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There is no getting around the fact that 2020 has been a difficult year.
It has been harder for organizations to have meaningful interactions with limited in-person contact—be it to make a customer’s experience better, or make supporters feel more connected to a cause.
Organizations like More2 and Refugee Council of Australia have adopted alternate methods like calling and text messaging to keep having meaningful, personalized conversations, and CallHub is glad to have played a part in enabling them to keep their contacts engaged even in a time where social distancing is necessary.
Let’s look at the stats:
Campaigns made 45.2 million minutes of calls and sent 42.7 million messages on CallHub in 2020.
17,000 organizations and individuals used the platform in 2020.
A 63% growth in customers meant that more organizations have been adopting calling and texting as their primary modes of communication in lieu of face-to-face communication.
How have organizations adapted their communications?
More2 (Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity) needed to collect census data in Kansas City by reaching out to hard-to-count populations.
This was traditionally done by going door-to-door, with the help of trusted community members to raise awareness about census participation and how it would help the community.
In order to continue those efforts remotely, More2 used CallHub’s Predictive Dialer to make calls to 8869 community members, track constituent data, and follow-up with relevant information.
For More2, the personalized scripts proved to be an effort saver, letting volunteers view information about a community member without having to look up their contact information. Survey forms allowed them to collect information from constituents and sync it back to their database in NGPVAN.
They managed to help 1745 people join the census, and connect 67 people to the health department for COVID-related care leading up to the census deadline in September 2020.
The Refugee Council of Australia used CallHub to raise funds.
Lockdowns resulting from COVID-19 took away the livelihoods of nearly 600,000 Australians. In aid of those with no safety net, the Refugee Council of Australia started a fundraising campaign with the help of their supporters.
They were used to sending emails as their primary mode of communication with supporters and donors, but the need for more personal ways of communication (while still being scalable) necessitated a shift to texting.
With the objective of building a support base through texting, they used CallHub’s text broadcast campaigns to send messages to 6000 people, sharing a link to their donation page.
Other nonprofit organizations have used CallHub in 2020 for:
- Spreading COVID awareness.
- Fundraising and donation reminders.
- Member outreach.
- Surveys.
- Advocacy.
Political campaigns and organizations like Democrats Abroad and the Bernie Sanders’ campaign used CallHub for:
- GOTV campaigns.
- Ballot registration reminders.
- Volunteer recruitment.
We wanted to make sure that our product would evolve to meet the needs of our customers. Here’s what we added to our calling and texting tools this year.
New releases in 2020
In 2020, we focused on making it easier for campaigns to stay compliant and run more efficient campaigns. Here’s a look at some of CallHub feature updates from this year:
- MMS
- FastClick Dialer
- Callbacks
- Text from CallCenter
- Answering Machine Detection
- Household improvements
- User Roles
MMS
The addition of MMS was a way to give users more options when it came to sending an engaging text message.
That meant improved response rates for text broadcast and peer-to-peer text campaigns.
With 250 users adopting CallHub’s MMS capability for texting campaigns, 2.8 million messages went out in 2020.
Read more about CallHub’s MMS feature here.
FastClick Dialer
The FastClick dialer was built to let users get the speed of a predictive dialer while complying with TCPA regulations for calling cell phones.
All calls can be initiated by a human, rather than the software. This is great for use cases like GOTV dialing where you have to reach a lot of people in a short time.
How does the FastClick Dialer work?
- You select a clicker agent to manually initiate multiple calls at once for all other agents taking calls for the campaign.
- Once the call is answered, it is connected to a free calling agent.
Introduced late in the year, 12 verified customers used the FastClick Dialer to make 1.2 million minutes worth of calls in the months leading up to the US elections.
Learn more about CallHub FastClick Dialer
Callbacks
We wanted to make it easier for campaigns to follow-up with contacts if they were busy or otherwise unavailable.
The ‘CallBack’ disposition was added to calling campaigns to let agents schedule callbacks and save them the hassle of manually calling contacts later.
Our customers have seen more than 80% answer rate to scheduled calls, with more than 100k minutes generated from callbacks.
Learn more about scheduling Callbacks.
Text from Call Center
The ability to follow up with contacts meant an increase in reach and a better chance to convert prospects.
The Text from Call Center feature lets campaigns drop a text for unanswered calls or follow-up with additional details for the people they talk to.
All you need to do is enable it for agents and provide text message templates during campaign setup.
A total of 600,000 follow-up text messages were sent from call center campaigns.
Learn more about CallHubs Text from Call Center feature
Answering Machine Detection
Answering Machine Detection helps campaigns save time and effort, and makes your agents more efficient in the process.
Now, your agents will only need to talk when a human answers the phone. For calls from your campaign that reach answering machines, you can choose to automatically leave a pre-recorded message, or just hang up.
Learn more about Answering Machine Detection
Household improvements
What if campaigns called a number that was attached to multiple contacts? That was the problem we had in mind when introducing the Households update.
Household members are now grouped so agents can survey multiple members of the household in the same conversation. New household members can be added for contacts not already on the list.
Learn more about Households here.
User Roles
User Roles were introduced to give campaigns more flexibility in managing staff and volunteers.
Our predefined user roles let you choose whether your collaborators have full or partial access:
Co-Admin: The co-admin has the freedom to create and manage campaigns, manage credits, reports, add or delete rented numbers.
Collaborator: Collaborators will have access to every feature of the campaign, except for payments and cost related details.
Learn more about distributing leadership through user roles.
What’s next?
We have a lot in store for next year when it comes to making your outreach easier.
Look forward to:
- New and improved integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and EveryAction.
- A CallHub mobile app.
- Improved automation, like auto-assigning contacts to agents in P2P campaigns.
- Agent leaderboards for P2P campaigns.
- URL shorteners for texting campaigns.
- List segmentation– To improve data handling in CallHub.
Here’s to a great year ahead.
