Confirming participation

We normally run the selection part of a democratic lottery around 4 weeks before the first meeting of a citizens’ assembly. We then spend the first of those four weeks confirming participation.

Once we’ve run that selection our pool of respondents is naturally divided into two groups: the people who have been selected and the people who have not!

Confirmation calls

Our confirmation calls process includes the following:

  • We contact everyone by email and text to let them know that they have been selected and we arrange a time to speak to them on the phone.
  • On the phone, we remind the person of some basic information about the event. As part of this we go over the dates and confirm that the person is still able to participate.
  • We also find out if the person has any particular support needs, to help with your more detailed onboarding.
  • Typically, we tell the person that they can expect some form of contact to follow up from the delivery organisation within a week.

Drop outs

We normally expect about 10% of the people who are selected as assembly members to drop out during the week of confirmation calls. This will be because we can’t get in touch with them, or because when we speak to them we find that their circumstances have changed and they can no longer participate.

The people who are most likely to drop out are, typically, people with lower levels of educational attainment and young people. Recognising this, we will often give longer deadlines for people from these groups. For instance, if we do not get a response from people in this group, then we will delay replacing them until we have tried to get in contact in multiple ways over multiple days.

Replacements

If someone does drop out and need replacing, then we will use the same selection algorithm to replace them with someone who wasn’t originall selected. We do this replacement in such a way that is randomised, and (ideally) ensures that the final group of selected people still satisfies our original targets.

Some notes:

  1. It is not always possible to replace people so that we satisfy the original targets. The maths is much harder to satisfy when doing replacements, as compared to doing the initial selection. When doing a replacement we may have to decide which target we are prepared to relax: e.g. we may not be able to perform a replacement so that both the age and the ethnicity targets are satisfied – so we may need to prioritise one.
  2. The maths becomes a lot easier if we replace people in batches. So, during confirmation week, we will typically wait until 3 or 4 people have dropped out before we replace them. Towards the end of the week this is not always possible.
  3. Our chances of being able to do a replacement in such a way that satisfies targets also depends on the our pool of “not selected people”. If this pool is big and varied, then our chances of success are high! Again, though, this pool is typically skewed so that we have less people with lower levels of educational attainment and less young people: so replacing people from these groups is likely to be harder. This reinforces what we said earlier: it is wise to try extra hard to confirm people from thse groups so that they don’t need to be replaced.

Keeping people warm

How do we avoid drop outs?