Create Walk Packets
WebElect/CampaignCalendar > WebElect/PrecinctAnalysis > WebElect/EnterWalkResults
Create Walk Packets
The following was a script for the old Microsoft MapPoint walk list feature. They do not apply to the current Google Maps integration.
To create walk packets with the current Google Maps option, see the demo video on the left side of the http://webelect.net home page title "Create Walk Packets"
I’ll be demonstrating the power of Web Elect and it’s integration with Microsoft map Point for creating walk packets to be used when you and your volunteers canvas neighborhoods during your race. To follow this online demonstration, simply follow the mouse pointer on your screen as I point and click through the software and explain the process for creating walk packets.
We begin in Web Elect with the Query Targeting tool. This tool is one of the most popular features of web elect (and actually is somewhat of a backbone of the system since it is the starting point for many other final products). The query-targeting tool is explained in more detail in some of the other demonstrations. Some of the other tasks that we’ll be doing here are also seen in some of the other demonstrations. For now we will just be focused on creating walk packets for neighborhood canvassing and I’ll demonstrate how the query-targeting tool is used to do this.
So from the main menu of webelect.net I start by clicking on the Query Targeting link up here on the top left of the page under the “voter info” module.
This brings us to a new page that allows us to make our initial query. This page is set up with several query options on the left side and a list of voter precincts on the right. For this example, we are looking at state house district 47, so all of the precincts listed on this page are the precincts within this district. WebElect is tailored to your individual race so that your voter query targeting will only include registered voters who are in your district and are your constituents. So that basically explains the layout of this page.
Now. In this case, for our query, we want to create walk packets for two of the precincts in district 47 that the volunteers will canvas on a coming weekend. The two precincts selected are HIL 551.0 and HIL551.1 - - These are highlighted by clicking them with the mouse.
Next, we’re going to select voters from the two main political parties, and from the quote “other” registered voters as well. - We’ll start by selecting all republicans who have voted in any 2 of the last 4 general elections, and I do this by simply checking the boxes that correspond to the last four general election cycle years which are the years 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006. Then I pull down the drop down menu to select “Any 2+”. This pulls your republican constituents who vote, but are not what we call “SUPER” voters. So you want to be sure to target them on your walk lists to make sure they get out and vote on Election Day. - Next we’re going to select Democrats who haven’t voted in any of the last 3 primaries but all of the last 4 general elections, so I check the last three election cycle years for the primary elections, and then on the drop down, I select “none”, but on the next row, I check the boxes for 00, 02, 04, and 06 for the last 4 general election cycles and then on the drop-down I click “ALL”. This filters out the pure general election or “super” general election democrats. It can be reasoned that these voters can be potential “Swing” votes, based on their past voting habits.
- And then finally, we will select any “other” voters who have voted in three of the last four general elections, and again I do this by clicking the boxes to make this selection. The “OTHER” category includes all registered voters who are not registered as a republican or democrat. So if they are registered “independent” or under any of the minority parties (green party, libertarian, etc), they will be in this category.
So, among these three broad-based groups of voters, this will be our base criterion. You will notice at the top of the page there are some other selection criteria available that we did not use in this demonstration to keep the time of the demo reasonable. However, these can be very powerful in maximizing the effectiveness in use of your volunteers by targeting specific groups of voters, whether delineated by age, or race, or gender.
Now after making our selections on this page, I click on the “NEXT PAGE” button at the top and it brings us to a second page for the query targeting too. You can see at the top of this page that it gives us some statistics based on our selection criteria on the first page. First it shows that within those two precincts, there are 865 voters that meet the voting criteria we specified. It also shows that these voters are living in 560 households within these two precincts. Naturally, some houses contain more than one voter. Now this page allows you to further sort through the 560 households that resulted from your initial query. This is done by selecting the radio buttons for the desired voter attributes represented in this matrix. The default for all of these criteria is "Ignore" which means the attribute is not considered. For an example, I’m going to filter out the houses we have in our “don’t Mail” group, the voters that we’ve marked as having “early voted”. And then any houses that are in our “oppose” group. Although the reasons for doing this are somewhat self-explanatory, let me give the basic explanation why I want to filter these out. And that is that these voters are not going to vote for you, so there is no point in knocking on their door and wasting 3-5 minutes of you or your volunteer’s time. The “groups” that I just mentioned are built and maintained by your campaign and they will be explained in another demonstration.
This voter targeting page is another one of the very powerful tools of web elect. You will see this again in some of the other demonstrations how useful this page is and it’s effectiveness for optimizing your campaign.
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You can see that these additional selection criteria reduced the number of houses from our initial query down from 560 down to 505. It saves your campaign from knocking on 55 doors or leaving campaign flyers at 55 houses that you know are not going to vote for you anyway.
Now to plot this to map point, I just take the mouse and select that output option “Plot to new Map” and run the report. This is going to plot those 505 voter addresses directly into Microsoft mappoint. It displays the location of each of the homes by pulling up a map of the area and showing a pinpoint on each home. Now that we can see where our targeted voters are located, we can use the tools within map-point to create our walk packets. We’ll start with the “zoom in” feature to zoom in a little closer on an area like this section of the map. Then we use the “free-form” tool to draw the boundary line for the walk packet we want. This is where the free-form tool is so useful for creating walk packets because neighborhoods and streets are not usually square blocks. The freeform tool allows you to create your boundary line based on street proximity, not just geographic location. If you have a limited amount of time for campaigning due to weather, other events, or whatever, you can look for the tight clusters of voters in a neighborhood and focus your efforts on these areas to make sure you get to the maximum number of voters in the shortest amount of time.
Now, after completing this shape, a window opens up and we see there are 89 houses within the boundary line. This seems like a good number of houses for a team of volunteers to visit so it’s a good size for a walk packet. Then we just click on the “print list and map” button in the window and that will print out two copies of the street map with the pinpoints. With this system you won’t need to do any photocopying of Ran McNally maps or extra work to get the walk packet ready. WebElect will also print out two copies of detailed walk lists by address, which we’ll see at the end of the demonstration. But going back to the map, You can see the color of the pin points have changed from black to red so we know that we’ve already included those houses in a walk packet.
Now we can create a second walk packet and again, we’ll look for streets that will be easy to walk. Then we just use our mappoint free form tool again to draw a boundary around the streets in the next packet we want to create.
This time we can see that there are 108 houses in that packet. This is kind of a large sample but for the purposes of this demonstration it’s fine. And again, we’ll click the “print list and map” button telling the system to print two copies of the street map for that packet and two copies of the walk list for the houses on those streets within that boundary.
And let’s just create one more for the demonstration. I’ll be following the same steps as for the first two. You can also see that mappoint uses different colors for the pinpoints of each new packet created, so when you’re finished creating all of your walk packets, you have a map of several different colored pin points. This way so you can see what kind of your packets were in that precinct when you created them.
And there’s our last packet with 99 addresses included in the boundary line I drew.
So now we’ll click ????????????? to view the actual walk list (DOUG – what do you click here to get to the walk list). And here it is. This is a list that will print out for each boundary line that we selected in the previous step. In this example, I blocked out some of the information for privacy reasons, so the actual report does not have any of the gray boxes you see here, but shows the actual data. As you can see we’ve got the street address for each home in the boundary along with the names of the registered voters in those homes that met our selection criteria. To the left of each name listed are the letters S O U and NH. Theses letters mean S is for SUPPORT, O for OPPOSE, U for UNDECIDED and NH means NOT HOME. These letters are here for your volunteers to circle as they make the rounds and greet your constituents. At the end of your canvassing for the day you can take this information collected by your volunteers and enter it into your WebElect database. And this is the reason for the bar code out to the right. A bar code scanner is used to scan in the “status” of each of the voters you visited. After a day of walking you can know just who your supporters are, who will vote against you, who is undecided and who was not home. You use all of this information with the help of webelect to track these voters and ensure that your campaigning time and campaign spending are both as effective as possible Going back to the walk list, you will see that along with the voter name, we can see their party affiliation, their race, their age, and their gender. The final two numbers listed by each name are what we call voting scores. The voting score is a number between 1 and 99 that is calculated using a proprietary logarithm developed by Webelect to predict the likelihood that someone will vote in a particular election. Regression analysis has been run against this formula to verify its prediction accuracy. The two voting scores listed are the voter’s primary election voting score and their general election voting score. These will be explained in more detail later, but for now just remember, the scores range from 1 to 99 with 99 being the voters that have been registered in the past 8 election cycles and have voted in every single election. We sometimes refer to these folks as “super voters”. If you can lock in their support, you know you will also get their vote. Also on the walk list you can see some additional information for some of the voters included. This information comes from the group management module of web elect. Group management is explained further in the ??????????????demo. But on the walk list here, we can see any groups that contain these voters. For example, Mary there is in our “support” group meaning she supports our candidate. When meeting her at the door, you can tell her you appreciate your support and ask if she can recommend you to her friends and neighbors. ON the next line we see Claude is a CPA, a UF alumni and an NRA member. Again this information comes from the group management tool in web elect. You can see other names further down the list are members of different groups. The grouping tool is an important feature of webelect. It supplies you with information printed on the walk lists that you can use to connect with the voters when they answer the door. Also if the person contributed to your campaign, it will list their contribution amount on the walk list so you can be sure to thank them when you’re at their door.
That completes the demonstration for creating walk list packets. Thank you.