AdvoKit - Person To Person Politics:

AdvoKit is a Voter ID/GOTV Web application available for free to any organization doing community organizing. The Howard Dean presidential campaign demonstrated that significant political power can result when an online community grows and unites behind a cause. The 2004 Democratic primary proved that people can trump "big" money in our civic lives. In our system of government, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is winning an election. AdvoKit provides the tools to get people out to vote.

Voter ID/GOTV campaigns, when effectively organized, can easily produce a margin of victory for a contested election. The Web, with its ability to facilitate efficient collaboration among large numbers of people, enables, for the first time, volunteer recruitment and Voter ID/GOTV to be performed by thousands, or even tens of thousands of individual political supporters. However, well designed and inexpensive Web tools for managing such an effort have not been available.

AdvoKit

combines manage­ment and tools for the best practices of traditional Voter ID/GOTV campaigning with the power of social networks and friend-to-friend outreach methodology to produce a campaign system with unprecedented political power, that costs almost nothing, and strengthens civil society - indeed, relies on it. Friend to friend outreach has been shown to be five to ten times more effective at identifying supporters, per contact, than targeted phone banking, and twice as effective as neighbor to neighbor outreach. The secret to AdvoKit is its ability to recruit, manage and effectively utilize large numbers of volunteers - all performing high-yield friend to friend outreach within their communities.

This graph shows how an early version of AdvoKit enabled a campaign to effectively utilize more volunteers using high-yield friend to friend contacts. The average volunteer produced 50% more identified supporters despite making fewer calls.

The E-Volve Foundation is a strategic partner to both public interest issue groups and citizens active on the Internet by modeling new forms of civic involvement and citizen action. E-Volve is empowering these communities with innovative Web outreach tactics, organizing techniques and electronic tools. AdvoKit represents a convergence of the visions of Pat Dunlavey and Dan Robinson. Pat is veteran of community-based grassroots organizing in Massachusetts, where he experimented with and ultimately proved the power of voter outreach through a network of trusted relationships - friend to friend (see graph above). Dan, CTO of the E-Volve Foundation and a software industry veteran, was involved in regional organizing in California for the Howard Dean campaign. 2004 is a watershed year for democracy in America. Will Americans take their country back? Or will corporations and big media consolidate their grip on power, and use it to further erode civil society? The importance of democracy-enabling tools such as AdvoKit cannot be overstated. AdvoKit will be open source/free software. Look for it in July, 2004. More information available at voter2voter.org. If you are interested in using AdvoKit, or supporting its development, please contact us.