The Fund has been helping progressive non-profits build their organizations and campaigns through canvasses for over 20 years.

Canvassing is an effective way for organizations to build donor and activist lists while engaging the public in priority campaigns. For our larger-scale partnerships, we sign up 100,000 new one-time donors and 20,000 new sustainers, acquire tens of thousands e-mail addresses from potential activists, and educate over a million citizens on the issues in a single year. Our canvassing programs will be tailored to meet the specific development and political goals of your organization.

The benefits of a canvass program include:

Membership and Activist Prospecting
Canvassing finds new members who are difficult to reach through direct mail prospecting. The average canvass member is relatively young and unlikely to appear on most marketing lists. Our staff can sign up monthly sustainers and identify potential volunteers. Some partner groups report that new canvass members are more likely than other members to become major donors and to participate in political actions.

Public Education
The Fund's professional canvass staff have face-to-face conversations with millions of people every year on issues from protecting national forests to fighting rural poverty. We hand-deliver fact sheets and legislative scorecards while building name recognition for our partners and their priority campaigns.

Activating Concerned Citizens
Our staff collect petition signatures and generate phone calls, e-mail messages and letters to elected officials. Political messages can be changed from day to day or region to region, and each year we reach out to half the congressional districts in the country.

Expanded Reach
Canvassing is an effective tool to activate people in targeted geographic locations. National groups like the Sierra Club want to find members all over the country to maximize their political clout in Congress. In 2005, we canvassed in all 50 states. Regional groups we’ve worked with like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation can expand into neighboring states.

Fund canvassers hold thousands of postcards they collected asking Gov. Schwarzenegger to take action on Global Warming. The canvass staff stand with Bernadette Del Chiaro of Environment California at the signing of California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

Petition gathering
In 2000, U.S. PIRG, the federation of state PIRGs, asked the Fund to gather petitions to help win protection for America’s last pristine national forests. The U.S. Forest Service invited the public to weigh in on whether roadless areas in national forests should remain undeveloped, and the environmental community decided to flood the Forest Service with comments in favor of full protection.  Thanks to the work of the Fund's petitioners, U.S. PIRG submitted over half a million comments supporting the strongest possible protections for these forests, ultimately playing a key role in convincing then-President Clinton to pass the Roadless Area Conservation Rule in 2001.

Field organizing and petition gathering for ballot initiatives
The Fund worked with WashPIRG to win an initiative campaign to block the importation of radioactive nuclear waste to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation—2004’s Vote Yes on I-297 campaign. We canvassed door-to-door, passed out brochures, gathered signatures to qualify the initiative, and passed out lawn signs to increase visibility for the campaign. Thanks in part to the Fund's work with WashPIRG on the initiative, Vote Yes on I-297 passed by more than a 2 to 1 margin.

Voter Registration
On behalf of U.S. PIRG, the Fund ran the Community Voters Project to register low-income minority voters for the 2004 election. We ran campaign offices in Florida, Michigan and North Carolina. Fund staff applied decades of experience in grassroots organizing to develop a model for a successful large-scale voter registration effort built around face-to-face contact.