Why Relational Organizing?

How campaigns can amp up their voter contact with relational in 2022

Thinking about running a relational program in 2022? You’re in the right place, and we love the way you’re thinking. It’s in every campaign’s interest to talk to each voter in the most effective way possible — and relational organizing is a way to supercharge the effectiveness of your conversations with voters.

I’m Davis, Senior Product Manager for Digital Organizing at PDI. In the coming months, I’ll be writing a series of blog posts about relational organizing and its applications to elections in 2022. To kick us off, let’s get started with the question: why relational organizing?

The biggest reason is that relational contact is the most effective form of voter contact.

Cold phone banking produces contact rates that average around 3–5%. That makes sense — most people are not going to pick up the phone for unknown numbers. And when they do pick up the phone, it’s easy to write off a brief conversation with a stranger about an election and move on with your day. As campaigns rack up contact attempts sometimes into the millions, and voters remain unmoved, it begs the question — how can we best optimize our resources?

Relational voter contact, on the other hand, meets people where they truly are: in their lives, embedded in the relationships and values that give it meaning. Not only is a voter far more likely to pick up the phone or engage with a text message from someone they know, the message holds more impact when it’s coming from a trusted friend.

The evidence bears this out, but it’s also intuitive: we care about the things that matter to the people close to us. If a friend takes the time to tell us about an election that is so important to them that they’re spending their free time volunteering for it, we listen. That election may become part of how we support our friends in what they care about, in the same way we might grudgingly attend a community theater production our friend is passionately involved in — even when we don’t care for theater all that much ourselves. People who know us are also more likely to understand the challenges we’re facing in our lives, and can point out specific ways the results of an election might ameliorate or worsen those challenges. Lastly, our friends are in the best position to follow up with us, to chase us to action in organic ways and hold us accountable.

Social pressure, accountability, and connecting an election to the values and life circumstances of an individual voter all fall into place when the messenger about that election is a known and trusted friend.

There’s ample evidence to back this up — when the Ossoff campaign put relational volunteers and paid relational canvassers on a phone bank of just their friends and family, the contact rate averaged around 70%. Better yet, an analysis of that program found that turnout increased by 3.8% for voters within the relational network, much higher than the average effect of traditional cold methods. Other studies considering turnout effect by mode of contact across multiple campaigns found the same thing — that relational contact outperformed all other modes of contact.

Interested in running a relational program on your 2022 campaign? Get in touch with our team to talk about getting started. And keep your eye on this space — my next post will discuss the nuts and bolts of getting started on your relational program.