Wellstone Action!

I am working to organize some knock-phobic volunteers. I understand their concerns - they are afraid people will think of doorknockers as intrusive, or ask them difficult, technical questions, or that they'll be attacked by dogs - I had the same fears when I first went out. How do you motivate nervous volunteers to take the leap?

How does one best deal with 'no soliciting' signs/stickers?

How do we teach volunteers to ask questions and listen rather than break into a speech at the doors? I've been organizing for some time and I do sometimes slip into that with somebody who just wants to know what you're doing at their door... but you've pretty much lost them the moment you start your "speech".

These are great questions - keep 'em coming! We can definitely answer these in our upcoming Organizing Tool on doorknocking. But in the meantime, if you have ideas for these questions, please join in the conversation!

My community is a typical suburban community. Many of the neighborhoods are not dense, lots of two wage earner families, also somewhat paranoid about people knocking on the door. Seems to me this is not a good community for doorknocking and I should think about some other methods, like house parties, social networking connections, email, etc. Your thoughts?

1. How do you handle safety? 2. Is insurance advisable? 3. What to do if the person you are talking to has a medical emergency? 4. Do door-knockers accept donations? 5. What data do you code about the contact? 6. How do you prepare the mind and attitude of walkers?

Hey everybody - we posted the answers to these great questions over in our Organizing Tool on doorknocking.

See the answers here

Feel free to add more questions to the mix.

Also, we posted a video blog in response to some of the questions here.

 

What advice do you have for door knocking on apartments? I have knocked on every house in my district, but the rest of my doors are apartments. These are primary voters and I don't want to leave them out. What do you suggest?

Apartments have vexed veteran canvass directors for ages.  Unfortunately, since they require extra resources to access, most campaigns just ignore them.  I say unfortunately, because the populations that are more likely to live in apartments are also (generally speaking) less likely to vote, and, if they were to vote, more likely to vote progressive.  Young people living in apartments frequently have no landline and are therefore often not reached by phonebanking either.  Apartment dwellers are more likely to be highly transient and therefore not registered to vote because they move often.  Apartments are great base building territory for any progressive campaign.

Because most apartment buildings are locked, it's not possible to just go knock on individual doors.  One strategy that has worked well for campaigns is to identify one person who lives in that building to be a "building captain", letting you in to the building and sometimes even knocking on doors with you.  This is time consuming because the campaign must identify a campaign supporter in each building, but a good way to build leadership in your campaign and talk to apartment dwellers.

A less savory but frequently used tactic is sneaking into the building by waiting for someone to let you in.  This can lead to being ejected from the building by a super or building owner and your potential voters seeing you as a nuisance.  I wouldn't recommend this method.

A last resort is always focusing on phoning into apartment buildings when you can't gain physical access to them.  You can target apartment dwellers by sorting your voter file by address and identifying those that have more than, say, five registered voters at the same address.  

Good luck!