Accomplishments
The Basebuilding Initiative is a effort to help organizations learn more about their supporters, communicate with them more effectively and efficiently, and build a constituency actively committed to the goals of the organization and the allied community. It enables partner organizations to do more strategic advocacy, lobbying, and voter engagement work, as well as enhance their fundraising and volunteer recruitment efforts. It also enables our community to gain a better understanding of who we are and where we are collectively.
The Basebuilding Initiative expands our collective capacity by allowing us to understand our base better, and enabling more effective collaborations across our issue areas. The most important outcome of our work is enabling collaborations and engagements on policy issues. One of the most effective collaborations that reaches across a broad array of issue areas is to mobilize our members to vote. Historically, our members are not voting as frequently as we expect, and not consistently more frequently than the average citizen. Through list enhancement, we can target our infrequent voters through collaborative, non-partisan civic engagement efforts.
In 2008, we engaged our Basebuilding partner groups in several collaborations beginning with mobilizing participation in the February 9th HKonJ march and rally by helping to make 13,000 recruitment calls, and culminating in our non-partisan "Get Out the Vote" drive around the general election in November. Our GOTV work in 2008 tested two engagement strategies--early voting and vote by mail, with approximately 20,000 North Carolinian "infrequent voters" receiving targeted direct mail for each voting strategy. Our preliminary evaluation found a 7% success rate on targeting vote by mail respondents, significantly higher than the average response rate of 5% in other states testing the same strategy.
In 2008 we were also able to identify 10,000 North Carolinians (who are not members of any of our organizations) who identified as strongly interested in engaging with or persuadable on environmental and social issues. This pool of potential North Carolina citizen activists is a new resource now available to Basebuilding partner organizations and we plan to engage those individuals along with our existing members in a variety of education and civic action projects.
Previous accomplishments include:
In 2004 we came together to implement a collaborative infrequent activist mobilization project using enhanced lists from each of our communities. Over 25,000 North Carolinians, members or newly registered activists of more than 25 progressive groups, were contacted via direct mail, robo calls, and volunteer phone banks; an additional 19,000 members of 16 environmental groups were contacted via mail. This effort was supported by a number of other groups, including: NC PIRG, NC Conservation Network, NC Fair Share, Planned Parenthood, and Common Cause, resulting in almost 200 volunteers contacting infrequent activists.
In 2006 we worked with nearly 100 state and national groups to enhance their member lists. The names of nearly 250,000 progressive and environmental activists were matched against voter and demographic databases, providing our list enhancement partners with strategic constituent information useful in education, advocacy and fundraising campaigns. As in previous years, our three groups, along with other partners, came together for an ambitious "Get out the Vote" drive leading up to the November, 2006 elections. Over 45,000 individuals were contacted via phone calls and mailings. Additionally, our groups launched a new website, www.ncvoterinfo.org, which provided the only nonpartisan statewide resource for early voting, absentee voting and regular voting information, voter registration information and links to candidates. This website, launched just two weeks before Election Day, received over 6,000 visits.
We have also published the "Census of the Movement", a detailed analysis of our collective membership, and shared this information with Basebuilding Initiative members.
The next few years will bring not only civic but also economic challenges and opportunities that North Carolina nonprofits must face. The Basebuilding Initiative will help North Carolina's nonprofits build their capacity and engage their membership in the issues affecting our growing and diversifying population. The Basebuilding Initiative will help groups strengthen their membership and donor base. The Basebuilding Initiative will help our nonprofits continue to push an agenda of economic, environmental and community health, and help get that message out to the citizens of North Carolina.
