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A 40-year-old immigrant rights organization, a compromised platform, and 155,000+ members to protect. Here is how we partnered with CASA to give their team the tools to move faster and do more.
About We Are CASA
We Are CASA has been fighting for immigrant and low-income communities for over 40 years. With 155,000+ lifetime members across Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, they run legal services, health navigation, ESOL education, workforce development, citizenship preparation, voter registration, and rapid-response organizing. Often all at once.
Their outreach is not just logistical. When ICE enforcement activity spikes in a neighborhood, CASA needs to reach members in minutes. When a bill comes to a vote, they need to mobilize thousands of constituents the same day. The platform they run on is not a back-office tool. It is a frontline resource.
We have had the privilege of partnering with CASA’s Membership Engagement Manager, Irena, since they came onboard. This is their story.
The Problem: When the Platform Becomes the Risk
For years, CASA managed member outreach through Hustle, a peer-to-peer texting platform central to their organizing. Then two things happened at once.
Their contract came up for natural renewal. And CASA leadership learned that Hustle had entered into contracts with the current federal administration. For an organization whose core mission is protecting immigrant communities from federal enforcement, this was not a vendor preference issue. It was a data security and values decision.
“The biggest trigger was who Hustle decided to work with from a political standpoint. As an organization, we decided we do not want to continue contracts with companies that are working with the current administration.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
The contract with Hustle was discontinued. The search for a replacement that could handle CASA’s scale, complexity, and multilingual membership began.
What the Old Platform Held Them Back From
Beyond the political misalignment, Hustle had real structural limitations the team had been quietly working around for years:
- Tag-based targeting meant the same person could end up in multiple simultaneous campaigns, sometimes receiving the same message in multiple languages.
- Opt-out lists were unreliable. A member who texted STOP could re-enter campaigns if a new list was uploaded without the correct tag attached.
- Large list uploads could take up to an hour before contacts were usable, a critical bottleneck for time-sensitive outreach.
- Exports did not carry unique identifiers, which forced the team to run separate campaigns per region per language. One event with 5 regions in 3 languages meant managing 15 separate campaigns.
- No built-in URL shortener. Links could only appear in follow-up messages, never in the initial outreach.
- Bulk-purchase pricing with no rollover and a significantly higher per-message cost.
The Decision: One Clear Winner
CASA’s evaluation was thorough. Given the sensitivity of their member data and the complexity of their programs, they structured this as a full organizational project involving staff from organizing, health, legal, ESOL, workforce development, IT, and communications.
The process grew large enough that CASA brought in Build Consulting, a third-party firm, to facilitate requirements gathering across departments, manage demo scheduling, and coordinate the final decision.
They evaluated EveryAction and Twilio alongside CallHub. The field narrowed fast. Most platforms could not meet even the baseline requirements. Only two made the final demo. Only one checked every box.
“CallHub was the only platform consistently meeting all the requirements, and that was before we even had a demo. That is when you were really put on the radar as our best viable option.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
| Why CallHub won the evaluation • Met all requirements across every department. The only platform that did. • Broadcast texting, P2P, and phone banking in one place • Multilingual support built in, not bolted on • Fully operational without a CRM integration • Pricing that was, in Irena’s words, staggeringly more affordable than Hustle • A platform built to grow with the organization |
How We Helped CASA Work Faster and Reach Further
We started with individual training sessions for CASA’s outreach team and expanded progressively as confidence grew. From day one, the platform addressed structural problems that had been slowing the team down for years.
Broadcast Messaging: Speed When It Counts Most
CASA sends at least one time-sensitive broadcast every month, and in active periods, multiple in a single week. Raid alerts, public safety announcements, event invitations, legislative call-to-actions. The clock starts the moment the request lands.
Under Hustle, the setup process could consume a full day. Pull and clean the geographic list through ArcGIS, wait up to an hour for the upload to process, then create separate campaigns per region and language. Under CallHub, list cleaning is still the longest step. But once that is done, the platform side is fast.
“Once the list was ready, it took me maybe 30 minutes to set everything up in CallHub and launch. From request to send was under two hours. That used to be a full day. I do not have words for how much that matters when someone’s community is under threat.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
That time saving is not just an efficiency metric. When members are facing active enforcement in their neighborhood, two hours versus six hours is a safety difference.
Multilingual Segmentation: One List, Three Languages
CASA’s membership communicates primarily in Spanish, English, and Haitian Creole. Under Hustle, multilingual campaigns required pre-splitting every contact list by language and running entirely separate campaigns for each. It multiplied the workload with every single action.
With CallHub’s segments feature, Irena uploads a mixed-language list, applies AND/OR conditions to divide by language tag, previews the contact count to confirm the logic is correct, and launches. No manual splitting required.
“I set up a segment for English and one for Spanish, tested the conditions, checked that the numbers matched what I expected, and launched. It worked really well. It saved me from having to manually divide the list before I could even start.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
Built-In URL Shortener and Link Tracking
Every CASA campaign involves links: event RSVPs, petition pages, resource documents, meeting links. Under Hustle, there was no built-in shortener, and links were blocked from initial messages entirely. Every campaign required a workaround.
Irena now uses CallHub’s URL shortener on every single campaign. The tracking data feeds directly into her reports, and she no longer needs external tools or extra steps to include a link in outreach.
“I love the URL tracking. I use it every single time. It saves so much time, and I love being able to see the engagement data. That was simply not possible before.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
Reports and Dashboards: From Manual Cleanup to One-Click Exports
After every major action, CASA’s team submits reports: contacts targeted, response rates, costs, RSVP percentages. Under Hustle, producing those numbers meant downloading raw exports, cleaning them manually, and building summaries from scratch. It took most of a day.
With CallHub, Irena aggregates results across multiple campaigns in a single dashboard view, including separate language campaigns for the same event. She exports charts directly as PDFs or images, ready for executive presentations.
“The Monday after May Day, they needed reports for an executive retreat. I pulled the charts directly from CallHub. Accurate, formatted, ready to drop into a PowerPoint. They were already made for me. That used to take a whole day.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
Ease of Use: Staff Adoption That Actually Sticks
One of CASA’s consistent challenges with previous platforms was re-training. When a system is not intuitive, staff find workarounds or quietly stop using it altogether.
Miriam, CASA’s workforce development coordinator, went through a single onboarding session and has operated independently since. She has rarely needed to reach back out for help.
“Sometimes you retrain people over and over and they still do not get it, and that tells you something about the platform. With CallHub, people understand it after the first session and keep using it. That is not always the case.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
The Results: May Day 2026
May Day is CASA’s biggest annual mobilization, a multi-region, multilingual civic action spanning all four states. In 2025, their first year on CallHub, the team was still building their confidence with the platform. By 2026, they ran the most organized outreach in recent memory.
The 2026 campaign launched with a soft-touch invite the first week of April, nearly four weeks ahead of the event. That was followed by a targeted follow-up to interested members two weeks later, then a final reminder in the days before May 1st. Each wave ran through CallHub’s broadcast tool.
The practical effect: organizers received clean, filtered lead lists before they started their own outreach. No more calling members who had already responded. No more duplicated effort between the digital and organizing teams.
“At the debrief after May Day, one of the things our organizers really appreciated was how well-organized everything was this year. They could focus on the action itself instead of scrambling on the back end. That was a direct result of being able to set up and send outreach earlier and more cleanly than we ever had.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
What CASA Can Do Now That Simply Was Not Possible Before
- Add contacts to active campaigns mid-flight. Under Hustle, a last-minute list addition could break a live campaign. Now it is a routine step.
- Send MMS with links in the first message. Hustle blocked links in initial outreach entirely. CallHub supports rich, link-included messages from the start.
- Segment by language without splitting lists. What required 15 Hustle campaigns (5 regions x 3 languages) now runs in 2 to 3 targeted segments.
- Track engagement automatically. Built-in URL tracking replaced a constant manual workaround with zero extra steps.
- Pull report-ready charts in one click. PDFs and images straight from the dashboard, ready for executive presentations.
The Bigger Picture
We asked Irena what she would tell another immigrant rights or advocacy leader who was evaluating outreach tools. She did not hesitate.
“One of the biggest challenges in this work is showing impact through numbers when the real impact is not a number. The impact is a person showing up, realizing they have rights, taking action in their community. CallHub helps us track what we can measure, and do it without depending on a massive CRM system that smaller organizations cannot afford.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
That last point matters. CASA is a large organization, but many of their peer organizations in the immigrant rights space are not. The fact that CallHub operates as a full-featured outreach platform without requiring a CRM integration means smaller groups doing the same critical work can access the same infrastructure.
“I will advocate for you guys anytime.”
Irena, Membership Engagement Manager, We Are CASA
What’s Next for CASA on CallHub
We are excited to keep partnering with CASA as they expand across more programs and departments. Here is what is in the pipeline:
- Phone banking rollout. Organizing teams are finalizing scripts and training schedules to bring structured phone banking across all programs, replacing untracked personal calls.
- P2P texting agents. A dedicated agent team is being onboarded for relational organizing, building one-on-one member conversations at scale through CallHub’s P2P tools.
- CRM integration. CASA is working toward connecting CallHub to their main CRM for real-time sync of outreach history and member engagement data.
- Broader multilingual segmentation. As the team’s confidence grows, they plan to use segments systematically across all campaigns, cutting list prep time and sharpening targeting precision.
