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Our Goals
Our goal for the fall of 2012 was to civically engage college age citizens in Boston for the 2012 general election and register them to vote. Our ultimate goal was 200 voter registrations by the voter registration deadline, October 17, 2012. In order to narrow it down a bit, we focused on young people ages 18-29 who live in the Mission Hill area.
Number of voter registrations Number of voter registrations in our target demographic Number of voter registrations per volunteer
To find out how we did, we looked at the data of everyone we registered to see how many people were in our target demographic, and compared the tactics we used on different canvassing days to figure out what methods were most successful. We also did a survey of 43 of the people we registered.
Goal Results
Goal: 200 voter registrations Actual: 154 voter registrations or 77% of our goal or pretty damn good
63% of registrations were target registrations (remember, Target = born between 11/6/199411/6/1983 AND Current Address on Mission Hill )
79% of registrations were people ages 18-29 (so, born between 11/6/1994-11/6/1983 AND Lived either on Mission Hill or someplace else )
Results by day
50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 17 13 Non-target Registrations Target Registrations 39 44 41
11
13
12
Target Registrations
10
5 0
Our Tactics
We used two different tactics to register voters:
Street Teaming (\strt\ tm \i) Getting a clipboard, loading up on voter registration forms, slapping on a volunteer sticker and going to talk to random people on the street.
Door-knocking (\dor\nk\ i ) Having a list of voters and potential voters made up of public information from a database (voter file) and using it as a guide to go up to peoples houses in your neighborhood to talk to them.
But the ability to target that usually only comes with door-knocking
Volunteers
Over all of our events, we recruited 23 volunteers to go out and register voters. Some volunteers only came once, others came to most or all of our events. One of the things we did every time before canvassing was to give a thorough training to every volunteer about how to engage potential voters. For every one of our canvasses, we asked each volunteer to try to bring back 5 filled out voter registration forms.
4.3
Door-knocking
per
2.5
Survey Results
From our survey of 43 people:
18%
12% 6% 12%
Wentworth
MassArt Harvard Medical School Other Schools
Partnering with the business community for National Voter Registration Day
Having fun!
This report created by Dorothy Scheeline with special thanks to Dylan OSullivan for SPSS wrangling. Thanks also to Emily Lonetto for her awesome graphic design skills, Jenara Gardner for being our Communications Manager, Kassandra OBrien for photoing, Kim Niedermaier for data entry help, Mission Hill Main Streets for 10 gazillion things, and Annie Schriber for letting us hold our kick-off event on her porch at the last minute. Most importantly: a giant thank you to the Massachusetts Voter Table for giving us access to a voter file!