Organizing a Campus to Vote — a Concise Guide

Campus Compact’s 2008 Campus Vote Initiative and Your Vote, Your Voice offer a host of resources to help campuses conduct nonpartisan efforts to register their students to vote, help them think through relevant issues, and encourage them to volunteer in the campaigns, whatever their political beliefs. But how do people at any given campus start the process? And how do staffers or volunteers engage other schools? Here are suggestions for organizing your own and other campuses.

For your own Campus

Use existing organizing resources. Skim the resources available on this site. The site offers great examples, explanations, and templates so you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. Use the concise Campus Checklist, which draws on both the Campus Vote Initiative and the complementary Your Vote, Your Voice to summarize key approaches and list key offices or departments to contact.

Integrate into current activities — then expand your efforts. Find out what’s already happening on your campus so you can fill gaps and strengthen existing efforts. Build a team involving as many key offices, departments, and individuals as possible. Most campuses have some logical starting places — the community service center or the office of student affairs. But anyone who is enthusiastic enough can help. Some schools have full-scale voter engagement efforts launched by top administrators or senior professors. At others the initiative came from a campus librarian, counselor, secretary, or engaged student. You may not know all the key people at first, but one office can usually lead you to another. If you get enough energetic people involved, together you can engage all the necessary offices and departments, and follow up to ensure they’re doing all they need to.

Help your school fulfill its legal mandate. Campus Compact’s Campus Vote Initiative is based on tested approaches, so engaging your school should be straightforward. If a key department or office resists, remember that postsecondary institutions are legally required to do their best to distribute voter registration forms to each degree- or certificate-seeking student they enroll, so you’re helping them to take that mandate seriously. Most state registration deadlines are the week of October 6: See the League of Women Voters election site, Vote411.org, which is also a great resource on national and statewide candidates and campaigns.

Help students volunteer — whatever their political views. As you’re ensuring that students register, you can also create opportunities for them to reflect and act on their political choices. This site and Your Vote, Your Voice offer tips for encouraging students to volunteer with whichever campaigns they choose to support. This involvement can be particularly important, because once students start volunteering in these kinds of efforts, they tend to continue throughout their lives. You can help by giving out the websites and phone numbers of relevant national and local campaigns and helping students connect with groups like the College Republicans and College Democrats. If students feel that the winner of their state is a forgone conclusion, they can volunteer with national campaigns by calling voters in other states. While your first priority is to make sure your school works to register all eligible students, your second is to engage students with this election in all other ways you can, while respecting their diversity of political beliefs. The more you reach out, the more you’ll make it likely that both aspects succeed.

Start now — don’t wait till fall. Organizing may be difficult during the summer, because many faculty and staff and most students are away. But to register and engage as many students as possible, schools will need a structure in place before students return for fall classes. That’s particularly true if you want to engage them (and register them to vote) during programs like first-year orientation. So start as quickly as you can, draw in more people as you go, and plan easy ways for entering and returning students to jump in as soon as they arrive on your campus. You might even give the project an official name, like Campus Election Engagement Team, so people who participate can get credit for their service to the campus.

A few more suggestions:

Establish communications. To coordinate within your Election Engagement group, set up regular mechanisms to share information through email, phone calls, meetings, and online interactive tools.

Contact Campus Compact. Tell your local State Campus Compact that you’re working on this, so they can pass on relevant information and help you work with nearby schools.

For People Organizing Across Campuses or Statewide

Here are some additional suggestions if you’re organizing other campuses or working statewide. Start with the suggestions above, since they’ll tell you what needs to happen on the campuses you work with.

Choose schools to engage. Once you have a sense of the available resources and useful approaches, figure out which schools you want to engage. A group from several St. Louis community colleges, for instance, will be collaborating with the Washington University service learning office, working to involve all the two- and four-year campuses in that city.

Identify potential contacts. Your initial contact list might be just the people you know at nearby campuses. But you can also draw on suggestions from your local Campus Compact state affiliate, since they work with people across schools — often service or service-learning directors. If no one knows anyone at a particular campus you want to engage, start with the community service, student affairs, or student government office. Don’t forget nearby community colleges, whose students may be more overcommitted and less connected to their campuses, so often vote at lower rates than do those at four-year schools. If you can help involve these students, they may be particularly well-positioned to engage their non-college peers.

Approach the schools and build a plan. After you’ve drawn up your initial contact list and skimmed the resources available on Campus Compacts’ 2008 Campus Vote Initiative site (including the campus checklist) and Your Vote, Your Voice, start contacting people. See what efforts are already going on, which offices are already involved, and which need to be engaged. Identify gaps in current efforts and share the resources you’ve found; then you can work together to figure out what would be most feasible and effective for each campus to take on. Ideally, you’ll find a key individual or group to help get things going at each school and can brainstorm with them on how they can enlist the support they’ll need. Establish one primary contact person on each campus, with a backup in case you can’t reach the primary person. This person could have an obvious campus role–for instance, the service- learning director or a staff member in the president’s or provost’s office. But it could also be any faculty, staff member, or student leader who has the enthusiasm and campus knowledge to make something happen. Suggest that the primary driver on campus assemble a broad enough team to be able to contact all key departments and offices and to have someone pick up the slack if one person falters.

Stay in touch. Once you’ve made your initial contacts you can move on to other schools, but remember to send reminders to those taking the lead — persistently enough to move things forward, but gently enough not to annoy people. Make sure those who’ve offered to engage their campus are actually proceeding along the path they’ve mapped out.

Don’t delay. This will be a major scramble with so many people away for the summer. Then you and your team will have an all-out sprint before the voter registration deadlines (in most states, the first week in October) — -and then a month later, the actual election. The more you can help set in motion before students return, the easier things will be when they’re back. Encourage schools you contact to pay particular attention to time-dependent opportunities like voter registration efforts that are tied to first-year orientation or to the period when students are registering and reregistering for classes. These must be ready before students return.

To sum up your challenge:

Initiate

• Familiarize yourself with what campuses can do, using the checklist and website resources.
• Pull together your initial contact list from your state Campus Compact’s suggestions and from people who sign up via the mapping tool.
• Contact key administrators, faculty, and student leaders at each campus.
• Share online resources with them, so they know they’re available.
• Identify current initiatives and respond to potential gaps.
• Help participants develop an action plan, using the wealth of available resources.
• Brainstorm on how they can navigate campus bureaucracies and enlist support.
• Move on to the next school.

Encourage

• Follow up with earlier contacts to see how things are developing.
• Help refine ideas and programs — pass on ideas from other campuses.
• Spread relevant new materials, such as candidate and initiative information.
• Funnel innovative ideas campus {at} compact(.)org to post on the national Campus Compact website.
• Keep touching back with people who are involved — coach them through the home stretch.

Reflect

• After the election, collect useful information and particularly effective practices from participating schools.
• Pass reflections to your State Campus Compact and to the national office, so they can improve their outreach for next round.