CiviSociety

Cross-posted from NDI's DemWorks blog; written by Kate Cyr

“Data is what makes or breaks campaigns,” says Chris Doten, NDI’s senior manager for technology and innovation. “Knowing the voting population, what they like, don’t like, where you should be focusing your efforts -- that’s what drives how candidates and their staff interact with the community.”

Canvassing, an organized system of face-to-face citizen outreach, has long been used by politicians and advocacy groups to encourage constituents to vote, assess the habits and preferences of voters, and gather public opinion data. The time-honored tradition of knocking on doors remains an integral part of campaigns, though new mobile technology is starting to change the way canvassers operate on the ground.

Traditionally, field canvassers navigate constituent interviews with help from hefty question guides. The process can be difficult -- follow-up questions change based on an interviewee’s answer, and finding the right question may mean wasting time on awkward page-turning. Taking notes on constituents poses another problem, as canvassers may record things illegibly or in an incorrect shorthand.

For field organizers in advocacy and political campaigns, the logistics of sending canvassers into a community offer challenges as well. Canvassers may get lost, accidentally cover the same ground twice, slack off during a shift or falsify responses. Organizers have to devote time to creating routes, printing maps and logging canvassers’ data every day. READ MORE »

 

Last month, NDI trained political parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on the use of CiviParty, NDI’s contact management DemTool, which is based on the open source contact relationship management (CRM) system, CiviCRM. READ MORE »

Just wrapped up a great time at #NYCcamp. NDI hasn't participated in this particular open source hootenanny previously, and I was really impressed. We’ve been long-time supporters of open source software, of course, but it’s fun to see all the people together in action. I was invited down because of our work on Aegir,  the open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) system that we've been actively using for the last year. I had the opportunity to share some of NDI’s experiences with CiviParty in the DRC (post forthcoming!) and Ukraine and with The Issues in Colombia. 

There’s a lot of clever ways in which the Aegir community was advancing their project, like DevShop, a develop/test/deploy system, and integrating WordPress (!) with it; it's a really vibrant group. Aegir 3 has just dropped, which is really exciting for us. While the system has worked relatively well over all Aegir had its share of bugs and glitches that make things challenging for us, and the move to Drupal 7 is a big leap.