Proven Peer-to-Peer Texting Best Practices for Outreach

Why do you need peer-to-peer texting best practices? Because peer-to-peer texting solved a problem that had plagued organizations for years: the challenge of having personalized conversations at scale. Today, peer-to-peer texting (or p2p texting) enables campaign volunteers to engage in one-to-one conversations with thousands of contacts.

This allows campaigns to mobilize supporters for events, provide voting instructions, gauge voter sentiment on issues, raise funds, encourage people to take action, etc.

While the technology itself is solid with continuous improvements made every day, we’ve identified numerous instances where campaigns go wrong with their implementation of peer-to-peer texting.

Some of it is simply a matter of gaining experience with a new messaging model, while some others are due to inherent human tendencies.

We analyzed more than 1,000,000 peer-to-peer text messages sent through CallHub to identify these gaps and the inventive solutions that emerged to solve them. This article lists 13 best practices to address gaps in an otherwise effective peer-to-peer text messaging campaign.

Peer-to-peer texting best practices: Framing your message

Decide if you want to initiate a conversation

P2P messaging is built for personalized conversations. And most people take that to mean that if contacts aren’t replying in large numbers, they’ve fallen short of engagement. That’s far from the truth. Take two instances of outreach for an upcoming event. The goal of the initial P2P Text campaign is to nurture the audience and to get them talking and interested in learning more about the event. So, an initial text that prompts a response makes sense here.

“Hey Jon, this is Melinda from Hope Society. We’re holding a rally next Saturday to support the Clean Energy Act ✊. There’ll be snacks and drinks 🍕. Want to come?”

This text is meant to initiate a conversation. It instills curiosity about the event, prompting follow-ups about where it will be held, when it will be held, whether there will be transportation, and so forth.

Next comes the follow-up reminder for event attendees.

“Reminder: Clean Energy rally tomorrow at 221B Baker St, Marylebone from 3pm to 6pm. See you there!”

The text is meant to be informative, not conversational. A horde of incoming replies to this reminder is a waste of your staff’s time.

Although people will still reply to this text enquiring about one thing or another, the response rate will be far lower, owing to its informative nature rather than the conversational nature of the previous text.

This is just one example to drive home the point that you have to reflect on your goal before deciding whether to make the distinction between informative and conversational text messages.

Personalize your initial text

I’m talking about initial texts of a conversational nature. If you look at my previous example, you’ll see that the text answers three questions most people ask themselves when they give a text the once-over.

• ‘Is it meant for me?’: Are they just another name on a list, or is this text meant specifically for them?
• ‘Who is this?’: Do they know the person sending the text?
• ‘So what?’: Now that they’ve read the message, what is the next course of action?

The questions are answered in three simple steps: personalize, identify, and prompt.

Personalize your message for each individual contact – “Hey Jon”
Identify yourself and your organization – “this is Melinda from Hope Society”
Prompt them with a call to action or a question – “Want to come?”

And of course, a healthy dose of emojis helps ensure the receiver treats the text like it’s from a real person, not an automated tool.

(There are instances when you’d want to strike a more authoritative tone rather than a friendly one. We recommend testing your texts to find the tone that your audience relates to.)

A/B test to find your tone

The nature of audiences varies based on an organization’s established culture and its history of communication with its respective audiences.

That’s to say that a one-size-fits-all text messaging structure will not give you the best returns.

For example, VOTE.org found that a conversational text drastically reduced their response rates when trying to get people to register to vote. But on the other hand, an authoritative text that included a link to the voter registration page resulted in a 50% increase in registrations.

Switch the tone of your initial (and follow-up) texts to better align with your audience. A simple strategy is to split your contact list into smaller samples and run texting campaigns at the same time, with each campaign using a different tone. Once you find the right fit, it’s only a matter of scaling up.

Maintain context with your replies

With peer-to-peer texting, campaign managers can suggest replies to their text bankers. Say, a contact asks about their polling location. A text banker simply has to go into saved/suggested replies and use the saved reply in their text.

While saved replies are a huge time-saver that let text bankers manage multiple conversations with ease, their use also presents a common problem: volunteers using them without adding context to the conversation at hand.

Pre-saved replies are meant to address frequently asked questions like ‘Where’s my polling location?’ or ‘Where’s the event taking place?’. Unfortunately, FAQs don’t come in perfectly framed questions. They’re almost always part of individual conversations, each with its own quirks.

So, when text bankers directly use saved templates to respond to contacts, it tends to read like an automated text, which is one major problem we’re trying to avoid in the first place. Even if the reply answers the question, the recipient is good at discerning subtle mismatches between what they said and the reply they received.

Campaign managers need to be aware of both sides of this problem.

• If you overburden your text bankers, they’ll have no choice but to stick to templated replies to keep pace with the conversations.
• Agents don’t bother to modify the template replies to ensure they’re in context with the conversation.

So,

Solution A is: Make sure that you assign only enough contacts to a volunteer that they can comfortably manage during a shift. We recommend assigning 1000 contacts/volunteer per hour.

Solution B is: Train your volunteers to treat saved replies as a guideline and to use their own intuition to modify the template based on the conversation.

Peer-to-peer texting best practices: Managing Conversations

Treat wrong numbers as opportunities

A lot of text bankers, when faced with the realization that they’ve reached a wrong number, try to wrap up the conversation with a generic opt-out message. But we’ve also seen a few others treat the wrong number as an opportunity to get closer to their goal.

For example, GOTV drives by a local government used peer-to-peer texting to reach out to people on their voter lists. And these lists weren’t 100% reliable. We saw two ways volunteers handled wrong numbers, and two very different results, depending on how they were handled.

(a) Volunteer reaches the wrong person for a GOTV campaign. Once the person makes this evident in their reply, the agent sends out a generic opt-out text, and the conversation ends there.

(b) Volunteer reaches the wrong person for a GOTV campaign. The person makes this known in their response text, and the agent apologizes and asks them to make sure to vote anyway and to tell their friends to go vote.

We saw multiple cases where the person responded affirmatively and thanked the volunteer for their work. There have even been cases where the contact says they’d reach out to friends in the target constituency to tell them to vote.

It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of these conversations using data collected or other metrics. But it’s safe to say that wrong numbers don’t have to cost you. The way you manage them can actively contribute to your campaign’s success.

Don’t overdo it

A follow-up or two is fine when reaching out to unresponsive contacts. But beyond that, remove them from the current campaign. Text messages currently get through the din of excessive emails and social media because they are personal and relevant.

Send too many texts, and you risk people treating them just like any other spam email.

Follow-up with the maybe’s

We see a lot of ‘maybe’s’ showing up in survey results. The questions usually range from invitations to attend an event and ask for volunteers to fundraising requests. It goes to show that you’ll be losing out on engaging a large portion of your audience with just a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ option on your survey response.

If you aren’t already making room for a ‘Maybe’ option in survey questions, start now. And make sure you filter out the undecided people and follow up with them later.

Quick Responses

We’ve all been part of text conversations where the person at the other end took way too long to respond. And we’re familiar with the frustration that causes. The lesson here is not to leave contacts waiting too long for your responses. This causes people to lose interest in the conversation and become less inclined to respond later. The problem is easily solved by:

(a) Adequately training volunteers on the importance of responding quickly.

(b) Creating templates for volunteers that address the most common questions or responses. Some of them are:

• “yes” response
• “no” response
• Who is this?
• How did you get my number?
• Don’t text me.
• I’d like more information.

(c) Assigning a manageable number of contacts to each volunteer.

Account for underperforming volunteers

You have to accept that not every volunteer will follow through on their commitment to support the campaign. Maybe they were busy, changed their mind, or couldn’t get out of work. The reasons don’t matter. What matters is that you ensure that every person on your contact list is actively engaged by a campaign volunteer. That means identifying underperforming volunteers and reassigning them to your active volunteers.

Read More: You can check out how re-assigning works in CallHub here

Peer-to-peer texting best practices: Maximizing your returns

Clean your contact list

Contact lists aren’t 100% reliable. They’ll have their fair share of non-existent numbers and landline numbers mixed in with mobile numbers. Before you start your text outreach, analyze your list and remove any invalid numbers.

Tools like contact list analysis in CallHub or phone append services like Accurate Append help you clean up contact lists.

Make room for phone calls

While younger generations are more attuned to text messaging, many older supporters will be more comfortable getting on a call to learn about an event, their poll location, or to clarify any queries related to the campaign.

Make sure that when people call the number they receive texts from, they can connect with the campaign office or a volunteer.

At the same time, encourage your volunteers to call contacts if conversations start to lag while exchanging texts.

CallHub lets you use a call transfer option to route calls to a central campaign number.

Record your data

Engaging conversations will remain just as they are — as conversations — if you’re not actively recording the details of each conversation. Use surveys in your peer-to-peer texting campaigns to capture supporter data. Before you start the campaign, drive home the importance of marking survey responses to your volunteers. That’s the only way for you to learn and grow through each outreach campaign.

Mandatory training for new text bankers

While the features of a peer-to-peer texting tool may seem obvious to an experienced organizer, volunteers may still skip important features or, as we mentioned earlier, forget to mark survey responses unless they receive specific instructions on what to do.

Train new volunteers before you start them on a peer-to-peer texting campaign, instructing them on how to use the tool and handle conversations effectively.

Use these best practices as a guideline to develop your own voice and style, and you should find yourself with the best results from peer-to-peer texting campaigns. You may not get the results you want from the get-go, but the willingness to be patient, experiment, and constantly evaluate your outreach goes a long way to seeing the results you expect.

At CallHub, we’re constantly on the lookout for gaps in peer-to-peer texting and are determined to help campaigners fill those gaps. To learn more about Peer to Peer Texting, check out our detailed guides on peer to peer texting, event building, fundraising, and GOTV.

If you have insights to offer from your use of text messaging, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

FAQ: Peer-to-peer texting best practices

Tony Joy

Tony works on stories at CallHub, where the customer is the protagonist, and the setting changes across politics, advocacy, and business. He shapes and builds the story arc to help them mobilize supporters, assess voter sentiment, or get citizens out to vote.