Deep canvassing is convincing community members to change their minds, one conversation at a time.
Montana Burgess had a problem. She’d just become the executive director of a non-profit called the West Kootenay Eco Society (now Neighbours United) and one of their campaigns wasn’t gaining supporters. “We’d been organizing across the West Kootenay region since 2015 — trying to get local governments to commit to a 100% renewable energy transition,” she says. While several of the other small towns in this eastern corner of British Columbia had embraced a renewable energy transition in order to help tackle climate change, the Eco Society hit a roadblock when they reached the town of Trail, a community of 8,000 that straddles the Columbia River 100 miles north of Spokane, WA. “Because they have this big smelter in the center of town, people were conflicted.” Burgess says, “There was this classic ‘jobs versus the environment’ argument playing out in people's minds.”
Using the traditional grassroots approach of organizing volunteers, educating people about the issues, and then having supporters sign petitions or turn out at meetings to sway the town council wasn’t working in Trail. But rather than skipping the industry town and moving on to the next community, Burgess and the Eco Society realized that being able to get places like Trail onboard with renewable energy transition was going to be essential for the future. “We knew we needed to change hearts and minds,” Burgess says, but the society’s traditional methods weren’t having an effect. “We needed new ideas.”
Deep canvassing is a non-judgmental way of soliciting views around an issue and then asking follow-up questions to go deeper, explains Ella Barrett of the New Conversation Initiative. “The goal is to sit in that conflicted place with a person and just be curious,” she says. By asking ‘Where do your thoughts come from?’ or saying ‘This is my life experience,’ Barrett says the canvassers give people permission to sift through their opposing thoughts. “That’s why it works,” she explains, “People are able to resolve their cognitive dissonance.”
For Burgess, this new idea came in the form of a technique called deep canvassing, which she’d learned about on a This American Life podcast. “It was like a light bulb went off,” she recalls. The podcast told the story of how deep canvassing was born after the controversial same sex marriage ban passed in California in 2008. (The ban was later overturned in court.) After the disappointing loss, canvassers went door to door in conservative neighborhoods to learn why people had voted in favor of the ban. The volunteers soon realized that by personalizing the issue and helping people work through their conflicted feelings, they were able to change minds. Organizers suddenly realized that they had a whole new way to approach polarizing issues. “It was wildly successful,” Burgess says, referring to the change rate of about forty percent. “I realized we needed to try it in the climate movement.”
What’s Deep Canvassing?
Deep canvassing is a structured conversation that uses trained canvassers to guide individuals through their feelings on a controversial issue, with the ultimate goal of changing public policy. In the case of equal marriage, this proved to be straightforward. Canvassers asked people about their support for same-sex marriage on a scale from zero to ten, and then used prompts and personal stories to help people unpack why they felt the way they did. At the end of the conversation, the canvasser used the scale again to see if the discussion helped shift the individual’s views.
“We had over 1,000 conversations with people in Trail,” says Montana Burgess, executive director of Neighbours United. They led to a forty percent overall persuasion rate and helped overcome community distrust. In April 2022, Trail City Council voted unanimously to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050 and pledged to develop a transition plan within a year.
According to the Deep Canvass Institute, which runs information and training sessions, the scripted conversations typically stay away from facts and statistics and instead focus on personal experience. During a recent online information session, Ella Barrett, co-director from the New Conversation Initiative, explained that deep canvassing is a non-judgmental way of soliciting views around an issue and then asking follow-up questions to go deeper. “The goal is to sit in that conflicted place with a person and just be curious,” she says. By asking ‘Where do your thoughts come from?’ or saying ‘This is my life experience,’ Barrett says the canvassers give people permission to sift through their opposing thoughts. “That’s why it works,” she explains, “People are able to resolve their cognitive dissonance.”
How Does it Work?
It’s long been considered difficult to change someone else’s beliefs. There's plenty of research describing the backfire effect: a response that happens when we’re confronted with factual information and, rather than swaying us, it leads us to increase the strength of our opposing belief. But contrary to traditional canvassing — which can trigger this effect — studies show that something quite different happens with deep canvassing.
Where traditional persuasion techniques often involve sticking to talking points or handing out information pamphlets, deep canvassing uses life stories and human vulnerability to create a connection. Focusing on people who are in opposition, or on the fence, deep canvassing aims to help the canvasser and respondent find common ground. The goal is not just to convince people to support a specific policy, but to change their minds for the long term.
But going door to door and having lengthy conversations about hot-button issues is both difficult and expensive. Training courses are an extensive commitment for volunteers. And once those volunteers are deployed as canvassers, just getting people to open their doors can be difficult. But once doors do open, the method is proving to be effective.
A 2016 study at UC Berkeley showed how human stories were more effective than data when deep canvassing was used to examine people’s opinions around transgender rights. After a twenty minute conversation, about ten percent of the deep canvassing respondents reported a more understanding view of transgender rights. As the study notes, it took from 1998 to 2012 — fourteen years — for the U.S. as a whole to have a comparable change in its attitudes towards gay people. But according to study findings, one conversation following deep canvassing principals was able to do this for trans people.
How to Apply Deep Canvassing
For Burgess, the possibility of using deep canvassing was initially exciting, but as the organization got going — raising funds and getting canvassers trained — they hit a stumbling block. “You can't just pluck a script out of the air,” she explains; it needs to be personalized for each community and issue.
There also needs to be a discussion point — an X that can elicit a scaled opinion. With Trail, the biggest challenge was working out what that X would be. “Other scripts open with ‘I’m here to talk about same sex marriage or immigrant rights’ — something that feels personal and tangible.” But 100% renewable energy was too technical an X and climate change was immediately polarizing. “We settled on ‘I’m here to talk about pollution and waste,’” says Burgess. “It was something people could engage with.”
So now they had an X for people to talk about but needed to make it personal. After working through several ideas, one canvasser stumbled on a way to go deeper. He asked, “What do you love about your community? Why are you here?”
Where traditional persuasion techniques often involve sticking to talking points or handing out information pamphlets, deep canvassing uses life stories and human vulnerability to create a connection.
Using this approach, canvassers were able to draw out the things people value about Trail: hiking, fishing, forests. Then canvassers brought up a specific time when Trail’s environment had been threatened and the community had come together to solve the issue. From here, canvassers were able to loop back to the idea of waste and pollution and how the community now had the opportunity to lobby for renewable energy. “We had over 1,000 conversations with people in Trail,” Burgess says. They led to a forty percent overall persuasion rate and helped overcome community distrust. In April 2022, Trail City Council voted unanimously to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050 and pledged to develop a transition plan within a year.
With this success, Burgess and Neighbours United realized they had a powerful tool. But the problem was still the script. Each situation requires individual script development. Eager to share what they’ve learned, the organization began identifying community archetypes and set out to build a toolkit of scripts that can work in different contexts. “The goal is to save folks time and resources by giving them a place to start, then assisting them to tweak it to fit,” Burgess says. “So instead of spending a year doing script development, it will take two months.”
To develop the toolkit, the group is heading to small, divided towns. “We’re going to mill towns to talk about old growth forests and into oil towns to talk about ending tax breaks for oil and gas. In the beginning, we acknowledge the identity of the conflict: ‘[These communities] have prospered because of these industries. It’s meant food on the table.’” Then, Burgess says, they ground people in why they love their hometowns. And then, one conversation at a time, canvassers offer locals the power to change their futures.
What You Can Do: When to Consider and How to Use Deep Canvassing
The Deep Canvass institute points out that deep canvassing can be both expensive and time consuming; typically it’s just one tool in an organization’s kit. It’s used when education, organizing, and lobbying aren’t gaining enough traction to change policy, because:
- It helps persuade conflicted people and depolarize communities (for instance, environment versus jobs)
- It can help inoculate against fear messaging (“environmentalists are trying to put us out of business”)
- It can reduce prejudice and stigma against groups and ideas — us versus them.
Scripts are not one-size-fits-all and are the most challenging aspect of deep canvassing. Neighbours United offers an extensive toolkit that outlines how to develop a four-part script that covers:
- Narrowing in on the best way to talk about climate change and action on climate change so as to not repel uncertain and/or conflicted people
- Story sharing to address barriers to supporting more actions on climate change
- Making the case for climate action
- Addressing outstanding uncertainty and conflict.
Canvassers need to be trained in the method. Learn more about deep canvassing or take part in the training at the Deep Canvass Institute.
