Canvassing & Phonebanking

Case Study: Door-To-Door Canvass In Northwest Indiana

Northwest Indiana has long been one of the most industrialized corridors in the country. The cities of East Chicago, Hammond, and Whiting, situated on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, are dominated by oil refineries, steel mills, and chemical plants. The BP Whiting Refinery, one of the largest in the U.S., anchors the area—bringing jobs, but also frequent accidents, flaring events, and generations of toxic pollution. These communities are known as “sacrifice zones”—bearing disproportionate burdens of fossil fuel pollution and health risks. Blue hydrogen is made from natural gas, with carbon emissions captured and stored underground instead of being released. It requires pipelines to transport both the hydrogen to users and the captured carbon dioxide to storage sites. JTNWI recognized the urgent need for door-to-door education and organizing to counter corporate narratives and ensure residents’ voices were heard. Launched in June 2023, the canvass aimed to educate residents, capture community concerns, and build local leadership around the MachH2 project.

Make Polluters Pay

Let’s make polluters pay. Come hear the playbook on how a diverse coalition in Richmond, California built on decades of community organizing to secure an unprecedented $550 million settlement from Chevron—without even going to the ballot. There are 132 operating US refineries (as of Jan 2024), that have been profiting, extracting from, and polluting our communities for decades. Join our webinar to gain insights and strategies on how to challenge and win against the opposition, including:

On the declining relevance of digital petitions

Digital petitions are a mostly-outdated tactic now. Both our politics and our media environment have moved in directions that render them less useful. Where petitioning used to be the central tactic in a digital campaigner’s toolbox, the Trump years saw a rebirth of collective, place-based mobilization. They were years of record-setting marches and participatory local-level civic engagement. Plus we’ve seen a renaissance in union organizing these past few years. But still, the relevance of petitions has diminished—related to the pervasive sense that government officials no longer behave as though listening to and representing citizens is a core part of the job. And it’s a reminder that most of our digital behavior is downstream of a small handful of quasi-monopolistic companies. If American Democracy is going to make it through the next decade, we are going to need better elites. I suspect, if that happens, we will happen to see digital petitions make a comeback. In the meantime, campaigners will do the best with the tools they have available—they’ll develop tactical repertoires that fit the changing media environment and respond to the political opportunity structure.

Deep Canvassing Lessons Learned with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) is a statewide membership organization working to dismantle racism, build a robust democracy, and transform the future of Kentucky. For more than forty years KFTC members have engaged in the essential work of bringing people together, organizing across lines of race, class, geography, and often political ideologies, to demand justice and shape a Just Transition to healthy, sustainable, and equitable local communities.

In the fall of 2021, KFTC launched a Deep Canvassing Project where teams of paid canvassers in Louisville, Bowling Green, and Hazard canvassed three to four days a week and had hundreds of conversations using an approach known as Deep Canvassing, which employs radical empathy and non-judgmental curiosity. This strategy invites the sharing of emotionally significant stories and encourages people to process their experiences and perspectives, including uncertain or contradictory views.

Join KTFC to learn more about their deep canvassing efforts, lessons learned, and best practices from their on-the-ground experience. During this webinar, participants will hear from the folks involved on how deep canvassing can be a powerful tool for bringing people into the climate justice movement, how learnings from this work can inform climate deep canvassing programs, and reflections applicable for advocates holding impactful climate conversations across the country.

This webinar will hold roughly 20 minutes at the end for Q&A!

What I learned building self-managing teams of volunteers at Sunrise Movement

Here are some tactics to use to successfully build a distributed voter contact program. In this resource, the Sunrise Movement’s former distributed director shares their lessons learned. Lesson one: Make time for a team launch, which is critically important for setting up a team that will work together effectively, improve over time, and contribute to the members' growth and learning. Lesson two: Create a team charter to serve as a reference during team calls, when orienting a new member, at a relaunch event, or whenever it's helpful to review the team's purpose and norms. Lesson three: Make norms explicit in order to protect against the assumption that everyone on the team enters with the same background, culture, and experiences and should be able to "read our minds" and guess our preferred ways of working together. The team launch and building the charter together creates commitment to the team and work outcomes, motivation for the work ahead, a sense of belonging, and shared ownership over team processes and outcomes.
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