Monday was about a Republican technique; Wednesday was bipartisan; today will be a Democratic technique.

Traditional voter registration techniques are shotgunned at best.  Volunteers stand at malls, go to concerts, or go door-to-door in a neighborhood hoping to find people who aren’t registered.

In looking at Texas, Erez Cohen, formerly of Mapsense and Apple Maps, knew there had to be a better way.  As a volunteer for Tech for Campaigns, he served as the team lead on creating a tool called Map the Vote.  The full story is here; the short version is:

• Take a dataset of all addresses
• Subtract the addresses that have registered voters at them.
• Take the resulting dataset of addresses without registered voters and display them 20 at a time to volunteers, with the ability to record results in the app, getting the necessary materials to those interested to register.

Erez reports that more people elected to register than not– once they have a face-to-face conversation.  It beats the heck out of malls, concerts, and unfocused door knocking.

This suggests a few lessons:

Direct marketing wins.  Oh, sure.  Our pray-and-spray mass marketing brethren puff up for each Super Bowl and wax poetic about brand impressions sans results.  But when you want a person to do a thing,  you ask them to do it directly.

In this case, it’s face-to-face; it can be mail, phone, email, text, even fax if you want to go retro.  The more you can meet a person on their terms, the better off you will be.  Throughout marketing history, all media started as mass marketing, but became more useful when you could address it minutely.

Skilled people want to donate their skills.  They wanted to do a mapping project – they recruited a product lead on Apple Maps who wanted to make a difference.  You can too.  On your file are advertisers, copywriters, marketers, tech wizards, designers, etc., etc.  They’ve been giving money, because that’s what you’ve been asking for.  What if you asked for volunteers like Erez who can give you something unique?

I’m working on a couple of campaigns this fall.  And I can tell you I’m spending way more time on the one where I’m the email marketing project lead than the one where I’m phone banking.

If you don’t have the tools you want, build them.  On a technical level, I’m nowhere near these folks.  But in 2008 when I wanted to see how political inclination affected our responses and our messaging, I exported the federal election donations database (which you can do here), imported it into our database, then deleted all the records that had a “new record” day of that date (because any record that had already been in our file would have a previous day for its creation date).  Voila – instant data append.

That’s a lie.  It was not instant.  In fact, it was a pain in the hindquarters.  But it got me the data I needed where it needed to be.

Hacks like this allow you to determine usefulness.  Once you’ve proven usefulness, you can create a fast and better way to do a thing.

Nick