Page 151 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

Those who are selected should then be contacted by an email seeking a confirmation in writing from the participant. The email should match the authority of the invitation and be clear about why this is a good use of their time. It is often useful to emphasise any reimbursement, childcare or meals that will be made available. You should also contact each participant by phone prior to the first meeting to build a strong personal commitment to participating, noting that once underway we cannot backfill for non-attendees. People are much more likely to attend when they’ve spoken to you on the phone prior, when compared to only having answered an email. Remember any exclusions you are considering for your project. People who are in political employment or have any form of involvement in the issue should opt out of selection. Outside of this criterion, it can be hard to draw a firm line for who is or is not eligible for selection. One nuanced way of determining eligibility is to ask a potential participant to reflect on if it were public knowledge that they were involved as a participant would people think that it was fair or not? This handbook is not an Excel course so we won’t list everything here, but it is also good practice to match the database of randomly selected addresses (or phone numbers) to the people you have drawn – just to check they really were randomly drawn and haven’t just pushed in! You can do this with the VLOOKUP function in Excel which checks to see records match. 149