You can access the NationBuilder Election Center to acquire voter data for the 50 U.S. states. It generally takes about a week to get data into your nation. You can also load your own data into NationBuilder for elections throughout the world.
Here's how NationBuilder helps you organize a digital field campaign:
- Use the Advanced search tool under the People tab to query people who have voted in several previous elections. These are your likely voters whose support level you want to determine.
- Click the + button at the top of the search result and chose an existing list or create a new list for your selected voters.
Phone banking
- Create multiple lists of people you want to phone bank, and then share them with volunteers who will be doing the phone banking. Don't share the same list with multiple volunteers, or they'll be calling the same people.
- Phone bankers can call people straight from the control panel by loading their list and clicking Call Mode (to phone bank from the control panel, volunteers will need intern access or above).
- Print a call sheet from any list for those phone bankers without access to a computer. They can record information such as support level directly on the paper, and then enter it the control panel later using data entry mode.
Canvassing and turf cutting
- Turf cutting splits up your list geographically into small enough groups that a couple volunteers can reasonably be expected to knock on all the doors.
- Click on the map pin icon or "Map view" on a list to start turf cutting. You'll almost always want to sort by address when saving a list via turf cutting.
- Once you've spit your list into several geographic chunks, click on Print sheets and select a walk list format to download and print a PDF walk list to hand to volunteers.
Support levels
- Support level is recorded on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 is a strong supporter, 3 is a possible voter, and 5 is someone who strongly opposes you.
- An eligible voter who has a support level of 1 or 2 will count towards the number of yes votes shown on your dashboard.
- NationBuilder can help determine whether or not someone is eligible to vote for you if you have your campaign settings such as district, City and State configured. Double check you have this information entered by clicking Settings > Political > Office.
