The John Hall campaign’s winning field director has drafted up his Lesson Learned on his new blog, AlexZwerdling.com. A tidbit:

Volunteers matter. Our [volunteer] capacity was unreal … I had grossly underestimated the power and voter contact potential of the volunteers that my plan inherited. They took an ambitious plan and made it look cautious. They took a strong second and turned us into an upset victory.

One lesson I would add to Alex’s list – Use your volunteers for persuasion calls, not IDs. For the non-consultants out there:

• A “persuasion” call is an attempt to sway a voter’s opinion, by giving them information about the candidates and engaging them in issues that matter to them. The point is engage the undecideds and win them over, one conversation at a time.

• An “ID” call is an attempt to find out if the voter supports your candidate. The simplest form of an ID call is, “Hi, can I speak to Joe? Hi Joe, I’m calling from Voter Research Services with one quick question. In the upcoming election, will you be voting for Democrat X or Republican Y?”

One of my few regrets is that we stressed ID’ing over persuasion in our volunteer call program. We told our volunteers, “Keep the calls short, so you can get quickly to the question, ‘Can John count on your vote on Nov. 7?’”

These quick ID calls were important, but were not the best use of volunteer callers. You can always get IDs with paid phones; it’s a cheap, simple ask. But no paid phone bank in the world can replace an honest, real, person-to-person persuasion call from a real volunteer.

In retrospect, we should have asked our vols to spend more time on the phones persuading, and less time asking for IDs. By the time Friday, Nov. 4 rolled around and we looked at our IDs, we still had a huge number of undecideds, aka “3s” — people right in the middle of our 1-to-5 point support scale. More volunteer persuasion calls could have chipped away at that undecided population, and the IDs could have been done with a quick and dirty live call in the final week.

But hey, we won. I’m not exactly losing sleep over it. :)