Evaluated whether a door-to-door deep canvassing campaign shifts immigration attitudes, and built an interactive dashboard for ongoing monitoring.
Deep Canvassing Nederland is a Dutch organisation, founded in 2023, that trains volunteers to knock on doors and have genuine, empathy-driven conversations with strangers about immigration — one of the most divisive topics in Dutch public life.
Deep canvassing is not about delivering a message; it is about listening, sharing personal stories, and creating space for people to reflect on their own views. It is one of the few persuasion methods scientifically shown to produce durable attitude change. Over two years, around a hundred volunteers have logged thousands of conversations in a custom-built, privacy-conscious web app.
The purpose of this project was to evaluate whether the campaign was having a measurable impact on immigration attitudes, to understand what factors were associated with the most successful conversations, and to build tools that would keep these insights accessible to the organisation on an ongoing basis.
Running remotely from January to July 2026, we delivered two things: an interactive Streamlit dashboard and a written analysis report. The analysis showed that conversations are associated with a positive, modest, and consistent shift in immigration attitudes — people are far more likely to move in a positive direction than a negative one — and that attitudes vary meaningfully across Dutch regions. The dashboard lets the organisation track attitude change, geographic patterns, and conversation trends as new data comes in, without relying on external analysts.
To find out more about this project, please see our blog post From Door Knocks to Data.