How Phonebanking Software Can Help Grassroots Voter Outreach

Using collective action to build a campaign from the ground up is no easy task! Especially without two things – a great strategy and a powerful voter outreach software by your side. 

Campaigns have used CallHub for over eight years to reach out to voters. And as someone who understands their needs and challenges up close, we can share pretty informed advice on phonebanking software for voter outreach.

This article explores how phone banking software can help you develop a successful grassroots campaign. From identifying voters to getting them to vote – good software aids you in every step. Let’s read more.

How phonebanking voter outreach software helps

It is evident that big and small campaigns are all turning to local strategies. The use of digital tools and platforms has helped movements shift their focus to addressing individual voters. Campaign messages can be tailored, and volunteers can be managed to run a wide-scale ground game with the aid of these services.

Similarly, phonebanking has large-reaching effects on grassroots voter mobilization. Here’s how a phonebanking software can help you–

1. Voter identification
2. Personalize your message
3. Focus on outreach
4. Build donor relations
5. Train and manage volunteers
6. Scale-up GOTV

Let’s explore these points in detail.

Read Also: Grassroots Mobilization: Enabling ordinary people to effect extraordinary changes: Here’s how it works. 

Voter identification

The key to a grassroots voter outreach campaign is understanding voters. For that, you have to get a grasp of local issues and the perspective of the local voters on those issues. 

A door-knocking campaign helps you handle and know the public’s concerns. And in addition to it, with its ability to reach thousands of voters quickly, phone banking expedites the collecting of voter information. 

Here’s how phonebanking for grassroots voter outreach helps you know your voters:

1. When you use autodialers, such as the power dialer and predictive dialer, each agent could make upto 110 calls per hour – maximizing your outreach potential!
2. The average answer rate for phonebanking is 21.17% – much more effective than many other forms of voter outreach.
3. You can conduct phone or text surveys through your phonebanking software to collect more information about your voters.
4. Your volunteers can add call dispositions to indicate a call’s outcome after each call. This feature makes it possible to understand your supporters and how you can communicate with them.
5. Clean your lists to access updated voter information, so your campaign is personalized and highly effective in achieving your goals.

Read Also: Political Surveys: Explaining The What, Why, And How 

Personalize your message

Each instance of meaningful contact with a voter is a chance to secure their vote on election day. An outreach software lets you interact with your voters, collect information, and use it to your advantage by targeting your ideal target group.

For instance, you may realize over your first few interactions that some voters prefer being contacted via phone while others prefer texting or email. You can switch the channels you are using for outreach to different segments of voters according to their preferences.

Here’s how phone banking through a good grassroots voter outreach software can help–

1. Personalized Scripts: You can improve voter relations over every call by using a personalized script that relates to their interests. Every time your agents call a contact, they can acquire more information about the voter and add it to their software’s dashboard. Updating a contact’s information any time you reach out to them will ensure you have the latest and most accurate information.
2. Branching scripts: Want to take personalized phone banking to the next level? With branching scripts, you can design logic-based script flows that guide your volunteers at every step of the way. Depending on how your voters respond, the script branches out into different responses that agents can easily follow.

You can learn more about branching scripts here.

3. Mergs tags: Use features such as merge tags for your phonebanking grassroots voter outreach. Merge tags help you personalize your outreach messages by including your voter’s first name, location, and other details in your conversations – whether text or calls – to capture voters’ attention and increase voter engagement

Read Also: These Eight Voter Engagement Strategies Are All You Need to Know. 

Focus your outreach

When you conduct phone banking for voter identification, you will identify:

• strong supporters 
• opposers of your movement,
•  unregistered voters, 
• swing voters, and more. 

You’ll also find patterns with different age groups, income levels, localities, etc. How do you consolidate this information and make the most out of it? You can enter this information on your CRM. Your next steps will include–

1. Using list segmentation features on your grassroots voter outreach software to segment different voter groups and share unique messages with each segment. 
2. Running a microtargeting phone banking campaign to identify areas to focus on instead of spreading yourself thin and trying to focus on multiple areas. 

Read Also: How To Personalize Campaign Messages With Voter Profiling 

Build donor relations

Fundraising is an essential part of a grassroots campaign. One experiment found that phone banking leads to a 41% increase in funds collected! Who would not want to leverage that opportunity?

You can identify high-potential donors and make fundraising calls through your phonebanking software.

Phone banking features can help you fundraise and build donor relations as follows–

1. Scheduled callback: Donor relations are not made in a day – they result from several phone calls and outreach efforts. Scheduled callback allows you to schedule the best time to reach a donor in case they are unavailable or prefer a different time to speak. 
2. Text message follow-up: With a text message follow-up immediately after a phone conversation with a prospect, you increase the likelihood of converting them into a donor. It is also a great way to leave a message for contacts who did not pick up your call – ensuring your message reaches out to them.

Want to know how to identify contacts who are most likely to donate to your grassroots political campaign? Read our article Your guide to donor research through political donor lookup tools 

Train and manage volunteers

Training and managing volunteers becomes much simpler when you are phone banking and using a voter outreach tool. 

One of our users, Celine Trojand from Organizing for Change, says about CallHub:

“A lot of our folks are volunteers, a lot of them are retired, they are often anxious with technology, and they were able to use CallHub easily. The feedback on the user interface was really good. People felt like the tool was easy to use, and volunteers had a great time. It’s empowering for volunteers who don’t see themselves as very tech-savvy to be able to pick up a new piece of software and a new program and just use it, so that was great.”

Easy-to-use software and a mobile app to go with it is the perfect tool for volunteers – no matter their tech-savviness. 

Read Also: The Most Effective Volunteer Recruitment Methods and Tools for Your Cause

Additionally, CallHub’s phone banking tools reflect your phone scripts on the agent’s dashboard. Each contact’s information and scripts combined on the agent’s dashboard help them easily navigate conversations. 

A grassroots voter outreach software will provide multiple features to encourage and train volunteers. They are–

1. Live call monitoring: Campaign managers can listen to live calls by volunteers to understand whether volunteers are conveying all necessary information and give them feedback to improve. Live call monitoring makes training volunteers much simpler. 
2. Agent leaderboard: Agent leaderboard is a fun way to incentivize volunteers engaged in phone banking. It showcases top-performing volunteers who you can reward and track volunteers who could improve and train them.

Scale up GOTV

A GOTV (Get out the vote) campaign right before election day increases voter turnout by 5% – a significant increase for any campaign. 

A grassroots voter outreach software lets you scale GOTV to your full potential. Your volunteers cannot go to every door right before election day. Instead, you could scale your GOTV effort over the entire constituency through phone banking.

While we have already explained autodialers earlier in the article, here are some more tools that will amp up your GOTV efforts–

1. Peer-to-peer texting: A peer-to-peer texting campaign for grassroots outreach is one of the best ways in which you can have personalized text conversations. Volunteers send text broadcasts to an extensive voter list and personally respond to any text they receive to create awareness, register voters, share GOTV information, etc. 
2. Mass texting: Mass text messaging is ideal for sharing reminders to vote, sharing voting information, and links for voters who have opted in to receive communications from you. It requires little effort or engagement with voters and gets your information out in no time.
3. Voice broadcast: Robocalls during elections can help you get out the vote. Schedule a voice broadcast message to send out reminders right before election day. Voice broadcasts can reach thousands of contacts in a short time. Campaign managers need to add a prerecorded message or choose the text-to-speech option on CallHub’s dashboard, and your message is ready to go out.

What’s next?

As you can see, grassroots voter outreach software is vital to any campaign. It ties in with every activity and lets you deliver personalized messages to every voter. 

Get started on a phone bank for your local election run, and you can provide microtargeted content to your voters at the same level as any other large-scale digital campaign. CallHub’s outreach software has been used by campaigns of all sizes to reach out to voters. Try CallHub for free for 14-days and leverage its features for your campaign.

Featured Image Source: Marcus Aurelius