Kyle
A startup in Nebraska is looking to optimize the footwork of door to door canvassers for political campaigns. The startup, appropriately called Footwork, couldn’t come at a better time as the United States prepares for a Romney vs Obama battle for the Presidency.
If you’re thinking that footwork takes canvassing to the Internet, you would be incorrect. Political candidates and those behind political causes know that in order to really make an impact, door to door canvassers are still a huge part of the equation.
Instead, Footwork helps organizers of canvassers optimize the canvassers route. In the past the door to door canvassers would typically have to jump out of a van, take a clipboard with the par affiliation data and find the house numbers that match printouts. With Footwork the data about the resident’s party affiliation is plotted on a mobile app on a smartphone typically supplied to the canvasser.
Now, with Footwork in hand there’s no need to match addresses over 100 sheets of paper.
Tegan Snyder and Phil Montag are the co-founders of Footwork and both gentlemen have lots of experience in grass roots political canvassing.
“When a canvasser is going door to door in today’s world they get a map and a list of voters by street. It’s up to them to determine what path to take and which houses to hits first,” Montag said to Betakit.com
Although most people who get involved in political canvassing do it for the cause itself, more and more political action committees and candidate campaigns have resorted to sites like Craigslist to recruit temporary workers. This sometimes results in canvassers pencil whipping signatures for a petition, or lying about actually visiting a house, or block of houses, just to get paid.
Footwork provides real time location monitoring for the canvass team leaders so you know that the paid canvassers are actually out the knocking doors and meeting people and not just pushing a button on an app.
The final piece to Footwork is social integration. Canvassers can now share their location is their social media channels which can at times spark conversation and awareness of the campaign.
Footwork charges 1 cent for every house that the canvassers visit using the app. Snyder and Montag say that with Footwork in hand canvassers are seeing up to 30 houses per hour, thus making it cheaper than mailings, traceable and mor efficient.
There are some competitors out there but none seems to incorporate all three functions in such a robust way.
Footwork is in Beta now, and plans to be in a full public release in August when the election races begin to heat up, and also just ahead of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, which will have a huge startup presence this year
Linkage:
Find out more about Footwork here
Source: Betakit
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