Collecting Local Data

You will collect important data through the MinVAN app. You will have the option of making notes in the app as well. Once the data and notes from a completed turf are committed with your leader’s report to NHDP, they become part of the statewide VoteBuilder database. Summary reports will be available to your group through NHDP. The Voter Outreach Committee will also review all data and notes from the conversation canvassing project, to see what trends and patterns emerge. 

In addition, you will learn things that you may wish to record for local use. For instance:

You knock a door and learn that the voter listed for that address has moved away. You mark “moved” in MiniVAN. That ends the data collection in the app. But the person who lives there now is very happy to meet a Democrat and wants to know how to get involved. You have a long conversation about U.S. foreign policy and then about local school funding. This person wants to give voter registration information to some other people in the building. You both end up feeling that you want to talk more at another time. You exchange phone numbers. 

You can record all that in the MiniVAN “Notes” section, and in time, your group leader can retrieve it along with all the other notes from the VoteBuilder database and share a copy of the spreadsheet. Your group may decide that’s sufficient.

Or you may decide that your group wants to maintain its own local notes, especially if you want to return to some residents and follow up. NHDP/Organize NH persuasion canvassing may benefit from the data you provide, but it’s not set up to send the same canvassers back to doors. If your group wants to build relationships for sustained engagement in your community, you may choose to keep track of some data on your own. It’s optional—not essential—but we offer it as a practice consistent with the purpose of conversation canvassing.

Here’s a sample (set up as a shared table or spreadsheet all canvassers can use):