How Empower Engine Takes the Pain out of Turfing

For most campaign professionals, the concept of “turfing” is enough to elicit a few groans. If you’ve ever done it, you know that Data Directors spend hours defining organizing turf, dividing up voting precincts into regions, and subdividing those into individual organizers’ turfs. These decisions determine who and what resources go where. The first-time I worked on turfing for a campaign, we used markers and printed maps from the county. As strange as that sounds in the digital age, many people are still doing it that way. 

But this year, Empower Engine’s click and color maps changed everything about this process and made my team’s life so much easier, as we worked to define turf for the entire state of Wisconsin. 

Defining turf for an entire state is a daunting process. We were dividing the state into 14 regions, which will be worked by 150 organizers. Normally, this process takes days of work and numerous iterations, as you check and re-check your data to give your organizers an equal number of targets, or as close as possible.     

Empower Engine’s interactive click & color maps made the process easier in a number of ways:

  1. Using the interactive map, we could try numerous different scenarios changing region assignments in a single click. We didn’t have to recheck our work to ensure balance and to ensure regions were contiguous.

  2. Thanks to their VAN integration, we could see the number of GOTV targets in each precinct and immediately assess the implications of each decision. Seeing our counts as we assigned each precinct ensured balanced precincts. This is something you could never do with a paper map. 

  3. The pandemic has made collaboration more difficult, as we no longer have the office in which to work together. But Empower Engine makes it possible to share access to the same click & color map, so we can work together in a live setting. Our 3 member team found this extremely helpful as we made decisions together. 

There’s no way to make turfing an easy process; it requires time and attention to detail. But Empower Engine saved us days and helped us produce a superior product. When we were done, we could export our regions and send them right to the DNC. I'd never want to turf without Empower Engine again