What's Your Field Plan?
8 min
Table of Contents:
1. What is a Field Plan?
2. Big-Picture Field Plan Goals
3. Establish Your Persuasion Universe
4. Interface with Each Part of the Campaign Team
5. Determine Field Tactics
If logistics are how you win a war, then your field game is how you win elections.
What is a Field Plan?
The short answer is that it’s how a campaign navigates interacting with voters. The longer answer is that your field plan – and the team behind it – is responsible for speaking with voters, convincing them to vote for a candidate, and turning out supporters. All campaigns need a strategy that effectively uses the field team’s time, money, and energy. And this comes in the form of a field plan.
Your field plan is a comprehensive blueprint detailing the exact goals, targets, deadlines, and tactics needed to meet your vote goal and win. It is one the core component that keeps a campaign on track for success. After all, how can you win if most voters don’t know you’re on the ballot?
Here’s how Democrats can make the most of their campaign field plan.
Set Out Your Big-Picture Field Plan Goals.
This will allow you to take a bird’s eye view to determine how you will use resources throughout the campaign.
To set big-picture goals, consider three key numbers:
projected turnout
win number
vote goal
The projected turnout is the estimated percentage of eligible voters who will cast a ballot in an election. This approximation depends on many factors, such as past turnout or outside factors that may drive turnout up or down. The win number represents the actual vote count you need to win. In a two-person race, the win number is half the projected turnout plus one voter. The vote goal refers to the number of votes you’ll aim for to win the election. In a two-person race, campaigns should set a vote goal of around 52-55% of the vote.
Pro-tip: For more on determining a race’s projected turnout, win number, and vote goal, check out our course Calculating Your Vote Goal.
Establish Your Persuasion Universe
Calculating your campaign’s projected turnout, win number, and vote goal allows you to establish your persuasion universe. This is a list of people you believe would support your campaign if you were to contact them through canvassing or phone banking. Knowing the size of your persuasion universe is helpful for figuring out the number of volunteers the campaign needs. It also helps determine the amount of phone calls or door knocks the campaign needs to complete before election day.
For more instruction on establishing your persuasion universe, check out our course Running a Persuasion Field Program.
Once completed, here are your next steps:
Set periodic goals based on your persuasion universe.
Update targets for voter contacts, as well as voters persuaded to support your candidate.
Set goals for volunteer recruitment and shifts completed each week.
Determining those goals largely depends on your district and its election history. For example, there will likely be a higher canvassing goal in an urban district than a rural one due to drastic differences in population, but keep in mind that the voters in rural areas are also often more difficult to reach. They may rely more on yard signs and phone banking to reach more voters in a given time period.
Our course on Targeting Voters shows you how to identify and strategize around the specific voter groups that make up your persuasion universe.
Interface With Each Part of the Campaign Team
The field team should stay in constant contact with every other team on the campaign, as well as the candidate and campaign manager. The field team’s work impacts each aspect of a campaign, including communications, digital, and fundraising.
Additionally, the field team must be up-to-date and able to communicate effectively on the candidate’s policy priorities. Volunteers and staffers must be prepared to discuss their policies with voters, as well as answer questions about the candidate’s background and values. That requires field teams to work closely with communications and press teams.
One of the biggest responsibilities of any field team is to stay engaged with supporters of the campaign. Canvassing and petitioning events provide great content for social media. Field teams serve as the first point of contact for voters to the campaign. This means they should work closely with the digital and fundraising teams to increase the campaign’s visibility in the community.
All of these dynamics between field teams and other campaign teams will live in your field plan.
Determine Field Tactics
There are many ways for a campaign to contact and engage with voters. But the most common tactics field teams use throughout a campaign are canvassing, phone banking, and texting. Here are the pros and cons, remember that the best field plan is the one that works for your campaign.
Face-to-face conversations with voters are the most effective means of persuading voters and mobilizing supporters. Having direct communication with voters fosters connection and makes people feel heard by the campaign. It's important that building community with supporters is a priority of a campaign’s field plan. At the same time, canvassing is resource-intensive, and can eat up a lot of time. Door to door canvassing might be effective, but it's not always efficient, and can limit the number of voters a campaign is able to reach in any given period.
Phone banking is a great alternative that can help reach voters en masse when canvassing is not plausible. It is also a good option to turn to when canvassing is inaccessible for volunteers. Calling voters can quickly gauge their support, and mobilize them before Election Day.
Texting is a relatively newer way to reach voters. There are two main texting methods campaigns use: blast texting and peer-to-peer texting. Blast texting, or sending the same text to many numbers at once, is effective for getting the word out about an event. Though peer-to-peer texting requires one volunteer to hit “send” for every message, it allows for more individualized conversations with supporters and other volunteers. NOTE: Texting is changing fast, with big implications for the political space.
Our course on The Fundamentals of Field Tactics has more information on each of these tactics campaigns use to contact voters.
The bottom line is that the field team is the real-life, public face of any campaign, and a field plan must be set early to make the team run effectively. Field is paramount for reaching and mobilizing voters, and turning them out on Election Day. And a well-planned field program can make all the difference in the outcome of an election.
Want to keep learning? Check out the following courses that are great places to launch your campaign and field program:
