Covid-19 Contact Rates by Mode
from: Leo Liu, The Movement Cooperative
date: April 14, 2020
Executive Summary
Amid the Covid-19 global pandemic, a question relevant to the progressive movement’s ongoing and future programs is about contact rates — how reachable are voters and Americans in a world of stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and self-isolation? Knowing that the answer may change how the progressive movement allocates resources in the unprecedented circumstances of the 2020 elections, The Movement Cooperative undertook analysis of contact data from specific progressive organizations who ran programs before, during, and after WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. In summary, we found:
Under Covid-19, phone contact rates have surged, at least according to data from People’s Actions’s call attempts across 2020. Before WHO’s declaration, People’s Actions’s phone contact rates had been slowly declining, with the average falling below 5% by mid-February. As of early April, People’s Actions’s average contact rate had risen higher than they’ve seen all year long.
Email opening may have increased modestly, according to data from one progressive group’s email program. Between mid-February and early April, the average open rate increased from approximately 30% to approximately 35%. However, this group’s associated email action rates did not appear to have increased; in fact, they had fallen slightly.
This analysis did not attempt to estimate changes in the open rates of text messages, in many cases the most relevant “contact rate” for text message programs. This analysis shows that the reply rates of peer-to-peer programs haven’t necessarily risen, based on data from VoteProChoice’s peer-to-peer text program. If VoteProChoice’s reply rates did increase after WHO’s declaration, that increase did not necessarily persist.
Across these three modes, there’s evidence that contact rates may be shifting. It’s worth paying attention to how contact rates continue to shift in the extremely dynamic time of Covid-19.
Data and Methodology
The data for this analysis comes from the phone, email, and peer-to-peer programs of four progressive organizations, spanning January 1–April 13 and comprising approximately 3.7 million direct contact attempts to unique people. Email data (2.5 million attempts) was provided anonymously by one progressive organization. Phone data (93,814 attempts) came from People’s Action. Peer-to-peer text data (1 million attempts) came from VoteProChoice. We accessed the phone and peer-to-peer data via The Movement Cooperative’s Communal Contactability Project, which compiles contact data across opted-in members of the TMC community. We thank our members for their generosity in contributing data to an important analysis intended to benefit the progressive movement.
Each point on the plot represents the number of attempts made by a particular organization on a particular mode during a particular time period (per day over email, per two days over phone and peer-to-peer text, to smooth out the noise). The larger the point, the more attempts were included in that computation. A weighted line of best fit was calculated before and after March 11, the day WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic.
While the Communal Contactability Project comprises a much larger set of attempts by the progressive movement, we subsetted this analysis to certain organizations to mitigate selection bias — e.g., an issue where apparent differences in contact rates are explained by differences in programs, rather than underlying changes occurring over time.
The contact rates here are not authoritative in that they aren’t representative of progressive organizations’ contacts in general. They reflect the specific programs that these organizations ran between January 1–April 13. Although we would expect to see similar trends across other organizations, the analysis highlighted here may or may not generalize to other programs. Similarly, the trends observed here may or may not hold up over time.