Empower puts building relationships at the heart of organizing, whether you doing friend-to-friend outreach or running a canvassing program knocking on doors. The Empower app is designed to support this mission with tools to help you build, manage and leverage a network of relationship to build power and affect change. Now with the addition of canvassing to the Empower app, there are exciting new possibilities to take a more relational approach on the ground and make the work you are doing even more impactful.
Follow Up With People You Canvass
One way to make canvassing more relational is to use canvassing as the start of a relationship, rather than a one-time transaction. Instead of reaching out to someone on a list once, follow up with that person and use that conversation as the foundation of a relationship with the person who canvassed them or with your organization. That way, if you have a good conversation with someone, you can potentially recruit that person into your program or move that person up an
elevator of engagement. By default, Empower keeps contacts assigned to the person who canvassed them, so you can have the same person reach out for future conversations to build that relationship further.
Neighborhood Canvassing
Asking volunteers to canvass in their own neighborhood or apartment building is a great way to have people engage with people they are connected to in their community, even if they don't know their neighbors yet. If you have a list of contacts you want to reach, you can use Empower's door-to-door canvassing feature with turf grabbing to let volunteers grab turf close to them to start canvassing in their own communities. If you don't have a list, you can also use an open canvassing call to action and instruct volunteers to knock doors in their neighborhood or apartment building to have them start meeting their neighbors and collecting these contacts to build your program. For neighborhood canvassing, a best practice is to keep it neighborhood focused. For example, you can have a community listening session in that neighborhood and use canvassing to recruit people to those events.
Incorporate a Relational Ask
Another way to make your canvassing more relational is to incorporate a relational ask as part of your conversation. For example, with recruitment prompts in Empower, you can ask people to come to a training, join your program as a volunteer to build their own list of friends and family to reach out to, or talk to three of their friends about the issue. You can also get creative about the kinds of relational asks that you make. For example, during neighborhood canvassing, you could ask each person which of their neighbors you should be talking to, then have them make that introduction on the spot to add those people to your list in a much more relational way.
Incorporating the principles of relational organizing into your canvassing can help you build long term power.