Persuading Voters with Deck

Deck's persuasion list is a combination of our support, turnout, and partisan elasticity scores. We analyze the distribution of scores in your district and create preset persuasion targets. In this article I'll go over some general recommendations for how to persuade voters with Deck. Each district and each strategy will be different so these are more general recommendations. You should customize Deck to what works for you!

If you have more questions about Deck or this article, send us an email at help@deck.tools or use the blue chat icon in the bottom right corner to chat with us directly.

Before editing any other fields in Deck, be sure to select your contact method first. If you create a list and then change the contact method, your edits will be reset. Choose your contact method to edit by our contactability model's found at the bottom of our filters. You can see all filters by clicking "Show filters" underneath the outreach method buttons. Selecting mail for example will narrow to people more likely to have a correct address. Selecting text will narrow to people more likely to have a correct mobile phone number and less likely to unsubscribe from a message.

You can also use our contactability model to remove likely incorrect addresses or phones from an existing list by selecting voters with a high likelihood of having an incorrect phone or address, exporting that list to Votebuilder, editing your existing list and removing the Deck list from your list. This will ensure you're existing lists are the best possible lists.

Deck creates a big list of every persuasion target in your universe. But this list might be too big for your campaign's outreach. To narrow Deck's list, use Deck's scores to create tier one, two, and three persuasion outreach. Tier one outreach might look like a more narrow support range and turnout range to target people with unknown support who are likely voters. Or if your campaign is focusing on building name recognition with active voters, you could widen the support range and narrow the turnout range to only target the most involved voters who'll help you get the word out. After you've created your persuasion universe tiers, export the lists to Votebuilder to start contacting voters.

For a refresher on Deck's scores look here.

You can also filter by score by scroll to the bottom of Deck's filters and editing the list by size directly. Click the pencil icon next to the number of people in your list. Under this icon you can shrink the size of your list by a specific metric. For example, if you select turnout and cut your list in half, Deck will sort your list to find the people most likely to vote.

One good way to use these scores is to narrow the support range to only voters most likely to support your campaign and then shrink your list by turnout score to the size you want for your outreach tactic.

You can also edit your Deck lists by demographic. Say, for example, you are endorsed by an issue group like Planned Parenthood or a union. You can put together a persuasion phonebank for your Planned Parenthood or Union volunteers based on the demographic groups they target. For your Planned Parenthood phone bank you could include only women or target lower income voters for union volunteers interested in talking about economic issues.

You can also filter your persuasion lists by voting method and history. You can filter by past voting method to target people who voted in a specific election or by partisanship. Maybe you've been endorsed by an elected official who won a 2020 primary. You could set up a mail list of your persuasion targets who voted in that primary and send them mail with information about that endorsement. Or launch a digital ad by boosting a video with the other elected official to your persuasion list.

You can always boost digital ads to your selected universe using Deck's digital ads tool. Learn more about how to launch a digital ad here. Remember you need a list of at least 1,000 people to launch a digital ad. Get help linking your Facebook to Deck here.

You can also export lists to Votebuilder by going to the export tab at the bottom of your Deck list. Deck will ask you to save a list into a Votebuilder folder with access to the Deck API. From Votebuilder you can build your text, walk, knock, or call lists and export the list for other vendors. Set up your Votebuilder integration here.