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L. Norwood & Associates is based in California and works with advocacies, nonprofits, and political campaigns focused on marginalized communities. They work on campaigns across the country and undertake digital and field organizing, communications, outreach, and marketing for organizations needing expert help.
“We are a movement-building consulting firm, and that is our own unique framing of our work. We support organizations by developing solutions that reach communities that are marginalized and excluded or are impacted by a variety of social justice issues. Typically, we work on campaigns that are intended to reach communities of color, and we serve and provide different strategic advisement, communications, and marketing solutions to nonprofit organizations that support Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other communities of color,” Lanae, founder and principal, tells CallHub.
Calling and texting form the core part of their communications to voters and supporters. That’s where CallHub features with Lanae. “We develop outreach solutions to targeted community members in different areas. One of the means we reach them is through texts and phone calls,” Lanae says, adding, “We use the CallHub solutions, and it helps us to uplift different initiatives, bring awareness, or engage community members on social issues.”
Let’s dive into how Lanae runs successful campaigns for her clients on CallHub.
Key Takeaways
L. Norwood & Associates is a California-based movement-building consulting firm that uses CallHub’s calling and texting tools to run large-scale voter contact and outreach campaigns for nonprofits and advocacy groups serving marginalized communities.
Campaign focus and channel effectiveness
- The firm runs voter contact initiatives that share information on voting initiatives and social issues with communities of color, including Black, Indigenous, and Latino populations.
- Calling and texting serve as the core communication channels because they enable personalized, conversation-style outreach similar to talking with a friend.
- A Tatango study cited in the article finds political texts get a 98% open rate compared to 20% for political emails.
- The same study finds people who receive political texts are 1% more likely to vote, a figure that can exceed 8% depending on age, message content, and presence of a call-to-action.
- L. Norwood & Associates has seen higher engagement from phone calls and texts firsthand, even as political calls face broader public backlash.
Scale and tools on CallHub
- Campaigns cover contact universes ranging from 400,000 to 1,000,000 people, run by a team of 5 full-time staff and 14 volunteers.
- The team uses CallHub’s Auto Dialer and Power Dialer to manage phonebanking and texting at this volume.
Script testing and optimization
- The firm treats data hygiene and message quality as the two biggest drivers of engagement and contact rates.
- Its team runs A/B tests by splitting a contact subset into two test lists on identical CallHub campaigns with different scripts, then rolls out the winning script to the remaining contacts.
- CallHub lets users pause a campaign, edit the script, and restart within minutes, with changes reflected on the agent console in real time, and a Live Script Edit feature allows mid-campaign script changes that apply starting with the next call.
PDI integration
- Contact lists are sourced from clients or third parties and go through at least one data hygiene scrub before being imported into CallHub.
- Agents add call notes on CallHub, which sync back to the firm’s master contact list through the PDI integration, cutting down manual data management time.
- The integration supports importing and exporting contact lists, flag IDs and survey questions, tag syncing, agent/volunteer name syncing, and text status syncing between CallHub and PDI in real time.
Nature of Lanae’s campaigns
“Typically [we work on] voter contact initiatives, so we need to reach a targeted audience of voters. We will develop a campaign solution to use CallHub to reach them, share information, and make them aware of different voting initiatives or social issues so that they can take action and be involved,” Lanae tells us.
These are personalized communications. And like you would pick up your phone to talk to your friend, L. Norwood & Associates uses calling and texting to have conversations with voters. Studies show this is effective.
A recent study by Tatango says that political emails have a 20% open rate while political texts get 98%. People receiving texts or political SMS marketing are also 1% more likely to vote (the number surpasses 8% if you further categorize by age, nature of information, and presence of CTA in the text!)
The L. Norwood & Associates team has also experienced a higher engagement rate when the team engages in phone calls and texts. So, while political calls have been getting backlash recently, they remain a more reliable communication channel when you have a targeted list to contact.
Calling and Texting on CallHub
Lanae’s firm runs campaigns for contact universes ranging from 400,000 to 1,000,000 contacts. So, investing in a communications solution becomes an obvious and high-returns choice for them. It’s typically a team of 5 full-time staff members and 14 volunteers that run phonebanking and texting campaigns on behalf of their clients on CallHub.
They use the Auto Dialer and Power Dialer to have meaningful conversations with their contact universe.
Testing scripts before and after you go live
Optimization is important when you’re running any campaign. “One of the things (apart from data hygiene) that drives engagement and contact rates is the message. It’s important to have the right type of message and script structure to help drive engagement,” she tells CallHub.
L. Norwood & Associates’s experience and previous studies have shown that a succinct, clear, and compelling message improves contact and engagement rates. Through A/B tests on CallHub. Her team divides a subset of their contact universe into two “test” contact lists, adds them to identical campaigns on CallHub (the script is different for both), and tests contact and engagement rates. Once there is a clear winner, that script goes out to all remaining contacts.
On CallHub, you can pause your campaign, edit the script, and restart calling. This takes just a few minutes, and changes will show on your agent console in real-time.
We also have a “Live Script Edit” feature in the Call Center Software that you can request, and with that, you can edit scripts while your campaign is ongoing. The new script will reflect from the next call onwards once you hit “Save.”
PDI <> CallHub integration
L. Norwood & Associates acquires contact lists from either her clients or third parties. They go through at least one data hygiene scrub before importing on CallHub (and sometimes more if there are too many bad or wrong numbers in their test runs). But in either case, there’s very little information on the contacts.
But on CallHub, agents can add notes (and managers can make that mandatory) after a call. Lanae’s consultancy mostly uses the PDI integration on CallHub, so these notes get synced back against the respective contacts on their master list.
With the PDI <> CallHub integration, you can:
- Import contact lists from PDI
- Export appended contacts (e.g., from your Text to Join campaign) to PDI
- Import and export flag IDs (or survey questions) between the two tools
- Sync CallHub tags with PDI survey questions
- Sync the name of the agent/volunteer who answered the survey or added a call disposition on CallHub
- Sync information on text status.
Essentially, all information you acquire on a voter via survey questions or text responses will get synced to your PDI account in real-time.
“Being able to have that integration with data talking both ways is super helpful. It cuts down manual data hygiene and management time because it automatically pushes data both ways,” Lanae tells us.
L. Norwood & Associates’s campaigns are powerful, ambitious, and high-volume. With their outreach, consultation, and marketing services, they are uplifting marginalized communities in the USA. We at CallHub are honored to play a part in their communication and outreach efforts and hope this relationship continues growing.
Feature Image Credits: Lanae Norwood.
