Ever since the first time I went door-to-door to talk to voters, armed with a trusty clipboard and paper packet listing doors to knock, I’ve thought: “there’s got to be a better way!” Paper is annoying to work with, and it requires a fair amount of follow-up data entry work. More than that, paper is inherently hard to distribute, which means that paper-based canvasses require a lot of expensive real-world infrastructure: printers, field organizers, field offices.

Turns out, I was not alone in that insight: there has been something of an explosion of new canvassing technologies over the past dozen years or so. I myself have contributed to this movement - in 2014 I launched OpenVPB, which is a website which makes it easy for progressive campaigns to distribute a list of phone numbers to call to any volunteer with an internet connection. This summer, some colleagues of mine at NGP VAN worked together with the DNC to launch Knock 10, a new mobile app that brings this line of thinking to its logical conclusion. To get started with Knock 10, a user downloads an app to a mobile phone, fills out a bit of information, and then gets started canvassing voters, ten at a time. Simple as that!

I think that Knock 10, and the flurry of online-canvassing technologies that preceded it, are marvelous inventions, and I am happy to see them proliferate. Now that we have made so much progress in obsoleting paper-based canvassing, it’s tempting to think that we can reduce some of the costs associated with paper-based canvassing - in particular, that we can do away with, or in any case substantially reduce the importance of, the field office.

The field office is an important place in a campaign’s ground game. It’s where volunteers congregate to team up with one another, collect walk packets, get instructions and maybe a pep talk from a field organizer. It’s also the place where they return at the end of the day to hand in walk packets, swap stories about the day’s adventure, and maybe get a final tally of the work they and their fellow volunteers have done. And finally, it’s quite an expensive resource to maintain: each field office represents a certain amount of rent paid, utility bills for electricity and Internet access, and so forth; it also represents a non-trivial amount of time spent in obtaining leases, installing furniture, etc. Campaigns whose supporters cover a wide geographic area must make a choice between maintaining a lot of expensive field offices, or foregoing the energy available from a bloc of supporters in one area or another.

A technology that reduces the need to maintain field offices, but can still tap the energy of a far-flung supporter base, is an attractive technology indeed. That is a good part of the motivation behind apps like Knock 10. But we need to remember that field offices are more than just a collection of desks and printers. As I discussed above, field offices allow volunteers to team up, get training, and motivate themselves by swapping stories or seeing a final tally of the day’s activity.

The upshot is that it’s not enough for canvassing technology to move information around efficiently. We can develop all sorts of apps that tell volunteer which doors to knock and which questions to ask, and we can make sure the resulting data gets back into the right databases straight away. But the question is, what do we need to do to motivate volunteers, to keep them engages with all the new canvassing technology?

I think that veteran field organizers understand this problem instinctively. What I’ve seen is that a field organizer presented with good canvassing tech will right away start to throw a volunteer program around that tech. What I mean by a volunteer program is just some combination of pep talks, reminders, follow-ups, and so forth. What these organizers are doing, I think, is adding in to the canvassing tech the same social infrastructure that is an inherent part of every field office.

That’s all to the credit of these field organizers, but I think there is more we can do to make canvassing tech more friendly to the volunteers who use it. Gamification is an interesting transitional technology, in this light. My team brought game mechanics to market when we launched Action Center in 2012, and I think these features are still very popular; the thinking is that points and leaderboards and so forth with motivate volunteers to take action. There is something to that, I suppose, but it is relatively thin motivation compared to the rich interaction of a real-world field office.

We can go beyond gamification, to make some of the traditional trappings of a field office - the pep talk, the swapping of stories, and certainly the end-of-day tally - a built-in part of our canvassing apps. We can make it easy to host online canvassing events, which encourage volunteers to do their canvassing in the same time window - in order to help build social cohesion around a canvass. We can even help volunteers host canvassing events at their own homes, effectively creating little pop-up field offices. It might take a bit of training and some precautionary measures to ensure everyone’s safety, but the technology is not difficult. Indeed, once we identify the problem, dreaming up potential technical solutions is really easy. The fact is that we needed a great deal of experimentation in canvassing tech to identify the problem of social infrastructure in the first place.

I’ve already seen some promising moves in this direction, so I think there is clearly some wisdom gathering about this next advance in canvassing technology. Gradually, I think the progressive software industry is coming to learn some lessons about how we bring offline processes into the online space: in the world of politics, the social context of any campaign activity is just as important as the data that activity conveys. Hopefully, the addition of this sort of social infrastructure to existing canvassing tech will help progressive campaigns engage with voters and supporters in new and more cost-effective ways.

Image courtesy of Priscilla Du Preez