Definition
The Civic Volunteer Score indicates a person's likelihood to volunteer on behalf of a national, state, city, or neighborhood political campaign.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
Which of the following describes an activity that you did in the last few years?
- Volunteered on behalf of a local city or neighborhood political campaign
- Volunteered on behalf of a national or state political campaign
Respondents who answered yes to any of the above were labeled as targets in the model. Those who did not answer yes to any of the activities were labeled as non-targets.
The Civic Volunteer Score was trained on polling data from the 2023 Murmuration poll. We collected over 9,000 responses via phone and online from registered voters. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter will engage in civic volunteering activities, i.e. volunteer on behalf of a local, national, or state political campaign.
We validated the model using a held-out test set of 20% of the original survey sample. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Civic Volunteer Score, 22% volunteered for a local political campaign (69% more likely than the average voter) and 17% volunteered for a national political campaign (89% more likely than the average voter).
Use Cases
Our Civic Volunteer Score can be used to understand your community, recruit volunteers, plan events, or refine your outreach strategy. Below are a few examples for how partners could use this score:
- Identifying Community Leaders: Partners can use this score to discover individuals who could become great organizers in their communities. By combining the Civic Volunteer Score with the Community Engagement Score, Grassroots Engagement Score, or other custom organizational data, partners may be able to identify community members who can take on future leadership positions.
- Friend-to-Friend Recruiting: By targeting people with high Civic Volunteer Scores, partners can connect with people who might be good at getting their friends engaged in the political process. Partners should consider how they can equip these potential advocates/volunteers with the right tools and training to multiply their recruitment and outreach efforts.
- Layer With Issue Models: This score can be particularly useful to partners seeking to drive volunteer engagement for specific issues. Combine the Civic Volunteer Score with other issue scores, such as the Reproductive Rights Score or the Democracy Protection Score, to identify politically active volunteers who also care about specific issues. These insights can help partners form alliances with non-political groups, expanding their outreach efforts and volunteer base.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Civic Volunteer Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 15 |
| 20% | 12 |
| 30% | 11 |
| 40% | 10 |
| 50% | 9 |
| 60% | 8 |
| 70% | 8 |
| 80% | 7 |
| 90% | 6 |
| 100% | 4 |