Voter Contact: Warming Up the Cold Call
This session will focus on how to effectively cold call or cold knock a voter in a way that mobilizes them for your campaign or organization. The training will cover essential parts of successful communication; demonstrate how to write scripts that your volunteers will understand and feature a live phonebank for a progressive candidate as an activity.
Matt is the National Field Director at Democracy for America. He was born and raised in rural Iowa and first got involved in politics at 19 while attending the University of Iowa. In 2001 he managed his first campaign in an attempt to elect a UI student to the Iowa City Council. Since then he has done Field, Fundraising and Online Organizing work for numerous campaigns including the DNC, MoveOn.org, Russ Feingold, Jon Tester, and the No On 1 campaign for marriage equality in Maine. For the last four years Matt has managed national field and training programs for Democratic activists and candidates at Democracy for America. Since joining DFA he has organized over 84 campaign trainings in 37 states, training over 8,000 progressives to become better activists, campaign staff or candidates.
Nick is the Deputy National Field Director at Democracy for America, where he works to mobilize DFA's more than one million members to support progressive issues and candidates up and down the ballot.
Nick got his start in electoral politics in 2006, when he was inspired by Colorado gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter’s message of education reform and joined his successful campaign as a campus organizer and GOTV coordinator. More recently, Nick was a vagabond campaigner during the 2008 cycle who worked in 8 different states (NH, CO, TX, WY, PA, OR, MT, CA), first as a Regional Director and Youth Voter Outreach Coordinator for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, and then as a Deputy Director for Field Operations on Lt. Col. Charlie Brown’s campaign for Congress in CA-04. While working for Lt. Col. Brown, Nick supervised what was considered to be the largest congressional field program in the nation during the 2008 cycle, making an average of 30K+ voter contacts per week.
Prior to 2008, Nick worked for President Bill Clinton as a personal aide and liaison, as well as short stints with the Boys and Girls Harbor of E. Harlem NYC and the Prague Society for International Cooperation. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
