributed Canvassing with MiniVAN saves campaign organizers time by completely eliminating the need to “cut turf” in VAN. Users setting up a distributed canvass select a universe, a MiniVAN campaign, and assign a # of doors per canvasser. Then, canvassers simply type a list number into MiniVAN, and they are automatically assigned doors to knock based on geolocation. The MiniVAN app already saves time and resources by cutting out the need for all night printing and packet creation sessions, and this tool takes it a step further by cutting out the need to cut turf entirely. This tool actually came out of our annual hackathon, and the team called it #KillTurfCutter.

The feedback we received from this test was overwhelmingly positive — and the field organizers who utilized the tool were most excited about the time savings from no longer needing to cut turf. One organizer stated after the pilot that without the tool, they had spent an entire day cutting turf, and another day printing it into packets, and was excited that Distributed Canvassing will soon “make both processes obsolete.” This would result in saving many thousands of hours, especially during critical GOTV windows.

Connecting Third Party Apps via the Innovation Platform

One major goal of ours is to enable progressives to run sophisticated, multi-channel organizing campaigns. In Virginia, we served as an organizing hub and powered the movement of data between campaigns, organizations, and the different voter contact tools they use — facilitating millions more voter contacts beyond door knocking and phone banking. Since 2014, we’ve integrated with over 200 third party apps to better equip campaigns with an array of multi-channel organizing tools — and this cycle we rolled out integrations with dozens of powerful tools, including ones widely used like Hustle and Revolution Messaging.

This year, more campaigns than ever experimented with new peer to peer contact tools, text messaging apps, chatbots, and volunteer organizing tools to get out the vote like never before.