Supporters of marriage equality will have just 20 days to make half a million phone calls and win at least 5.5m votes in the same-sex marriage postal survey, according to yes campaign advocates. The campaign blueprint was revealed at an organising meeting in Sydney on Monday by the executive director of the Equality Campaign, Tiernan Brady, and Sally Rugg, the marriage equality director of the progressive campaign group GetUp.
Rugg and the Labor NSW upper house MP Penny Sharpe also revealed that campaign groups will use voter identification to reach “outside the [inner city] bubble” to encourage soft yes voters to return ballots.
Brady told volunteers that the campaign “had to ramp up incredibly quickly” because research from similar voluntary ballots overseas suggests that 80-90% of votes will be cast in the first 72 hours.
“Twenty days is what everybody in this room has to make sure we win Sydney and we win New South Wales,” he said.
If the survey survives a high court challenge the Australian Bureau of Statistics will begin the postal vote by mailing out survey forms from 12 September with the aim of reaching all Australians by 22 September.
Rugg told the meeting the yes campaign estimated that 55-60% of the 16m enrolled Australians would participate in the survey.
“If you assume about 60% support marriage equality – we’re probably higher [than that] but it’s going to come down lower over the campaign,” she said. “When you crunch all those numbers we need to ensure there’s over 5.5m ballots returned [for yes], which is a lot of ballots.”
On Friday GetUp and the Equality Campaign launched the yes.org.au website, which will allow supporters to organise phone-banking events and coordinate campaign calls.
In its first five days the website has registered 69 events, with 319 members registered to attend and 4,336 attempted calls so far.
Rugg said the campaign “is not a persuasion campaign, it’s a get out the vote campaign ... We need to focus our energy on making sure yes supporters send their ballots back”.
The yes campaign has consulted with campaign teams for the Irish referendum, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in designing a voluntary vote campaign.
It aims to make 500,000 calls in the next 20 days, Rugg said. “This effort cannot be centralised with GetUp or the Equality Campaign. It’s going to take people and organisations across the country to step up.
“We’re not asking you to join a phone bank, we’re asking you to host a phone bank.”
GetUp data analyst Ben Raue told Guardian Australia:“We’ve been conducting polling to ask voters how they intend to vote, and how likely they are to vote, and we are breaking down those results by demographics, including age, gender and geographic location.
“Using that information, yes.org.au allows volunteers making calls for the yes campaign can talk to those yes voters who are not yet committed to turning out to vote.”
The yes.org.au website, which will be used by unions, other groups and individual supporters, coordinates outbound calls to avoid duplication. Organisations involved in the campaign will not receive data on targeted voters, but callers who use the tool to phone bank will be patched through to yes voters.
Asked how the campaign would target voters “outside the bubble” of inner city areas with a high yes vote, Sharpe told the meeting that a range of organisations were using voter identification.
“So you can assume that if you pull up a list [at a phone bank], that you will be provided with people that are not the people in this room ... You’ll be calling people outside this room.”
The national director of Libs & Nats for Yes, Andrew Bragg, said that while a high proportion of Labor and Greens voters will vote yes, many Coalition voters were undecided.
He said the campaign would target them through TV, radio and press appearances, as well as advertising using “the strong liberal and conservative case for same-sex marriage that hasn’t been made yet”.
Brady said the campaign would be “about real people we know, getting people to see their lives, and the value of fairness and equality”. Volunteers would be directed to tell everyone they know – relatives, neighbours and work colleagues – to return a ballot.
“We are incredibly conscious the [inner-city] bubble is not what Australia looks like.”
Brady said the Equality Campaign had held about 80 town hall forums all over Australia, including in Armidale and Coffs Harbour, and “some of them were absolutely packed”.
“We’re not without support in every one of those towns, [the campaign] is about switching them on.”
