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A 75,000-member Oregon union, 104 campaigns a year built by hand, and a recurring campaigns feature that finally gave their team their time back.
About SEIU Local 503
SEIU Local 503 is a statewide public sector union based in Portland, Oregon, representing approximately 75,000 workers across state government, higher education, home care, nursing homes, and local government. They are part of the Service Employees International Union, an international organization representing more than 2 million workers.
Their membership is one of the most varied in the labor movement: from DHS caseworkers and ODOT road crews to home care workers supporting people with disabilities, university classified staff, and county mental health professionals. Keeping 75,000 people informed, mobilized, and connected is a significant communications challenge, and the tools they rely on need to work reliably, every single time.
We have been partnering with Sarah, a Systems Analyst and Software Engineer in SEIU Local 503’s communications department, since they came onboard. In her own words: she works with the tools the union uses to communicate with its members. That combination of technical depth and organizing context makes her story particularly worth hearing. This is their story.
The Problem: 104 Campaigns a Year, Built by Hand
A Service Members Depended On
SEIU Local 503 represents approximately 40,000 home care workers across Oregon. These workers, who provide direct care to people with disabilities and the elderly, are paid through a state-administered payroll system tied to the Oregon payroll calendar. To get paid on time, they need to submit pay vouchers by specific deadlines.
For years, SEIU 503 offered a simple but valued member service: text reminders telling home care workers when their pay voucher was due. Three days out. Then the day it was due. Twice a month, every month, for tens of thousands of workers.
It sounds simple. The problem was the Oregon state payroll calendar.
“The pattern breaks when there are state or federal holidays that fall in the pay period. So it was not something that was easy to systematize. We could not just say, send this every two weeks on Wednesday, because if Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July fell in between the pay end date and the pay date, then it was going to be a different day of the week instead.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
That irregular schedule meant the reminders could not be automated through any standard scheduling tool. Four reminders a month across two pay periods. Fifty-two weeks a year. One hundred and four campaigns, every year, each one requiring manual setup.
Seven Years of Doing It by Hand
For seven to eight years, Sarah manually queued every single one of these campaigns. Usually in batches covering three to six months at a time, working through each one in their previous platform, which required a full screen refresh between every step of the process.
“I would try to set all of this up, and then I would get distracted in the 15 seconds while I was waiting for the screen to refresh and do something else, and have to come back to it. So it would end up taking hours to get it finished because there was so much waiting and it was a very tedious job.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
They tried solving the problem on three different platforms before CallHub. None of them could handle the irregular calendar logic. At one point, they received a quote for custom development to finally automate it. The price was $3,000. The organization passed.
| How close SEIU 503 came to cutting the service entirely The manual workload became so significant that SEIU Local 503 was seriously considering discontinuing the pay voucher reminder service altogether. The staff time required to maintain it was no longer sustainable. Up to 40,000 home care workers would have lost access to a service they relied on to get paid on time. |
How CallHub Solved It
Recurring Campaigns: Set Once, Run Forever
Sarah had shared her pay voucher problem with the CallHub team early in the relationship. The irregular payroll calendar, the manual rebuilding, the hours lost to screen refreshes. We listened. When we began developing the recurring campaigns feature, her use case was exactly the kind of problem we were building to solve.
When we rolled it out, Sarah was one of the first to put it to work. The Oregon state payroll calendar is released once a year. With recurring campaigns, all she needed to do was check the boxes for the dates and times, set the message template with a variable for the dynamic date field, and save. A problem that had existed for seven years was solved in an afternoon.
“I think the whole thing took maybe 15 minutes to set up all of them. It was literally just checking boxes for the days we wanted them to go out and the times. It was the same message each time with a variable in it. And I never have to look at it again. And that is amazing.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
One hundred and four campaigns. Set up once a year. In fifteen minutes.
And because the template is still editable, Sarah retains full control. If something changes on the agenda or the message needs to be updated, she can edit the template and the campaign still runs on schedule. The automation handles the repetition. She handles the judgment calls.
“It automates all of the tedious, repetitive work of a recurring campaign, and it lets you still manually do the quality assurance, or make changes to the template if you need to. But otherwise, you just let it run. And that is very convenient.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
Salesforce AutoSync and Segments: Always the Right List
The pay voucher reminders were the most time-consuming problem. But the broader challenge at SEIU Local 503 was list management across a 75,000-member organization where the right message almost never goes to everyone.
Before Salesforce AutoSync, the process for any targeted campaign was laborious: build the report in Salesforce, export it as a CSV, import it as a flat file into CallHub, and then use it. Except by the time anyone wanted to use that list again, it had already gone stale. Members had moved, changed employers, updated their information.
“There is the potential that you are using out-of-date information when you send to recipients. And so being able to do that targeting directly in CallHub has made an enormous difference for us, because it means we know that we always have the right recipient list.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
With Salesforce AutoSync, SEIU Local 503 now has 15 to 20 fields syncing directly into CallHub in real time. Geography, employer, language, affinity group, role, interest, and more. When Sarah or her colleague Cole need to build a targeted list, they do it directly inside CallHub using those synced fields, without ever exporting a CSV.
| What the Salesforce sync made possible • Always-current recipient data, no more stale exports • Micro-targeting across 15 to 20 synced fields: geography, employer, language, role, affinity group, and more • Any combination of those fields for precise list building in minutes • Eliminated the export, import, and re-pull cycle entirely • Confidence that the right message reaches the right people every time |
The Results
The most significant result is not a metric. It is that a member service nearly discontinued due to staff workload is still running, reaching up to 40,000 home care workers every month with reminders that help them get paid on time.
“We had actually been considering discontinuing this service to our members because it was so much staff time for something that maybe not enough people used to justify the effort it took. The fact that it is now basically effortless means that we can continue to provide this service to our members.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
Beyond the pay voucher campaign, the Salesforce sync has changed how the entire team approaches targeted outreach. List building that used to involve multiple steps across two platforms now happens in one place, with data that is always current.
What SEIU Local 503 Can Do Now That Was Not Possible Before
- Set up a full year of recurring campaigns in 15 minutes. One hundred and four individually scheduled campaigns, each with its own date and time, configured once and running automatically.
- Keep a critical member service running without dedicated staff time. The pay voucher reminder program was almost cut. Now it runs itself.
- Edit campaign templates without disrupting the schedule. If a message needs updating, Sarah changes the template. The automation keeps running.
- Target precisely across 15 to 20 live fields. Geography, employer, language, role, and more, always synced from Salesforce, never stale.
- Build lists in one platform instead of two. No more exporting from Salesforce, importing into CallHub, and hoping the data is still current when it is time to send.
The Bigger Picture
The pay voucher reminders were just the start. But Sarah is clear-eyed about what the change meant at a personal level.
“The difference it made for me is not having to take an entire workday once every couple of months to do nothing but data entry, which is not really supposed to be part of my job. It made me personally very happy to not have to do that.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
We asked Sarah, who sits at the intersection of technology and organizing as a Systems Analyst and Software Engineer in SEIU Local 503’s communications department, what she would tell another union communications director who was still manually rebuilding the same campaigns every month.
“Make a template. If you have a recurring meeting and everything about it is the same every month except the date, you make a variable for that, you save it, and you set it and forget it. It is going to run for you. And if you want to change something, you go in and edit the template. The list is the same. The details are the same. It automates all of the tedious, repetitive work and lets you still do the quality assurance when you need to. But otherwise, you just let it run.”
Sarah, Systems Analyst & Software Engineer, SEIU Local 503
That framing, set it and forget it while keeping full editorial control, captures something important about how recurring campaigns work in practice. The automation does not remove judgment. It removes the part of the job that should never have required judgment in the first place.
What’s Next for SEIU Local 503 on CallHub
The pay voucher reminders were just the start. Sarah is already planning the next round of recurring campaigns:
- Monthly county membership meetings. SEIU Local 503 holds recurring membership meetings across many Oregon counties. Sarah has a meeting planned to map out how to use recurring campaigns to automate monthly invitations for each of these.
- Training and orientation invitations. Regular new member orientations and ongoing training programs are natural fits for recurring campaign automation, freeing staff from rebuilding the same invitations on repeat.
- Deeper Salesforce segmentation. With a newly added blank field condition now live in CallHub, Cole and the team have even more precision available for list building across their 75,000-member universe.
