This is a guest post written by Augustus Franklin, founder of CallHub - a hosted voice and text broadcasting system that integrates with NationBuilder. In this post Augustus discusses effective phone-banking strategies he has seen deployed in campaigns to get out the vote and activate supporters:
We’ve been working with a number of large political campaigns to help manage their phone banking and GOTV campaigns. Here are some pointers that we gathered:
Planning
It takes time, effort and persistence to convince voters so always start early, at least 6-8 months before voting day. Channels like social media work very effectively to recruit volunteers, especially younger ones. Use voice broadcasting to reach out to supporters who aren’t active on social media. The day before voting day, reach out to as many voters. This can help swing the opinion of voters who are on the fence and go out on voting day.
Feedback and Data accuracy
Collect data during calls to make sure it’s as accurate as can be. This will improve the quality of your future campaigns by over 50%. Don’t waste time importing and exporting data between systems. Use a phone banking software like CallHub that smoothly integrates with NationBuilder.
Pipeline
Start your campaign with a broadcast message, either through voice or SMS. Funnel your responses into a follow up campaign through phone banking. This ensures that you visualize the conversion funnel, you optimize your calling lists, you reduce spam calls and most importantly you save time and costs. With CallHub and NationBuilder, create custom tags to differentiate between each response.
Training
Conduct training programs for campaign managers of different cities on how to maximize the use of phone banking software. Set up budgets for the different cities and review the phone banking script so that your message remains consistent. Use paths and goals on NationBuilder to move your voters to go out to vote.
Roadblocks
Some of the bigger roadblocks that were faced during a campaign were related to scale, budget and data. For example:
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Calling over 100,000 people through a landline is expensive and time consuming.
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Most of the callers are volunteers whose time and support is limited.
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Collecting data on paper at the end of a campaign is time consuming and error prone.
With CallHub managing your campaign you can get :
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Quality feedback from each call.
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Save time by automating calling, managing volunteers and optimizing call logs.
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Remove the dependency on phones to run your campaigns. It means your agents can be anywhere in the world.
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All the feedback from your calls will be measurable and flow directly into NationBuilder.
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Create sub accounts to easily manage multiple campaigns with their own Nations while moving credits from one to another.
Case study
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A major political party in France created a phone bank of 134 volunteers and reached 100,000 voters in just 16 weeks. Read more about it here
