Advantage Walk Training Tool

With help from Jessica Liebing, I built this to go alongside my e-guide on Field Tactics & Organizing. My hope is that you will find both helpful in your own campaign.

 

Here's the training tool:

What did you think?
Let me know here or at caitlin@huxleystrategies.com

 

Paper walkbooks are a scam. The purpose of knocking doors is obviously to sort voters into buckets, and build a relationship with IDed persuadables over the 7 (or more now-a-days) required connections to ensure they remember your name on election day. Without a good data collection process it's impossible to actually follow up with them in a timely fashion. Without an app like Advantage, knocking doors is practically an exercise in futility.

For years, I have been giving individual trainings to candidates and volunteers on the Advantage system. But volunteers are both numerous and sporadic. You don't know if they will be using the system while they walk for 30 minutes, or for years. We needed a way to easily train volunteers; both on the walk app, and on how to knock doors appropriately.

With my short, 19-page e-guide on Field Tactics & Organizing we were only half the way there . This self-guided training brings us the rest of the way. It is broken down into 3 sections:
  1. Video Tutorial: a quick 3 minute overview of the Advantage App. Peppered with a few best practices, this should be all you need to walk your first door. It's short enough to be watched, or re-watched, in the field.
  2. Self Guided Tour of the App: a bare-bones recreation of the Advantage app for volunteers to experiment with, without needing them to submit fake surveys, or risk accidentally marking a voter as deceased! 
  3. Practice Scenarios: 7 common scenarios that new volunteers will definitely find confusing. How do you mark a house with an aggressive dog? what about a passive aggressive teenager who obviously doesn't vote? Advice on these situations, and more, are given.
Election season approaches fast, and political campaigns move at breakneck speed through the phases of organization building, voter identification, persuasion, and GOTV. With mail-in ballots and early voting, it'll be time to Get Out The Vote before you know what hit you. Soon enough you'll find yourself with little time to train new volunteers, and will need something help you along in the process. If you find this useful, feel free to share with your volunteers or your network.
This training tool, and the Field Tactics guide were developed to go hand-in-hand with our guide on Building an Organization, and the example Six Month Field Plan. Soon, you'll be well on your way to victory in November!