What every campaign should start with!
Now that you are running for office, what is one of the first things you should do? We started with this question in last week’s newsletter, but upon reflection, I find that there really is something that you could do prior to running for office. This is something that might help you prepare your thoughts, help you decide if you are running, develop your message and get some idea of how you might do, and that is a survey. Starting with a survey might be useful in your initial attempts to raise money (ask us about a new fundraising tool we are offering). If you have some good name identification, donors might find that encouraging. A poll would help you determine what message you put on your website! If you are considering the idea of an initiative, finding out how the ballot title might do is very important as you look to start the effort.
What can a survey help you with? If you get some good results regarding your name identification or your message seems to resonate with the voters, an initial survey can help you raise dollars to the campaign. If you want to see what the results of different advertising are for your campaign, you will have a baseline to start with for comparison.
Action Solutions, via its state-of-the art, automated collection process, can gather responses which is a great place to start at a very reasonable price. Many other companies rely on live phone collection which is much more costly. While we do offer the option of live collection phoning for both landlines and cellphones, many prefer the automated calls because of affordability. Of course, getting a representative sample for your results is very important, and some would argue that the diminishing number of landlines (the primary source of automated calls) would tend to reduce the accuracy of any polling. However, when you consider the average age of the voter, which is about 54 years of age (and also the age range of people who still have landlines) you can still get good representative data from polling to landlines (see the quote below). Additionally, we can augment automated calling with some segment of the live calls as well.
In one set of races here in Oregon, Action Solutions, did a number of polls for a prominent consultant who works in the northwest. Chuck Adams had the following to say about Action Solutions polling products:
“We have used Action Solutions for some polling, and it has been affordable and strategically valuable. Initially, I have to say that I was a bit wary of the use of automated collection for polling, however we had Action Solutions conduct a poll in our Gubernatorial Race complete with weighting and scientific analysis, and it proved to be a valuable tool in evaluating the race. My candidate, with far less name ID, and running against a much more well-known opponent, was ahead in the poll. That was a surprising result, but it turned out to be correct just as the Action Solutions poll predicted. We won and went forward to the General Election. We did another poll with Action Solutions and had them throw in the Secretary of State’s Race. Keep in mind, no Republican has won state-wide in Oregon in over 20 years. So when the poll came back with Secretary of State Dennis Richardson winning over his Democrat opponent, it did cause a bit of skepticism, but again, the Action Solutions Poll was accurate. Dennis Richardson won! Action Solutions polls will continue to play a role in campaigns I advise since they are affordable and allow for the collection of data that helps shape key strategies. I would recommend them!”
Action Solutions can provide your polling needs complete with scientific analysis of the results. Please call Jeff Kubler at 503-914-1082 or email to jeff@actionsolutions.net.
