Voter Registration Mail Chase

The Civitech team supports mail chase programs by helping organizations plan their chase efforts and providing data enrichment. This document outlines steps our team can take with organizations completing mail campaigns with Civitech.

Mail Batching

Mail can be batched in geographic clusters allowing coordinated chase efforts with volunteers in a particular region. Even when chase is happening virtually via text and phone, this approach increases volunteer engagement by allowing volunteers to reach out to people in their own communities. Depending on the size of the mail campaign, the Civitech team will plan batches based on:

Geographic region: Matching with where volunteers are located
Quality of data: Matches with phone, email, or other contact info
Prioritization of targets: Can be based on partisan score or recency of interactions
Scale of program: Generally we recommend starting with smaller batches and ramping up

Chase Strategy

The partner organization will be supplied with the list of mail recipients and updates on the delivery scans for the outbound mail. This enables the organization’s volunteers and organizers to chase recipients based on the status of the delivery. Generally for text and phone chase, we’ve found that a sequence similar to the following works best:

Immediately following mail receipt - Text message to confirm the message was received and answer questions. The TextOut team at Civitech can manage all steps of the text-chase program, or the campaign team can send the chase texts themselves.
Second follow-up text - Text message to number that we received no response from in the first round of text-chase
Follow up call ~ 1 week later - this would happen after texting if no response was received
1-2 week following phone call - Text message to verify that the recipient returned the voter registration form.

The logistics of recruiting, managing, and coaching volunteers will be managed by the partner organization. Civitech will supply supporting material for volunteers including a FAQ and draft script that will be modified by the partner organization.

Organizations can choose to have Civitech manage their text-chase program by signing up with TextOut. We can also help train your campaign team or volunteers to use TextOut to send the texts themselves.

Data Updates

List Preparation

Once the target list has been finalized and enriched by Civitech, aggregate counts summarizing: zip code, phone numbers, will be shared with the partner organization. Working with the partner organization and our printer, batches for the list that will be prepared by Civitech and delivered to the printer.

Delivery updates

Civitech will provide updates of outbound delivery scans (up to) twice a week and reports on return scans for voter registration forms once a week to the partner organization. Data delivery schedules can be adjusted as needed depending on the volunteer chase schedule. These updates can be provided up to two weeks following the final batch.

Voter file updates

Updates to the Voter file are generally only made available every 2-3 months, but possibly more often depending on the state. Civitech will update internal databases to provide updates on verified registrations for the target list within 1-2 weeks following the receipt of an updated voter file for each state. Subsequent updates will be delivered up to 9 months following the campaign.

Additional considerations

If the first chase effort begins before there will be enough time to get a reasonable amount for return scans, no exclusion will be made in the groups of people that received the first text
Civitech can provide the partner organization with an updated list the morning of the phone chase call date that excludes the individuals that have already returned forms. Alternatively, these people can be asked to take other action if they pick up the call.
For each of the mail batches, we exclude randomized records from what we'll send to the partner organization for chase. This will allow us to measure the difference between chase vs no chase on the response rate.