How to give your GOTV efforts a bonus finale

Previously I covered a simple way to knock-up voters on Facebook. Today, it’s the turn of one extra flourish you should always give your get out the vote (GOTV) efforts: what voters should be asked after having voted Lib Dem.

The narrow, short-term, damn the future attitude of course is not to care. Vote secured, ignore them, move on to another voter.

The smart, long-term perspective – remembering the importance of building up a larger core vote and a larger party membership – is to think like the rest of the world thinks. Which is to remember that the very moment when someone has just signed up to support a cause (by casting a vote, giving a donation, signing a petition or whatever) is a great moment to get them to take another step up to help the cause.

So when you send out your GOTV emails and online surveys asking voters to let you know if they have voted Lib Dem, also set up a follow up for those who have voted Lib Dem to be thanked and asked to join the party.

In Mailchimp, for example, you can set up in advance an automatic follow-up to anyone who responds to an earlier email by clicking the ‘voted Lib Dem’ link – so the messages go out without you having to take any time out on a busy polling day to send them. And of course you can also schedule in advance social media messages to reinforce the point.

However you do it, you should do it, because otherwise that very moment when people are most warm to us, having cast a vote, is a moment that goes to waste.*

* Unless of course you have tried it and have hard data that it didn’t work at all. Which isn’t what the admittedly limited data I’ve seen on trying this says – but if more data says ‘not’, then that certainly trumps good theory. And of course the way to get more of such data is to do this…