Peer-to-Peer

INTRODUCTION TO PEER-TO-PEER

Peer-to-peer campaigning is built on three principles:

1. The more personal a contact, the more effective it is in turning out voters.
2. People are most strongly influenced by people they know and people that are similar to them.
3. The most effective way to reach potential voters is to go to the places where they live or hang out.

Most field programs in the past were based on the assumption that young Americans were not receptive to political appeals, however research done over the last decade reveals that young voters are just as affected by political contact as other age demographics.¹ While this research tore down one assumption, it confirmed another: personal contacts are much more effective than impersonal methods. The findings of Green and Gerber showed an 8-10% mobilizing effect from door-to-door (in person) contact and a 3-5% effect from calls made by volunteers. Other less personal contact methods such as calls made from professional phone banks, leafleting, and direct mail all yielded a mobilizing effect of 2% or less at a dramatically higher cost-to-vote ratio. ²

A person is influenced the most by their family, friends, and neighbors. These social bonds increase the pressure to say yes to a request and carry the strength of trust. The eminent social psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University uses the following example in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion:

Take, for instance, the growing number of charity organizations that recruit volunteers to canvass for donations close to their own homes. They understand perfectly how much more difficult it is for us to turn down a charity request when it comes from a friend or a neighbor.³

This principle applies not only to charity requests but to political requests as well, from registering someone to vote to turning them out on Election Day.

People are also more likely to comply with a request made by someone that is similar to them. For example, you are more likely to do something that is asked of you if the requester is dressed like you, and you probably will not realize that it had any effect on your decision. Cialdini highlights a study from the 1970s where “marchers in an antiwar demonstration were found to be not only more likely to sign the petition of a similarly dressed requester, but also to do so without bothering to read it first.” ⁴

When it comes to electoral participation, young voters “need the authentic encouragement of a peer to become a participant.” ⁵

The greatest challenge in reaching young voters for traditional field programs is finding them. Millennials move more frequently and are more likely to rely solely on a mobile phone than older generations.⁶ The key to reaching this important demographic is to go to the places where young people live and hang out. University campuses, concerts, cultural and community events, parks, sporting events, progressive churches, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and shopping centers are all places that campaigns can engage peer-to-peer with young voters. As Michael Connery described in Youth to Power, “concert halls and bars became the progressive equivalent of how evangelical churches are used by the conservative movement.”⁷ The key is to contact and engage young voters using the context of their own lives.

PEER-TO-PEER TACTICS

The ideal location for peer-to-peer outreach will have a large concentration of young people and an environment that is conducive to socializing and communicating. A great way to find out where the best opportunities are is to ask your young supporters: nobody knows where young people hang out better than a young person. Here are some examples:

• High traffic areas of college and university campuses – Outside the entrances of the library, student union, residence halls, and large classroom buildings. It is important to not focus solely on a single location but to periodically switch locations so you reach a variety of different people.⁸ A successful tactic that many Young and College Democrats chapters have used is to help students move in to their residence halls during the first week of school and use that opportunity to talk to the students.
• Outside of sporting events – Talk to young people as they enter and exit a stadium for a sporting event. Using the principle of similarity mentioned earlier, have your organizers wear clothing representing the home team.
• Community and cultural events – For example, in Phoenix there is a First Fridays art festival on the first Friday of every month. The Young Democrats of Arizona reserve table space at the festival and have been extremely successful collecting voter registrations, petition signatures, and email list sign-ups.
• County fairs and 4-H events – In rural areas county fairs provide a great opportunity for reaching rural youth, which is one of the hardest demographics to reach. 4-H clubs are also very popular with rural youth.

Tabling is a very popular tactic among campus organizers due to it being particularly effective on college and university campuses. However, tabling can be effective anywhere that allows you to set up space in a high-traffic area as long as it is not so crowded you are completely drowned out.

The most common mistake made while tabling is for organizers to just remain seated at the table waiting for people to come to them. The main purpose of the table is for visibility and to hold campaign materials. While an organizer should always remain at the table, other organizers should only use the table as a home base and spend their time out in the crowds engaging young people.

The campaign should also prioritize the actions that they want people to take, whether it is registering to vote, signing a petition, signing up for an email list, or completing a vote pledge. Once a person has taken your priority action, this may be your foot-in-the-door for secondary and tertiary actions. Be careful not to be too aggressive with people, be polite even when someone blows you off, and always thank someone for taking an action. You want to ensure that people leave with a positive impression of the campaign.

In addition to your general campaign materials, the table should also have plenty of voter registration forms as well as any other technical forms depending on your jurisdiction (for example, in Arizona there are forms to request a ballot by mail or to sign up for the permanent early voter list). Your table should be fully equipped as a resource for any election needs, including the ability to give polling place information closer to the election.

Vote pledges are based on the power of commitment and consistency. According to Dr. Cialdini, “once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.”⁹ A vote pledge asks a voter to commit to voting in the next election.

The vote pledge was the primary tool in the Young Democrats of America organizing arsenal during the 2008 election. The YDA vote pledge was not only a pledge to vote, but a pledge to vote for Democrats throughout the ballot. The young people that signed a vote pledge committed to take that action, and they were much more likely to actually do so in order to be consistent: "Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand." ¹⁰

For this commitment to truly take hold of the signer, the must take ownership of their pledge. This means that campaigns and organizations should not offer external incentives for people to sign:

Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. ¹¹

Using incentives such as raffle tickets or free chum diminishes the sense of inner responsibility, and while it may boost your numbers in the beginning, your results on Election Day will suffer.

An effective vote pledge form must allow you to collect contact information from the signers, specifically their name, address, email, and phone number. Hard copies of vote pledge forms should also include a signature line, since the act of signing a document increases psychological commitment.¹²

Collecting the vote pledge is only the first step. With the information you have collected you can follow up with the people that signed to remind them of their pledge and give them voting information such as the location of their polling place. Following the election you can check the voter file to evaluate how successful you were in getting those people to the polls. Given the difficulty of finding good contact information for young voters due to increased mobility and exclusive use of cell phones, this data is extremely valuable.

David Plouffe’s memoir of the 2008 Obama for America campaign, The Audacity to Win, frequently returns to the importance of expanding the electorate to winning the election.¹³ To expand the electorate a campaign must register and turn out new and unlikely voters.

A campaign or organization’s emphasis on voter registration should depend on the mission and the distance to an election. There are organizations that focus almost entirely on registration, and for them it is a priority up until the registration deadline. A candidate or partisan youth organization will benefit from registration efforts early in a campaign but will be better served focusing on turning out voters as the election draws near. However, organizers should always have registration forms on hand regardless of the timing.

One tactic that has been successful with some youth organizations are Pledge to Reg programs geared towards Millennials that are about to turn 18. Similar to the vote pledge tactic, organizers get 17-year-olds to complete and sign a Pledge to Reg form with their contact information so the organizers can follow up with them once they are eligible to register to vote.

Campaigns should always make photocopies of collected registration forms so the new registrants can be later contacted with election reminders and polling information. Organizers should also be trained to be able to quickly look over a registration form to ensure that everything is complete.

In states and districts with a Republican registration advantage, registering new young voters and following up with them to get them to the polls can be the difference between a celebration on election night and a heartbreaking close call.

The most important aspect of a youth GOTV effort is to convey information to contacts about when and where to vote.¹⁴ In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes a study at Yale University that tested methods used to encourage students to visit the student health center and receive a tetanus vaccination. While information packets with fear-inducing information about the disease had virtually no effect, researchers were able to increase the vaccination rate by 28% solely by “including a map of the campus, with the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.” The interesting aspect of the study was that the students that responded to the map already knew where the building was. According to Gladwell:

The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk – a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career – to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.¹⁶

This same principle applies to getting young voters to the polls on Election Day. Your campaign needs to give young voters the information that puts voting in the context of their lives. A GOTV effort on a college campus that has an on-campus polling location could include a handout of a campus map with the polling location circled with the times that the location is open. You can email young voters that were registered or contacted earlier in the campaign a Google Map with the directions from their registration address to their polling site. At a minimum your campaign should be telling voters when and where to vote.

Successful cultural outreach does not happen overnight. In the past the ‘cultural outreach’ efforts of campaigns and organizations were just “campaign rallies and civic drives in cultural drag, exploiting the culture to attain a specific goal.”¹⁷ Using Malcolm Gladwell’s definitions from The Tipping Point, Michael Connery argues that “a real cultural outreach strategy finds the mavens, connectors, and salespeople within each subculture and uses them to change the entire culture itself from the bottom up.”¹⁸

Biko Baker of the League Young Voters Education Fund highlights some of the errors organizations make in organizing non-college youth. First, campaigns have to earn the trust of young people in low-income communities: “you can't just pop up in a neighborhood and get respect. You have to earn it.”¹⁹ Second, the focus must be more on organizing and less on just promoting your campaign or organization: “Low income communities only respond when they see a real commitment to organizing and local leadership development.”²⁰ Cultural outreach is a powerful tool in organizing non-college youth, but to be successful you need to earn the respect of a community’s influencers and develop them into organizers.

Cultural outreach requires active and continuous engagement in order to be effective. Because of this, many campaigns and organizations ignore cultural outreach and instead focus solely on college students – the low-hanging fruit of youth organizing. By neglecting non-college and low-income youth, campaigns waste important opportunities to expand the electorate with new progressive voters and empower these communities.

Notes

¹ See Friedrichs, Ryan. Mobilizing 18-35 Year Old Voters: An Analysis of the Michigan Democratic Party’s 2002 Youth Coordinated Campaign, 2003.; Green, Donald P. and Gerber, Alan S. Getting Out the Youth Vote: Results from Randomized Field Experiments, 2001.; and Nickerson, David W. Hunting the Elusive Young Voter, Journal of Political Marketing, Vol. 5 (3) 2006.
² Analysis of Green and Gerber’s findings in Friedrichs 2003.
³ Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Quill, 1993. (169)
⁴ Cialdini (173)
⁵ Nickerson (26)
⁶ Pew Millennials Report (32)
⁷ Connery, Michael. Youth to Power: How Today's Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow's Progressive Majority. Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2008. (158)
⁸ Student PIRGs Activist Toolkit (6)
⁹ Cialdini (57)
¹⁰ Cialdini (67)
¹¹ Cialdini (93)
¹² Werner, Carol M., Jane Turner, Kristen Shipman, F. Shawn Twitchell, Becky R. Dickson, Gary V. Bruschke and Wolfgang B. von Bismarck. Commitment, behavior, and attitude change: An analysis of voluntary recycling. Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 15, Issue 3, September 1995. Pages 197-208.
¹³ Plouffe, David. The Audacity to Win. New York: Viking, 2009.
¹⁴ Gerber and Green 2001 (4)
¹⁵ Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Back Bay Books, 2002. (97)
¹⁶ Gladwell (98)
¹⁷ Connery (156)
¹⁸ Connery (157)
¹⁹ Baker, Biko. Doing REAL work with Non-College Youth. FutureMajority.com. March 4, 2010.
²⁰ Baker, 2010.

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory

For youth organizations, the concept of peer-to-peer campaigning is nothing new. The Young Democrats of America have used peer-to-peer as the core of their campaigns for years, and organizations like the Bus Project have been innovating in the field with such methods. The Obama campaign embraced peer-to-peer as the most effective way to get voters to show up to the polls, especially new and infrequent voters. As Plouffe says, "the best way to get new people to caucuses and polls was to have a family member, friend, or neighbor ask them to go."

Peer-to-peer served multiple purposes for the Obama campaign: turnout and GOTV, list-building, and persuasion. Using peer-to-peer to build strong organizations in the states was elevated in the Obama campaign more than in presidential campaigns in the past:

This time I believed that our state campaigns should be the driving factor. Registering voters, person-to-person persuasion, building strong local organizations, boosting turnout where we needed to, and gathering as big an e-mail list as possible would be more important than advertising to our ultimate success. It is much more effective to throw late-stage surplus funds on TV than to field operations, which need time and infrastructure to grow.

Peer-to-peer grows organically, and as such it takes time to coalesce into an effective state or local organization. Friends, family, and neighbors recruit friends, family, and neighbors, who in turn reach out to their own networks. Young voters talk to and organize other young voters at the places where they live and hang out. The Obama campaigns state organizations were built on person-to-person outreach and trust, which made them very strong and cohesive as they grew.

Trust and similarity make for effective organizers:

We believed local people talking to their neighbors, friends, and family, to address these doubts, could create a permission structure whereby voters rationalized, 'Well, you're supporting him enthusiastically . We think alike, live the same types of lives. You see something in him, and that's important to me.'

The campaign's message is much more convincing when delivered by a trusted person or someone who seems to be in a similar place in life. They Obama campaign took advantage of this by making sure every supporter was equipped with the right message:

Through e-mailed talking points, postings on the website, and conversations with local field organizers, our volunteers were stressing the same arguments Obama, Biden, Ax, and Gibbs were delivering on any given day. Our philosophy was that John from Durango needed to be as current on the campaign as the candidate was. We wanted to build a message-delivery army in perfect harmony from top to bottom.

Because this organizing was being done by volunteers and supporters, and these supporters were encouraged to be unyielding in their efforts, they were able to focus on non-traditional voters and not solely a traditional campaign universe:

Our supporters' involvement couldn't end at making calls or knocking on doors from preapproved lists; they had to approach everyone they could, no matter their electoral history, and make a personal case for why their targets should support Obama. It was the surest way to expand the electorate in our favor.

The Obama campaign proved to many doubters what youth organizers have been saying for years: peer-to-peer wins elections.

Check out the other posts in this series:
Young Voters in The Audacity to Win
Technology in The Audacity to Win

The October 2009 CIRCLE report has been released about college students and voting. Here are some of the findings:

• Students can be diligent voters with high turnout, both by absentee ballot and in local voting.
• Students who can vote in their home state or their college state are strongly influenced in that choice by the closeness of the presidential election.
• Even in the internet era, in-person voter drives reach many students who would not otherwise vote.

The report was based on a peer-to-peer voter drive done at Northwestern University during the 2008 election. During this voting drive, campaigners encouraged students from Presidential swing states to register back home as opposed to in Illinois. Students contacted by the campaign chose to register back home and vote absentee instead of locally by an 8:1 ratio. Of the students that registered through the drive, 80% voted.

I have mixed feelings about encouraging students to vote absentee over locally. For most students, the political decisions that are going to have the greatest effect on their lives will be made at the state and local level in their college district. State legislatures decide university funding, and that in turn determines tuition increases. City ordinances can have a big effect on students. Back when I represented students at Arizona State a number of student-opposed measures were passed through the Tempe City Council.

Encouraging students to vote back home in a swing state makes sense to the Presidential campaign, but it has it's cost in other political areas. I'm also concerned that this sends a message that the only really important election is the Presidential one every four years and discourages students from building the habit of voting locally and being an active and engaged part of the civic community.

The drive at Northwestern University, analyzed here, offered each student a choice of registering for local voting in Illinois (the college state) or for absentee voting in their home state. Absentee voting was encouraged for students from swing states. Students from non-swing states were mildly encouraged to vote in Illinois. Students from swing states showed a dramatic preference for absentee voting in their home state, over local voting in Illinois, by an 8:1 ratio. Even students from other non-swing states preferred absentee voting in their home state over local voting in Illinois by a 2:1 ratio.

What is troubling is that the students that were contacted that were not from swing states were only mildly encouraged to register locally. Once again this appears to be a situation where the campaign only cares about the Presidential election and ignores the importance of local races. While at the Presidential level it makes sense for people to vote in swing states, it doesn't make sense to not strongly encourage students to register locally when neither state is highly contested.

On the bright side, the campaign showed that students are reliable voters when engaged by campaigns, most effectively through peer-to-peer contact. It also showed that absentee voting drives are possible and can be effective.

A troubling finding of the report is that absentee voting is error-prone:

16% of applicants for absentee voting were not enabled to vote. In 1/3 of these cases, an error was made by the applicant, and in 2/3 of the cases the error was made by county boards of elections. Most errors by applicants could be prevented by adding minor annotations to the application forms.

However, even with the errors the success rate of the campaign was extremely high.

There is a lot of good information in the report, as well as an evaluation of the methods used by the absentee voter drive campaign. It's definitely a must read for people involved in organizing college students.

I'll end with a question for the comments: what are your thoughts on where students should be encouraged to register and vote?

As I mentioned yesterday, if Day 1 at YDA was all about internal business and caucuses (activities which do, btw, continue throughout the conference), then the second day was all about action. As I've written in the past, YDA is still undergoing a transformation from a networking organization that provided manual labor for state parties and candidates into a chapter-based field organization focused on peer-to-peer GOTV of the often neglected youth vote. Day 2 was all about pushing that peer-to-peer program. Here's Tony Cani, YDA's political director breaking it down:

As Tony explains, the vote pledges - and the establishment of metrics for attaining pledges on the state level - are the focus of the day. The pledge cards - which declare the signatory's intention to vote for a Democrat in the fall, is really just the entry point to a whole series of "touches" - via text message, facebook, phone calls and door-knocks - that end with the person pulling the lever for Obama in the fall. It's also a way for YDA National and YDA chapters to measure their work - providing valuable information about the capabilities of the organization as well as data that can be used for fundraising purposes during the next cycle.

Most of the day is structured around trainings in peer-to-peer- organizing as a way to gather vote pledges. These include community service projects (the Democrats Work model), concerts and festivals (the MFA/Head Count model), campus organizing, online organizing (with a focus on Facebook and state blogs) and more. The day was capped off with a field exercise in which 10 teams competed to gather the most vote pledges as possible - online and on the streets of downtown Nashville - in the span of one hour.

Not everyone was thrilled with this use of YDA time. As I've written before, not all YDA members and chapters are bought-in to the new, peer-to-peer model, and there seemed to be some resistance to the idea of the vote pledges. At the YDA conference I attended in New Hampshire last Novembe, at the YDA Fall Conference, very few attendees participated in the field trainings. Instead, many chose to ditch YDA and canvass for their preferred presidential campaign. This time around participation in field training activities seemed to be on the rise, though still below a majority of conference members. The culture of the organization - who it's members are and how they view YDA's place in Democratic politics - continues to change, but it seems like they're still a ways to go before everyone drinks the peer to peer Kool Aid.

This is probably the best "news" piece I've seen about how Sen. Obama is turning out young voters in record numbers. It's not just technology and it's not just star power. It's a real commitment to field organizing, and making sure that young people are targeting their fellow youth. In other words, it's all about the peer-to-peer organizing.

This is the real message that needs to get out there because this is the strategy that campaigns, the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC need to learn if they want to replicate Obama's successes in down-ballot races.

The program will air on Current TV tonight at 10pm Eastern. You can also grab it here.

Reporter: Mr. Harrison, with all that's going on in the world today, why did you decide to focus on this (Bangladesh)?"

George Harrison: "Because a friend asked me to help."

From a press conference for the Concert for Bangladesh, posted in a diary at The Daily Kos

The first show that I successfully volunteered for with Music for America was a huge rock festival on Randall’s Island in NYC, in July 2004. I was excited to see how MfA worked, and how I would work with it. I went online and read up on all of MfA’s “issues”; I was familiar with most- the insane War on Drugs, the skyrocketing costs of education and healthcare, reproductive and civil rights, and the importance of youth participation- but I wanted to get MfA’s take on each, which basically meant looking at the issues in terms of youth and culture.

The next day I made my way to the venue and met with the other volunteers. I was the only male volunteer, and at the ripe old age of 25 probably the oldest. We gathered up our materials and made our way through security and inside the massive grass and dirt fields that housed the festival. I was pretty nervous as we setup our materials and arranged the stacks of voter registration cards. Even though I usually don’t have any problems talking with strangers I generally don’t like going up to random people and trying to get them to talk politics with me. I’ve always been politically focused, and I’ve always felt contempt or boredom from many of the people I’ve tried to talk politics with, so I wasn’t exactly excited when I was given a clipboard full of registration sheets, a box of issue cards, and was asked by the volunteer coordinator to go out, along with four of the young women, to the long line that had formed outside of the grounds to talk with kids and register as many as possible. The girls didn’t seem as nervous as they jumped at the opportunity to go, which emboldened me a little, given my macho older-brother ego- I wasn’t about to let a couple of younger girls show me up!

I came onto Music for America’s forums to tell their Communications Director, Mike Connery, about the research that I had done, and to try and see if they’d be willing to help me apply it.

My idea was to create a multi-media CD that would replicate the agenda-setting and priming effects that Iyengar had demonstrated. I thought that if we could convince, trick, or bribe young people to take a look at a CD that contained multimedia relevant to the campaign, that we could have a huge effect on youth turnout. MfA had a huge outreach operation, was extremely well funded, and I thought that it had the ability, if it desired, to get such CDs into the hands of tens of thousands of young people.

Mike wasn’t convinced. He challenged me to justify a project on the scale I was talking about, forced me to consider production time and cost, and pushed me to solidify my ideas on how something like this could work. He did not dismiss me, even though he had never met me and didn’t know me at all. He engaged me, he challenged me, and he encouraged me to continue on, which I did.

Mike had two main criticisms of my ideas.