📋Signature Gathering📋

By Trish Hyde

With all petition packets notarized, validated, and turned in to the Secretary of State on March 18th, this year’s candidate signature season has officially come to an end. This season gave us at Open Answer the opportunity to work with some great candidates and to further hone our signature gathering skills and processes. However, as a trusted partner, we heard from a number of campaigns that this year also brought unique challenges from poor communication from paid firms to record low validity rates. We know this year was not smooth sailing for many, and with it came a number of reflections and learnings.

• Start gathering early. While we often encourage campaigns to invest early in qualifying for the ballot before the caucus even happens, both for peace of mind and to save money in the long run, we understand this isn’t possible for all candidates. Even if a campaign decides to forgo paid signatures and is sure they’ll qualify through the caucus, it never hurts to at least have a few volunteers collecting in the district early on. This is for two reasons; first, signature gathering volunteers will serve as the face of the campaign before caucus to drum up further support. Second, if the candidate does not qualify in the caucus, the campaign already has the infrastructure in place to scale up a more robust signature program without having to scramble to find notaries or wait for packets to be printed.

• Validate early and often. The last thing a candidate and their campaign staff want is to realize a week before signatures are due that the stack of 2,000 signatures they have has a validity rate of 30%. At Open Answer, even when the campaigns we work with choose to do their own validation, we do daily spot checks of validity rates to ensure that any common issues are caught early and can be corrected in the moment. 

• Tailor your strategy to the district. Having worked in a range of districts for a variety of seat types, we can confidently say what works in Broomfield may not work on Denver’s Westside. While this may seem obvious, many fail to take this into account and find themselves wasting time knocking on doors with 5% contact rates. While targeted doors produce the highest validity rates and are often the best option, they may not always be the most efficient depending on the time of day and neighborhood. Instead, if the incumbent has strong name recognition and the area has more established party alignments, site-based canvassing can be more fruitful and still produce high validity rates. 

• Work with a trusted firm. This year, we were contacted by a number of campaigns to come in late and fix the work of other firms. At Open Answer, we don’t take this trust from our partners lightly. We know that as signature gatherers, our mobilizers are often the first faces of campaigns that many voters see and we do everything in our power to ensure, signature or not, that it’s a good first impression. We also have robust quality control policies in place that allow us to see validity rates closer to those of volunteers than to other paid firms.

We’re immensely proud of the work our team did during this signature gathering season and feel so much gratitude for the campaigns that chose to work with us. Hopefully some of these reflections will be useful for the next cycle and we’re looking forward to supporting even more candidates then.