Social Distancing Election Canvassing: A Moral Responsibility of Every Politician Amid COVID
The social stigma associated with face-to-face campaigning in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic is endangering the political career of those who fail to adapt to the latest technologies.
In these trying times, the social distancing canvassing strategies are getting traction, as the lockdown restrictions put moral responsibility on the national leaders to play their part in stopping the outbreak of the pandemic.
What are the most effective social distancing campaigning strategies, and how can they be used to win voters? Let’s see.
Through phone and SMS campaigning, you can reduce the physical touchpoints to ensure that no one is getting contaminated with COVID due to your campaigning efforts.
Blended Canvassing to Incorporate Every Tactic Simultaneously
The field volunteers are grounded these days and are focusing more on the phone and SMS campaigning efforts to carry out their jobs efficiently.
This has opened the doors for blended campaigning regimes, where the dependency on any single campaign tactic alone is not promising to drive conclusive results.
An all-inclusive campaign manager is incorporating phone banking to optimize their campaign. Only those people who respond on the phones are being approached through door-to-door canvassing.
But reliance on data has increased with these blending campaigning strategies by manifold. You need to be equipped with the latest voters’ files and the will to pursue the tactic religiously; you also should have an expert team of volunteers or campaign staff that can do it flawlessly.
As the message opening rates can go as high as 80%, blended campaigning is an effective way to encompass a social distancing strategy.
Going digital is one of the ways you can achieve social distancing goals with your campaign to stop the outbreak of pandemic.
Sweep and Collect Canvassing: A New Normal Amid the Pandemic
In order to minimize human contact in the pandemic outbreak, the sweep and collect method is regarded as one of the highly efficient ways to keep contact with the voters.
In most of the states across the United States, sweep and collect strategy is being pursued by the campaigns, especially for ballot initiative measures, in which the campaign staff leaves the petitions at the doorsteps in the collection bags from where the residents collect the forms.
After signing the petitions, people leave them back at their doors, from where the campaign team collects all the material in the evenings.
While this strategy is being pursued in the ballot initiatives most of the time, it is about time that it will also be followed for other campaigning activities, primarily to promote candidates’ tickets to people without exposing them to the risk of getting infected by the pandemic.
Using Technology to Win Voters
To minimize human contacts to stop the spreading of the COVID germs, canvassing apps have also seen a surge in electoral campaigns.
These apps are the all-inclusive platforms to mobilize voters for campaigns of varying natures. While you can use them for increasing voter turnout by creating awareness, you can also utilize them in mending your reputation in case you are facing PR problems.
They are widely used as an instrument of capturing users’ data as well, where this data is being synced with the campaign headquarters in real-time to take the campaign experience to another level.
The problems of social distancing can be solved once and for all by pursuing the campaign’s app in every corner of the world, which will also help the world in battling the deadly disease.
Bringing Physical Touchpoints to Zero
In order to avoid COVID contamination, the physical touchpoints need to be brought down to zero. Even flyers and pamphlets are vulnerable to carry forward the disease.
Lawn signs have emerged as the potential replacement for these physical materials, where the campaigners change the material themselves and install their campaign message on the lawn signs.
As campaigns seek alternate options to canvassing, these efforts promise to deliver the best results without contaminating the world.
Prospects of Relational Organizing in Social Distancing Efforts
Realizing the role of relational organizing has also proved to be fruitful in campaign strategies as per the social distancing mandates.
According to studies, when people are assigned the task of promoting GOTV campaigns in their circles through phone, SMS, or other untraditional means, they are more likely to drive results instead of them reaching out to their circles via traditional means.
This reinforces the concept of relational organizing in modern-day campaigning efforts.
Final Thoughts
Whether it is about using cutting-edge technology to pursue voters digitally or approaching them through other unconventional means, social distancing canvassing has altogether changed the concept.
As per the persisting trend, the pandemic is not going anywhere soon, and politicians who fail to adapt to the latest needs are prone to face the brunt of the general public soon.
