Executive Summary

This report examines the effectiveness of relational organizing—a voter contact strategy leveraging personal relationships—within conservative campaigns. Despite widespread adoption by progressive organizations, right-leaning campaigns have been slower to implement this approach.

The Center for Campaign Innovation conducted a field test in Florida targeting low-propensity Republican voters. Our findings demonstrate that relational organizing significantly increases voter turnout among conservative audiences. Voters who received text messages from people they personally knew were 8.6 percentage points more likely to vote than those in the control group. By contrast, traditional peer-to-peer texting produced no measurable turnout effect.

These results align with academic research showing relational organizing produces some of the highest turnout increases of any voter contact method. The mechanism is intuitive: messages from trusted connections carry greater weight than those from unknown campaign sources.

While our implementation faced challenges—notably a low volunteer conversion rate of 0.02%—the strong turnout effect confirms the technique's fundamental effectiveness across partisan lines. For conservative campaigns facing increasingly difficult voter contact environments, relational organizing represents a valuable and underutilized strategy that can deliver measurable advantages in competitive races.

Introduction

It is becoming increasingly difficult for political campaigns to reach voters through traditional outreach methods. Landline usage has plummeted, smartphone caller ID screens unknown numbers, peer-to-peer texting has become oversaturated, and doorbell cameras allow homeowners to avoid door-to-door canvassers. These technological and behavioral shifts have significantly diminished the effectiveness of historically reliable voter contact strategies.

Against this backdrop of communication barriers, the political landscape faces additional challenges from a fragmenting media ecosystem. The need to reach, persuade, and mobilize voters through personalized, one-to-one interactions has never been more critical. In response to these challenges, a refined approach to voter outreach—Relational Organizing—has emerged.

This strategy enables campaigns to combine data-driven targeting with the persuasive power of personal connections. By leveraging existing relationships between supporters and potential voters, relational organizing creates authentic communication channels that can bypass the filters and skepticism that often block traditional campaign outreach. In other words, relational organizing is the difference between cold outreach bordering on spam or a sincere message from a friend or family member.

While progressive campaigns and organizations have widely adopted and refined relational organizing techniques over multiple election cycles, conservative campaigns have been notably slower to incorporate this technology into their voter contact strategies. This hesitancy represents a potential missed opportunity to engage with voters who may be unreachable through conventional methods.

What Is Relational Organizing?

Relational organizing – leveraging personal relationships for political outreach – is not new. What is new in recent years is the technology to scale these relationship-based tactics effectively.

Following Hillary Clinton's unexpected loss to Donald Trump in 2016, progressive tech innovators (many former Obama staffers) launched new applications designed to transform "Tell your friends" from an informal suggestion into a measurable, efficient strategy. By the 2018 midterms, Democratic campaigns began widely deploying these tools, supplementing traditional phone banking and canvassing with digital friend-to-friend outreach. This evolution marked a shift from casual word-of-mouth to data-driven relational organizing at scale, supported by sophisticated voter files and graph-database applications.

Research consistently demonstrates that contacting voters through someone they know produces significantly higher turnout compared to typical campaign outreach methods. A large 2018 field experiment using the Outvote app (for friend-to-friend texts) showed an 8 percentage-point increase in voter turnout among those reached by a friend.

For context, traditional GOTV methods like door-to-door canvassing typically average a 2-3 point turnout increase, while impersonal tactics such as mass texts and cold calls often raise turnout by less than 1% or show no measurable effect.

Most notably, a 2020 study led by Donald Green found that relational organizing produced "the largest intent-to-treat effect documented by an experimental GOTV study in the past two decades" – approximately a 13.2 percentage-point turnout increase when voters were contacted by a friend versus a stranger. These are substantial effects in political campaign terms. The explanation is intuitive: a reminder or appeal to vote carries significantly more weight when it comes from a trusted friend or family member than from an unfamiliar campaign volunteer.

Relational tactics thus excel at boosting turnout, especially among low-propensity voters who might ignore traditional campaign outreach but will respond to a message from someone they know and trust.

How Does Relational Organizing Work? 

Relational organizing operates through a structured process that leverages personal connections for political mobilization:

Campaigns begin by uploading lists of target voters and crafting pre-approved messages designed to mobilize supporters. Volunteers download a campaign-provided app that syncs with their personal contacts, automatically matching them with the campaign's target audience. The app enables volunteers to send personalized messages via text or social media, encouraging their friends and family to vote.

Campaigns can track outreach activity and voter engagement through built-in analytics, providing real-time insights into program effectiveness and ensuring volunteer accountability. With metrics like total impressions, percentage of target universe reached, and cost per result, this brings standardization to an otherwise informal process. This approach significantly increases message impact, as communications come from known and trusted individuals rather than anonymous campaign outreach efforts.

Recent innovations in relational organizing strategy have incorporated volunteer incentives, such as gift cards for completing specific outreach activities. Campaigns employ various validation mechanisms to verify volunteer efforts, including requiring screenshots of sent messages and tracking recipient engagement metrics such as clicks, responses, or completed actions.

Our Field Test

Despite compelling evidence supporting the effectiveness of relational organizing for mobilizing supporters, conservative campaigns have been slow to adopt this voter contact strategy. The Center for Campaign Innovation conducted a field test to determine whether the documented effects observed by progressive organizations could be replicated among conservative volunteers and voters.

We partnered with Numinar, a voter data and outreach platform serving right-leaning campaigns that has developed relational organizing capabilities, to conduct a field test comparing relational organizing and peer-to-peer (P2P) texting in Florida.

Florida was selected as our testing ground for two strategic reasons: (1) it is a party registration state, allowing us to readily identify conservative voters through their official party affiliation, and (2) during the 2024 elections, there were few competitive statewide races that might have interfered with or obscured our testing efforts.

Our methodology included:

1. Identifying a universe of 538,078 low-propensity Republican voters registered with the Florida Secretary of State
2. Sending 424,179 P2P text messages to recruit these voters to join our relational organizing effort, branded as "Turnout the Vote FL"
3. Offering volunteers a $5 gift card incentive for each friend they texted as part of our recruitment messaging

When volunteers downloaded the Numinar app and shared their contacts, we matched phone numbers to our low-propensity voter universe. For measurement purposes, we displayed 75% of matched voters to relational volunteers while setting aside 25% as a control group. To prevent duplicate outreach, voters who received a relational text message were removed from future contact lists.

After implementing quality control measures, 101 volunteers successfully sent personalized text messages to 1,738 voters with whom they had existing personal relationships. The results were significant: individuals who received text messages from people they already knew were 8.6 percentage points more likely to vote compared to those in the control group. This finding aligns with similar academic research on relational organizing effectiveness.

As a comparison, we also sent 100,000 P2P text messages to a separate universe of low-propensity voters to measure the impact of this alternative voter contact method. Notably, we observed no measurable effect on turnout from the traditional P2P texting approach.

Discussion

Our field test was designed to measure the effect of relational organizing on voter turnout among conservative voters, specifically aiming to determine if we could reproduce results similar to those documented in studies published by progressive organizations.

The results confirmed that relational organizing can be effective across the political spectrum. The 8.6 percentage point increase in turnout among voters contacted through personal connections closely aligns with findings from studies conducted with left-leaning audiences, suggesting that the effectiveness of this approach transcends partisan boundaries. This is particularly noteworthy given the stark contrast with our P2P texting test, which produced no measurable effect on turnout.

However, our implementation revealed significant operational challenges. Most notably, we observed a low conversion rate of only 0.02% from our recruitment efforts, which substantially increased the cost per conversion. This low yield raises important questions about recruitment strategy and messaging that future conservative relational organizing programs will need to address.

Several factors may have contributed to this low conversion rate:

1. Brand recognition - Our "Turnout the Vote FL" initiative lacked the established trust and recognition that comes with an existing campaign or well-known political organization.
2. Volunteer infrastructure - Unlike many progressive organizations that have invested in volunteer recruitment and retention over multiple election cycles, we were essentially building a volunteer base from scratch.
3. Incentive structure - While financial incentives ($5 gift cards) were offered, this may not have been sufficient motivation for the effort required or may not have aligned with the values of our target audience.
4. Timing and context - The relative lack of competitive statewide races in Florida, while methodologically beneficial for our study, may have reduced overall political engagement and volunteer motivation.

Campaigns and organizations looking to adopt relational organizing strategies on the right will likely achieve better results with a recognizable brand, an existing volunteer base, and a compelling narrative that resonates with conservative audiences. Future implementations might benefit from integrating relational organizing into a broader campaign strategy rather than as a standalone initiative.

Additionally, our results indicate that quality may be more important than quantity in relational outreach. The strong effect among those who were contacted suggests that focusing on authentic relationships and targeted messaging may yield better returns than attempting to maximize the raw number of contacts.

Conclusion

Relational organizing demonstrably works. By harnessing trust and leveraging pre-existing relationships, campaigns can achieve greater turnout increases than almost any other voter contact method. Our field test confirmed this effect, showing an 8.6 percentage point boost in turnout among voters contacted by someone they know—a result consistent with academic research and progressive campaign experiences.

This approach effectively cuts through modern communication barriers that have diminished traditional outreach methods. When a text or call comes from a friend rather than a campaign, it bypasses the filters of ignored calls, deleted messages, and ad fatigue. More importantly, relational organizing injects authenticity into political messaging in an era when voters are increasingly skeptical of institutional communications.

While relational organizing is not a silver bullet for persuading undecided voters, it excels at its primary purpose: mobilizing and turning out existing supporters. In today's closely contested elections, where margins of victory are often razor-thin, this targeted boost in turnout frequently determines the outcome of competitive races.

For campaign professionals and political organizations on the right, the clear takeaway is that investing in relational organizing infrastructure—through appropriate technology platforms, volunteer training, and systematic implementation—can yield measurable gains in both voter contact efficiency and election results. Conservative campaigns that continue to ignore this powerful tool do so at their competitive peril.

As communication technologies and voter behaviors continue to evolve, relational organizing represents not just a tactical adaptation but a strategic imperative for modern campaigns seeking to maximize their impact in an increasingly challenging outreach environment.

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