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Here are some handy tools for letting folks know who their elected officials are and what elections are coming up.
Charli Oswald and I volunteered at the March 16, 2010 GOP Precinct Caucus to be our party's two "co-committeepersons" for our precinct. We weren't sure what all that entailed but we committed to figuring it out and doing it.
One of our duties is to help people in our precinct know about upcoming elections and encourage them to vote for our party's candidates. We created some helpful brochures which I'll show you below. You can download them and modify them for your own use if you'd like. I'll give you some details too on what we did with the brochures. In short, we walked the precinct with some other volunteers, visiting every house, introducing ourselves and handing the brochure and other materials to everyone. Feel free to contact me for more information or if you have some ideas you'd like to share.
Peggy Knight
Precinct 7162730001
Arvada, Colorado
peggyGOP@comcast.net
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Primaries
About half of our precinct is within my HOA (Homeowners Association). We
have a nice community newsletter, which folks do read, so I wrote an article for
the newsletter that was essentially the Primaries brochure. A few weeks
before the Primaries, Charli and I and one other volunteer then walked the rest
of the precinct, handing out the Primaries brochure , the piece about
Publications, books, etc. and just a few candidate brochures. We went to
every door, not just the registered GOP households. We had our "walk-list"
so we knew the names and party affiliations in each household. We
introduced ourselves and explained that we had created the brochure for them, so
they could see everyone running in the Primaries (i.e. both parties), the map of
our precinct, and Charli's and my contact information. People (regardless
of party ) were pleased with the information and we believe had the impression
we wanted them to have, "We are your neighbors, we are the face of the GOP, and
we are friendly, bright, and helpful." Seemed like a reasonable first
step.
General Elections
We did almost the same thing as we did in the Primaries. We put an article
in the HOA newsletter with essentially the same information as the General
Election brochure. This time we walked the entire precinct, i.e. including
my HOA. We had the help of 4 other volunteers too. We found it best
to go as pairs, so one person can be reaching into a bag to get a packet, and
the other making notes on the walk-list. We handed out slightly different
packets to households depending on party affiliation. It was fun to greet
folks we had met when we conducted the Primaries walk. We took the time to
chat with folks, sometimes just catching up on neighborly news, sometimes
listening to someone's thoughts about the state of the country. We did
this too in the Primaries Walk. Again, our purpose was to a large extent
"public relations" for the GOP and to establish this "local presence" of the
GOP. The General Elections brochure had everything that was going to be on
the ballot for our precinct, including the judge retention elections and the
ballot measures.
After The Elections
We created one more piece after the elections. This is "Our Elected
Officials" and includes everyone we in our precinct must elect at some point,
including those less well-known positions such as the Park and Recreation
District Board of Directors and County School Board. We listed who fills
the positions and when the next elections are. We wrote an article in the
HOA newsletter with essentially that information and e-mailed the brochure to
some key volunteers throughout the precinct so they could forward to their
neighbors or print out and give it to them. In hindsight Charli and I
should have followed up with the volunteers to confirm they did distribute the
information, as it really is a handy list. Finally, our neighbors have in one
place a list with all their elected officials and the terms of
those officials.
As you can imagine, this effort could be more than many precinct "co-committeepersons" want to or are able to commit. But Charli and I believe it was the right thing to do and had the time, skills, and money to do it. We also understand that our precinct is fairly small. We have 192 households. We used Office Depot to copy the materials we wrote, and our costs came to about $120 which we paid for personally. To give you an idea of the time involved, preparation of the General Election materials (writing, organizing into packets) took about 20 man-hours. The General Election precinct walk (entire precinct) took 26 man-hours.
The precinct map in the brochure started out as a hard-copy image which we were handed in a training session. We scanned it, annotated it in PowerPoint, then saved it as a jpg. I expect you will have to do something similar. We're in Jefferson County, so your county may already have a jpg image of your precinct for you to use. Keep in mind we'll have re-districting this year, so your precinct boundaries may be changing.