Voter Contact and Mobilization

The Campaign for Community Change will organize and mobilize a critical mass of voters in several key Congressional districts to participate in an electoral process linked explicitly to voters' values and needs.

The Campaign for Community Change works with partner groups on the ground to plan and implement the voter contact program. Intensive planning is done not only to ensure effectiveness of the electoral component, but more importantly to move both local and national organizing agendas forward and increase community power.

The Campaign for Community Change engages in a rigorous process to determine the Congressional Districts in which to operate. There are four criteria that the campaign uses to select its targets.  Each criterion is considered carefully to determine the optimal circumstances to engage in a campaign:

• Density – The critical mass of voters from our constituency that are available to make an impact on the election
  
  
• Capacity – The ability of a partner group on the ground to manage and produce a campaign that yields both qualitative and quantitative results
  
  
• Electoral Opportunity – the identified area where the vote of our constituency can be greater than the margin of victory in a closely contested race to ensure that the eventual winner of the election will have to be responsive to the needs of our constituency
  
  
• Organizing Agenda – The relevance of the electoral campaign as it positively relates to the local and national organizing agenda of the Campaign, notably, immigration and health care reforms.

We expect an increase in voter turnout this year because of the heightened interest in the presidential races. We will consider a number of factors in our targeting such as the number and percentage of turnout, voting age population, infrequent and frequent voters, immigrant population, marginal difference and registration. We will target individual immigrant and identified immigrant friendly voters throughout the districts as well as precincts in which the immigrant vote is at least 65% of the registered voters.

The following categories are our starting point to determine the electoral potential and establishment of an overall base universe of voters:

• Unregistered Citizen of Voting Age Population that is Non-Native, Non-White, Asian, Latino and likely to register to vote.
• Legal Permanent Residents who are likely to be naturalized and register to vote.
• Children of Immigrants who are 18 yrs of age and likely to register.
• All Asian and Latino infrequent voters.

1. Base Building – Voter Contact work—to increase the depth of an organization's reach and to expand the electorate via voter registration drives, house meetings, and coalition work.
2. Voter Connection—to be able to establish a link between the organization and the voter. This is based not in convincing, but connecting on a common set of interests and values using various methods such as door-to-door canvassing, phone contact, direct mail, earned and paid media, visibility events, and town-hall meetings/candidate forums.
3. GOTV—this is the movement from the organizing to the mobilizing stage where the established relationships are moved into action in a critical mass that will impact the election. We anticipate moving hundreds of thousands to the polls.
4. Voter Integration—this phase serves as a vehicle for organizations to integrate voters they connected with throughout the electoral cycle into their ongoing organizing work with follow-up phone calls, house visits, meetings, and events.

The Campaign believes in rigorous evaluation of our work to ensure that with each election cycle we become more efficient and effective in unleashing the power of many.  We will contract a consultant to conduct a rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis of our work in 2008.  The Campaign will engage evaluation at the front end to incorporate uniform methodologies; data; uniform tracking; and reporting procedures. This kind of embedded approach enables analysts to better measure the progress of a project from the beginning—allowing for observation of activities as they happen.