Civic Engagement Glossary

Handout: Civic Engagement Glossary Field Attempts: The number of times you tried to contact someone. For example, if you are phoning and you dial 30 people’s phone numbers one night, you have made 30 “attempts.” AV/EV: Absentee Voting and Early Voting. Absentee voting is also known as “VBM” (Voting By Mail). Contacts: The number of people you actually spoke with. For example, if you made 30 attempts during a night of phoning, and you actually spoke to 5 people, you had 5 “contacts.” Contact rate: “Contacts” divided by “Attempts.” Election Protection: Efforts to ensure that everyone is able to vote, and that every vote is counted. Field: Contacting voters through person-to-person contact, either at events, doorknocking or phoning. GOTV: “Get Out The Vote” – efforts to make sure people go vote. Vote Share: The ratio of socially responsible and under-represented voters compared to the total number of votes cast in a geographic area. Voter Education: Informing voters on things like their voting rights or particular issues like immigration or the economy. Yes’s: The number of people who agree to do whatever action you are requesting of them. For example, if you contacted 5 people and 3 of them agreed to go vote, you had 3 “Yes’s.” Yes rate: “Yes’s” divided by “Contacts.” Communications Issue Environment: The critical issues being discussed by the media, opinion leaders and in public discourse. Evaluation Metrics: The measurement of what you are trying to achieve. For example, if you want to reduce the crime rate in your city, , the “metric” would be your goal of how percentage points you’d like to reduce the crime rate by. Descriptive Evaluation: A simple description of the change that occurred. Using the crime rate example above, you could say that within one year’s time, the crime rate went from 6% to 4%. Experimental Evaluation: A measurement of the change you caused. Experimental evaluations are often done using “treatment and control” experiments, which can isolate the impact you had on the change. Using the crime rate example above, you could randomly select 4 neighborhoods in which you run your program – these are called “treatment” neighborhoods because you are

“treating” them with your program. You could then also randomly select 4 neighborhoods where you will not run any programs – the “control” neighborhoods. The only difference then between the treatment and control areas are whether you ran your programs there. After a year, you can compare the crime rate in the treatment neighborhoods versus the control neighborhoods. If the crime rate went down 2% in the treatment neighborhoods compared to the control ones, you can say, “our program caused a 2% decrease in the crime rate.”