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Connecting with voters over the phone is a tried and true strategy for political campaigns and advocacy groups. Be it for voter identification, fundraising, volunteer recruitment, or Get Out The Vote efforts, phone calls have stood the test of time as a personal and scalable medium for engaging the voter base.
We’ve seen campaigns follow two outreach strategies for political phone banking. The first strategy involves volunteers being provided a contact sheet and a calling script where they manually dial contacts from their phone and fill up the contact sheet with call details. This approach usually comes with a lot of drudge work with volunteers using pen and paper to take down details followed by the data entry work involved to enter all the information into the campaign database.
The second approach involves automated dialers to make calls to voters. While this approach is fast, scalable, and cost-effective, the downfall comes with the inability to make phone calls to cell phones without an explicit opt-in. Strict FCC regulations on auto-dialed calls to cell phones mean that campaigns often have to limit their outreach to landlines. And since 50.8% of voters don’t have a landline, that leaves a huge portion of voters who are cut off from your outreach.
An ideal solution should let your campaign make calls to cell phones (without breaking any regulations) while including all the advanced features that come with an automated dialer.
Manual phone banking with Collective Calling
This is where Collective Calling finds its fit. With Collective Calling, campaigns avoid regulatory hassles for cellphones by having volunteers dial from their phone while the software handles contact data and responses. No more pen and paper, no more data entry into Google sheets, no more missing data. You can directly import your voter lists and surveys into the tool from your CRM with instant syncing for any new entry, or update to existing data. You can access and modify all your contact details, calling scripts, surveys, and notes right within the virtual phone banking tool.
How it works
Step 1: Create your campaign
The campaign manager uploads the contact list and creates a phone banking campaign in Collective Calling complete with scripts and surveys. Managers can assign as many volunteers as they’d like to the campaign.
Step 2: Volunteers making calls
Remote or in-house volunteers can view and join the campaigns they’ve been assigned to from the agent dashboard. After joining a campaign, volunteers see contact details, scripts, and surveys on the screen. They can start making calls from their phone and fill call and survey responses on their screen.
Step 3: Syncing and exporting data
If you are using an Collective Calling integration, all voter data gathered during calls is immediately synced with your CRM software. You can also manually export the data from Collective Calling or view and segment the data within the tool to tailor future campaigns.
Features
Instant access to calling data
CRM Integrations ensure that you have instant access to voter data collected from calling campaigns. You can also import contacts, surveys, supporter levels and more from your campaign CRM into CallHub. When volunteers fill in new data or update existing data during calls, the changes are immediately reflected in your CRM.
Dynamic calling lists
Campaigns generally split up their voter lists based on the number of volunteers they have making calls and divide the list equally between volunteers. But all your volunteers will not be equally adept at making calls. While some will race through their list, others will be much slower dialing numbers. With dynamic calling lists, contacts are allocated to volunteers from the main contact list, only after the volunteer completes a call and hits ‘save’. This way, you avoid the issue of contacts being unreached and volunteers running out of people to call.
Add Surveys, Notes, and Scripts
You can add surveys, notes, and scripts when creating your phone banking campaign that is displayed to volunteers making calls. Volunteers manually dial the contact from their phone and use the on-screen script to interact with them. During the call, volunteers can take down survey responses, set supporter levels for each contact, and add notes.
Volunteer Management
There is no limit on the number of agents that the manager can add to each phone banking campaign. Depending on your requirement, you can add as many volunteers as you’d like to scale up your phone bank.
Contact Management
Data on contacts obtained from voter lists or other sources may not always be up to date. You can let agents edit contact data or add new data during calling campaigns with all updates instantly synced with the campaign CRM. Since a voter contact campaign involves multiple engagements with a contact, we also show agents the history of all past interactions to help them personalize voter engagement.
If you are part of a political campaign, advocacy group, or nonprofit, sign up for free to use Collective Calling. We’re offering 5000 free calls so that you don’t have to put a penny down till you see the benefits for yourself.
