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A 2022 study showed that nonprofits could increase the likelihood of a person voting by 56%. Of course, there are several nuances affecting voter turnout, including the demographics of the voter, the partisan or non-partisan status of the voter mobilization organization, and when and how a voter was contacted.
But overall, voter mobilization is a promising, challenging, and worthwhile effort in which thousands of organizations engage. CallHub is proud to work with several such organizations and contribute to the US democratic process. One such organization is a nonprofit focusing on swing states and engaging electorates in surveys before mobilizing them to vote. We have redacted their name to maintain their anonymity at their request. But we’re thrilled to confirm that in the 2022 mid-term elections, they organized 500+ callers to mobilize over one million voters!
Phone banking with CallHub
We have worked closely with the well-known nonprofit since 2022 and share a close relationship with their work. L, the advocacy’s Operations Manager, actively makes product and feature requests while the CallHub team works hard to see them come to fruition. In return, L and their team have been early adopters of many of our features, including the Spam Label Shield, Inbound calling, and Branching scripts.
From surveys to mobilization
L’s advocacy primarily calls their contacts for surveys. The list size can vary between 15,000 and 300,000, and L runs two to three phone banking campaigns every week.
They ask questions ranging from financial well-being to an electorate’s satisfaction with the current political representative.
Based on these data points, the next part of outreach begins. Since they typically work in swing states, L has to run voter persuasion campaigns as well. Tags on contacts (that get synced to and from a CRM into CallHub) help the manager segment and unify contacts for each new calling campaign. So, the run from the first phone banking campaign to the last one changes the length and contents of the contact lists quite a bit. But that’s just the nature of a voter mobilization campaign.
“CallHub has tons of features on its platform that fits seamlessly into our outreach process. Our ability to update contact information on the fly and have it sync back to our CRM ensures our conversations are effective in understanding our contact list,” L testifies.
CallHub features that boosted impact
The Spam Label Shield
When looking at a contact universe of millions, your number is bound to get labeled as “Spam” or “Spam Likely.” Even if you procured the numbers from a legitimate source and identified yourself, 1 in every 4 calls gets flagged. And that dramatically reduces your future answer rates.
With CallHub’s Spam Label Shield, you avoid this plummet. Our system is scheduled to do sanitization checks every 15 minutes, and as soon as there’s a flag on your number, we replace it with a fresh one. That way, your campaign manager need not check on the number status in the middle of the campaign and rent and change numbers while agents are still on calls.
The Spam Label Shield also works with our Dynamic Caller ID (renting local numbers based on each contact’s location) so we swap flagged numbers with a clean number with the same area code.
L’s team uses Predictive Dialling with CallHub. That typically means a huge volume of calls per minute. The Spam Label Shield does wonders here because they simply cannot afford to pause campaigns every hour.
“Predictive Dialing means that our callers are utilized at optimum capacity but not overwhelmed. Its ability to adjust in real time based on answer rate helps us provide a consistent experience as we reach thousands of contacts at scale,” says L.
Inbound calling
Campaigns use the Predictive Dialer when they have a huge contact list to go through, and the answer rates are not magnificent (typical for cold lists or state or nationwide campaigns like L’s). While you do miss out on a majority of contacts, not all of them should slip through the crack—at least not those with high motivation.
So, on CallHub, you can set up a voicemail drop if you reach an answering machine (ideally mentioning your number) and enable Inbound calling. This way, interested people will call you back, increasing your overall contact rate.
Branching scripts
The nature of L’s scripts is dynamic, considering they are full of questions that branch into multiple options for answers. Naturally, each conversation takes a unique turn.
Traditionally, these branches were listed in the script, with prompts like “Move to section 4.a if response is A”.
Instead, Branching Scripts guide agents to the subsequent question/reply based on the contact’s responses throughout the script. Unlike a static script, the agent doesn’t need to identify the next question based on written instructions. This functionality provides a more user-friendly agent experience, eliminates human error, and reduces long pauses in conversation.
“Usability is such a key feature for our staff when selecting any service provider. The branched script feature allows our agents to move through scripts while allowing them to focus on having a meaningful conversation with the contact,” he says.
Together, these phone banking features boosted the nonprofit’s contact and engagement rates. In 2022, the campaigns ran between August and December and successfully mobilized over one million voters to cast their ballots. Sometimes, the nitty-gritty of creating and strategizing campaigns can blindside the impact. But take a step back, and you’ll see that with each feature, the chance of contacting more people and getting them to vote increases manifold.
Some would say that phonebanking can improve voter turnout by “only” 2-3%. But perhaps those people are only looking at percentages and not the absolute numbers—numbers that make the real difference!
Feature image for representative purposes. Credits: AFL-CIO America’s Unions/Flickr.
