7 Lok Sabha seats, 70 assembly segments, 3000 booths, 300 volunteers, 9 days : BJP ends its biggest strategic voter contact programme.

7 Lok Sabhas, 70 assembly segments, 3000 target booths, 300 volunteers, 9 days : BJP ends its biggest strategic voter contact programme. Volunteers end campaign with a grand finale: a Flash Mob in the heart of the city. New Delhi, April 9, 2014: Even as campaigning officially ended yesterday, the BJP brought to a close its most extensive strategic voter contact programme that involved 50 teams of over 300 volunteers across the length and breadth of the city state. The voter contact programme was aimed at 3000 identified booths marked as ‘vulnerable’ where factors such as history of win or loss, the results of the last assembly elections, margin of win or loss and locality etc. played a defining role.

These booths were identified in an analytics exercise based on a complex matrix of factors such as traditional ‘booth behaviour’; susceptibility to swing votes; voter profiles; area and geography or caste and community biases.

Sanjay Kaul, Chief Spokesperson BJP Delhi, who devised the program for the party said that the campaign ran for over 9 days with a few days spent in planning, training and scaling up. “The idea was simple. We wanted to fortify the marginally strong areas and convert the marginally weaker ones,” he said. “This was just one of the plans that were executed to ensure that we take maximum advantage of the Modi factor which we expect will add substantially to our total vote share in Delhi”, he added.

One of the first things the party did was to encourage a number of professionals who had expressed a wish to contribute in the elections to form a group and ideate on strategies and execute plans. “The idea was to bring in fresh ideas, passionate supporters and enthusiastic followers of Mr Modi and harness their energy into positive campaigning”, said Kaul.

BJP seeded a group of such professionals which was dedicated to drawing up plans to counter voter erosion and plan for maximizing the Modi wave effect. A series of outreach campaigns which included traditional ideas like nukkad troupes, puppet shows and bioscopes were evaluated. Finally the groups were allocated a booth each for targeted campaigning, canvassing, debating with residents in that booth area, converting and picking up more volunteers from the area. The end result was a massive outreach push which ended just before the Election Commission deadline came into effect.