CallFire

by Kimberly Kohatsu

The protests in the Wisconsin state Capitol are now in their second week, and the political dialogue has gone beyond collective bargaining and the state budget. Now, there are calls for the recall of certain Wisconsin lawmakers.

Two national liberal political groups, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and Democracy for America (DFA), used CallFire’s Hosted IVR to send automated calls to 50,000 constituents in five Wisconsin state-senate districts.

Aimee Auer, a New London, WI schoolteacher, recorded the message, and it was uploaded into the CallFire interface. The voter interest poll was then programmed using CallFire’s drag-and-drop IVR Designer. Each keypad input is recorded for reporting, and listeners can be connected directly to their state senators office using a call transfer command. Listen to the result below:

Adam Green, co-founder of PCCC, sums up the strategy in three words: “Offense, offense, offense.” Green revealed to MSNBC that initial results of the calls show 59.7% of Republican voters would support recall efforts if the targeted state senators ultimately support Gov. Scott Walker’s bill, S.B.11. Green was able to see these survey results in real-time through CallFire’s campaign dashboard.

Michael Snook, Director of Targeting and Analytics for PCCC, noted, “CallFire made it possible for us to produce and deploy this effective advocacy campaign—quickly, and on budget. With CallFire’s simple, flexible XML environment, we were able to design a campaign that would connect with thousands of Wisconsin voters to voice their support for working families against Republican class warfare, and offer them the opportunity to connect directly with their elected officials.”

For a recall to be successful, petitioners must gather a number of signatures equal to 25% of the general electorate. If enough signatures are gathered, an election is held, and the official must run for his/her job again.

A conservative group, the American Patriot Recall Coalition, is also testing the waters for recall—except they are hoping to recall seven of the 14 Democratic state senators who fled the capitol in protest of Walker’s bill.

There are currently labor disputes in Ohio, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and even the NFL. Any of these political groups could use CallFire’s intuitive platform for voter outreach and education, volunteer phone banking, and text messaging campaigns. Watch CallFire’s CEO, Dinesh Ravishanker, explain how political campaigns have benefitted from using CallFire.

by Dinesh Ravishanker, CEO

From the video:  “CallFire is in the virtual call center business. This puts our software at the forefront conversation for Political Phone Banks in the United States.  During each election season we experience double, sometimes triple the virtual call center usage we see at any other point in the year.  Moreover, our solutions team consults with political marketers to design powerful telephone surveys and notification campaigns critical to campaign managers interested in voter preference and geography relevant analytics.  These campaigns also provide less educated voters with digestible information required to make a next-day voting decision.

Over the course of 6 years in cloud telephony consulting, my team and I have participated in countless confidential conversations with technologists and campaign managers.  Often we discuss the marketing and advertising strategy used to garner support for their candidates.   Time and time again, we find political advertising strategies are not terribly different from a good brand advertising strategy.  Here are a few political advertising strategies that I have seen used over the last few years.”

Political advertising strategies

• Creativity – differentiate your candidate by developing a persona
• Use fresh voter registration data lists and don’t annoy voters
• Market your candidate in search results on Google and Bing
• Place site-targeted ads for your candidate on Political Websites
• Use Voice Broadcast target geographies with tailored messages
• Accept campaign contributions online, via phone & snail mail
• Enable volunteers to make voter-outreach calls from home
• Use data from phone or social media surveys for targeting
• Tailor communication by age, location & political affiliation
• Use a “Google surge” or “Network blast” in the days before an election
  
• Partner with an experienced Political Technology company (references below)
  
• Read our entire blog post on Political Marketing Tips in the Cloud

Keep It Simple Stupid

CTA (or Call-To-Action) & KISS (or Keep-It-Simple-Stupid) are probably the most overused acronyms board rooms and marketing meetings around the world.  But lets face it – most politicians have a lot to say, so it is extremely important to distill your candidate’s values in a clear and concise manner.  In the case of telephone marketing, a 30-40 seconds message works best, with the option to learn more if the listener desires.  In the case of social media advertising, some Twitter studies indicate that clickthrough rates are largely affected by CTA.  Advertisers who push products or services often use CTAs like  “click here for a Free Trial”, or “Learn more.”  In the dozens of political sound files I have personally listened to, almost all of them had a similar CTA.  Namely, “Vote for me, [candidate name] on election day” or “Press-1 to Donate Now”.   If you’re interested in optimizing a voice campaign, read the top 5 methods to making a successful Political Voice Blast.

Study historical data

There exists a plethora of political data on the web in the form of case studies, blogs and raw data.  So, why make the Political Advertising mistakes someone has already made for you?   Although this advice seems elementary, remember to DO YOUR RESEARCH.  We assume that’s why you’re reading this blog now.  Here are a few links to get you started:

Case studies
MoveOn.org uses Cloud IVR to collect voter data (LINK)
Equality California uses Cloud Call Center to harness the power of volunteers at home (LINK)
Thomas Kennedy wins Citrus County using Voice Broadcast (LINK)

Professional references
Patrick Michael Kane – Technology driven political advocacy expert, CTO & founder.  Former lead technology consultant for MoveOn.org, One.org, OFA and ActionKit.com clients.  Website: http://www.actionkit.com
Brian Donahue – Political Consultant & Founder of Craftdc.com Mr. Donahue has managed 4 Federal election campaigns and served on 2 presidential campaign staffs and Headed national 72-hour Task Force for RNC. Mr. Donahue also served as the Executive Director for Bush-Cheney ‘04. Website: http://www.CraftDC.com

Media
Dan Siroker Video – “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election” Stanford University & Dan Siroker – the former Data Analytics Manager for the Obama campaign.

Video: Brian Donahue – Political Strategist: http://www.gspm.org/brian-donahue-video -
Election Assistance Commission – Data from the 2008 election. Download the full report as zip.

A few days ago, we got an interesting email from Thomas Kennedy, the newly elected Citrus County (FL) School Board  Member for District 1.  It read “CallFire got me elected!” It turns out that Kennedy’s use of voice broadcasts helped his campaign  win by a landslide, in 60 out of 61 precincts in his county.

Why Voice Broadcast?

Kennedy, who had never before run for elected office in Florida, was faced with the challenge of reaching out to voters in the most financially prudent way.  His political opponent, armed with a bigger budget, was outspending him four to one. What’s more, his opponent focused on direct mail marketing, which typically costs $0.85 per piece of mail, versus $0.035 per call on a voice broadcast. Additionally, his opponent was also of the opinion that volunteer phone outreach was not going to have the consistency in the message he wanted to relay.

After considering costs and available features for a range of options, Kennedy chose to use the CallFire Voice Broadcast. product to contact his local registered voters list. With no prior experience using voice broadcast products, he uploaded the list he received from his local elections office, scrubbed it carefully, recorded his own one-minute message, and sent a test call to his phone. “We were a grassroots operation. CallFire was scalable and we couldn’t get over the speed that our calls were processed,” recalls Kennedy.

Advice for future political campaigns

Kennedy has several tips for other campaigns. He recommends, first and foremost, to put the “call-to-action” in the first 20 seconds of the message. Second, he recommends utilizing the option to leave messages for  tailored for live answers and answering machines, respectively. He also stresses a diverse outreach strategy –don’t just rely on social media or print marketing. According to Kennedy, ”It was the phone calls that stuck in voters’ minds.”

In the spirit of election season, we’re releasing 8 tips for developing an online Political marketing strategy or GOTV campaign in the Cloud. We’re not experts in Political Marketing but we manage our share of virtual phone banks and polling around this time of the year. These tips are based on research and conversations we have with our valuable political clientele. This is not an attempt at defining an all-encompassing online political marketing campaign – instead we hope you find a strategy or two for your political campaign that you haven’t yet executed. We left out the more obvious suggestions like, “make decisions using data and analytics,” “design a great website” and “respond to email.” Instead we attempt to highlight trends in online political warfare specifically in the 2010 election cycle. We’d love to hear your feedback!

#1 Market your candidate in search results on Google and Bing

Around election time people will be searching these and other search engines by candidate name. (ex: “Barbara Boxer”, “barbara boxer ca”, “barbara boxer vs”, “barbara vote california”). Your search result should appear for similar queries and any relevant permutations. If your budget permits, consider showing your candidates ad whenever someone searches for the names of political opponents. This isn’t considered poor form – we see it as a public service to voters. Consider using multi-variate testing to determine Ads that drive the highest clickthrough from the cloud. http://adwords.google.com

• Pros: National reach, highly targeted
• Cons: Expensive, $1-5/click

#2 Place site-targeted ads for your candidate on Political websites

Content match advertising allows you to place video or text ads for your candidate across various websites and mobile devices. Consider targeting geographically relevant local news websites and the political news sections of nationally read publications like HuffingtonPost.com, Politico.com, NYTimes.com and WSJ.com.

• Pros: Less expensive than search advertising, target the long tail.
• Cons: Untargeted.

#3 Accept campaign contributions online, via telephone and snail mail

Make it blatantly obvious how supporters can donate to your campaign. Services like Google Checkout, CampaignPay.com and PayPal.com allow you to build web-forms to accept online donations. Use variant testing to measure the efficacy of different email designs, landing pages and call-to-actions for each donation push. Just a few days of A/B testing can reveal small percentage differences in donation levels and clickthrough rates. Seemingly simple variances in ad-copy and your call-to-action text can result in considerable (in some cases double-digit) percentage changes in your collections efforts. (Fast forward to minute 18:00 to watch Dan Siroker discuss how small changes in user interface design can change donation outcomes. )

• Pros: Inexpensive to set up, collect more donations than ever.
• Cons: More money, more problems. Just kidding, none that we can think of!

#4 Enable volunteers to make voter-outreach calls from home

Lets face it, some volunteers (like some employees) prefer to work from home. In 2008 and 2010 we saw an increase in on-demand Virtual Call Centers usage by political folk. Solutions like CallFire’s own Cloud Call Center and Five9′s Virtual Call Center software allow groups to enable the long-tail of their volunteer base who may live in geographically distributed areas of the United States. Cloud power dialing solutions like these allow volunteers to work from home, the beach or phone banking location with just a cell phone and laptop – and allow real-time telephone targeting in the areas your campaign needs it most. Because it’s web-based, you can change the script for your volunteers and collect statistical data in real time that can change the outcome of an election.

• Pros: Low cost because volunteers use a cell phone & their own laptop (no hardware or software), harness more volunteer hours, allow volunteers to work from home.
• Cons: Volunteer training is required.

#5 Survey your population via telephone and social media

Make calculated efforts to collect data on your voting population with online & telephone surveys. For example Facebook and Twitter support applications like RealPolls which provide easy tool to survey Facebook users. Short, fun surveys provide an interactive way for voters to find friends with a similar political lens while providing your campaign team invaluable data on voter preferences. Toll Free feedback hotlines can easily be set up using a Cloud ivr system like CallFire or Angel. Advertising an anonymous feedback hotline allows voters to freely voice their opinions, giving them the opportunity to be heard.

• Pros: Analytics galore, survey dozens or millions instantly, low cost, send automated outbound surveys or inbound toll free hotlines.
• Cons: Tough egg to crack, multiple survey types and iterations may be required.

#6 Tailor communication by age, location & political affiliation

If you’re mobilizing volunteers for phone banking, ensure voter-lists are paired with volunteers of similar backgrounds. Similar backgrounds creates an ethos of trust with the recipient and increases the chances they will discuss issues of mutual importance. For email campaigns, be sure to address issues important to that specific voter. We’re not suggesting you create 100 different variations of your email blasts – but splitting them up by major 2-3 age groups and 3-5 political affiliations may allow your team to leverage key issues that are more important to one demographic than another. For example, you might want to target a 25 year old male voter with an email describing your candidate’s Gov2.0 transparency initiative – but on that same day a 70 year old female voter might receive an email regarding women’s rights issues. Electronic communication affords you relevance and micro-targeting like never before – take advantage of it!

• Pros: Connect with voters on a personal level, make outreach relevant.
• Cons: Time consuming and resource intensive.

#7 Try the “Google Surge” (no, it’s not a dance move)

• Pros: Network surges are highly effective at getting last-minute eyeballs on your candidate.
• Cons: Extremely expensive

#8 Partner with an experienced Political Technology company

Experience trumps all, so if you’re late to the game and don’t want to architect your Cloud campaigning solutions in-house, we suggest you find a great technology partner. We recommend a company like ActionKit.com or an experienced creative political consultancy like CraftDC.com. If you can’t afford one – a good start to your cloud campaigning efforts should include the implementation of a hosted CRM platform to manage your outreach efforts. Consider Salesforce.com or Leadmaster.com. For those of you with in-house techies – consider an open source option like SugarCRM, VTiger.com and OpenCRX. Remember, to accurately measure your outreach efficacy you must first define quantifiable success metrics!

The modern political campaign seeks not only brand awareness, but also requires interaction and voter education for a big win. Always question your assumptions, rely on real-time data feeds and create innovative ways to connect with potential voters.

Good luck from the CallFire team! 877.897.FIRE

For your reference

Patrick Michael Kane – Technology driven political advocacy expert, CTO & founder. Former lead technology consultant for MoveOn.org, One.org, OFA and ActionKit.com clients.
Website: http://www.actionkit.com

Brian Donahue – Political Consultant & Founder of Craftdc.com Mr. Donahue has managed 4 Federal election campaigns and served on 2 presidential campaign staffs and Headed national 72-hour Task Force for RNC. Mr. Donahue also served as the Executive Director for Bush-Cheney ’04.
Video: http://www.gspm.org/brian-donahue-video
Website: http://www.CraftDC.com

Dan Siroker Video: “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election” Stanford University & Dan Siroker – the former Data Analytics Manager for the Obama campaign.
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71bH8z6iqSc

Election Assistance Commission – Data from 2008 http://www.eac.gov/News/press/eac-releases-data-from-2008-presidential-election Download the full report as zip.

The City of Santa Barbara holds city elections in November of odd years. This year, there were 3 council seats, a mayor’s seat, and an important measure all up on the ballot. Measure B was the hot topic of this year’s election, which would limit building hight limit in downtown Santa Barbara to a maximum of 40 feet. The Democratic party as well as environmentalists were opposed to this measure that limits building height because typically, taller buildings in cities actually lead to a greater level of sustainability as well as affordable workforce housing.

A Texas Republican decided to spearhead a large $700,000 “Yes on B” campaign. In addition to the threat of this campaign, it was also the first year that Santa Barbara’s election was all mail-in. For these two reasons, the Democratic Party knew that they would have to exercise strategic Get Out the Vote (GOTV) tactics.

The GOTV campaigns would be targeted towards Democratic households, who were the majority in Santa Barbara. The campaign consisted of a few printed mailings, and door to door phases. Realizing they would need to contact more people than door to door allowed, the Democratic Party decided to augment this door to door effort with aggressive phonebanking with the “stellar and affordable Callfire autodialer system” (calitics.com article)

The Phonebanking component of this campaign began at the end of August and was used three days a week by approximately twelve volunteers. On the final weekend, the volunteers were able to reach approximately 3,000 self-identified Measure B opponents through a disposition question in an earlier CallFire call. The Volunteers wanted to make sure Voters remembered to turn in their ballots at the drop off station rather than the the usual polling booth. It’s a good thing they did too, because many people still had no idea that there was anything different or new about this election.

By the middle of the day before the elections, voter turnout was 37%, and with the help of the GOTV efforts, including the final round of Cloud Call Center campaigns, total turnout rose to 49.5%. In particular, the result of the Measure B changed dramatically. The day before the end of the election, it was at 49% yes, 51% no. By the end of the election, Measure B was defeated by a whopping 62%. Not only were the Democratic Party’s efforts effective, but they managed to do it with less than $30,000. CallFire’s Cloud Call Center was a significant component of this effective campaign, and the victory was even sweeter when spending 1/23 of the opposition.

Reference : Ancona, Dan, 18 November 2009, “A Tale of One City: How Democrats with Good Data Beat the Odds“

CallFire now supports internal list management. You can create and maintain a list of phone numbers easily within your dashboard. This feature also provides an internal do-not-call list support for your campaigns.To use the feature, click on the phonebook link.

Create a new list and start adding numbers to it. The internal do-not-call list will be created automatically for you when you make your first campaign. You can add and remove numbers from all of your lists.

The MasterDNC list can be scrubbed against when you create a new campaign. Once the campaign is created, the system will dial all the numbers that were not scrubbed. Updates to your Master DNC list do not update old campaigns.

Robocalls have had mixed results during political campaigns. Poor implementations have caused major backlash from voters. In the last few years, many states have changed laws to enforce the do-not-call registry for political organizations. So, how can political organizations successfully use robocalls to promote their campaigns? Here are the top 5 ways to keep above the competition:

1) Have a clear message and keep it short.

Within the first 7 seconds of any call, a voter is well aware that they are hearing a recording. You want them to know your stance on the issue at hand without alienating them, so use a familiar voice for the recorded call. People will tend to listen more to a famous voice or the candidate himself/herself. So get the right talent to record the message.

Don’t squeeze too much information into a 30-45 second call. There are plenty of opportunities for a voter to find additional information about you, so use a caller-id and give them a web site, but don’t speed-talk through 9 topics in 45 seconds.

An example of a successful broadcast includes a campaign in which Hilary Clinton asked voters to oppose "a proposal to require minors seeking abortions to notify their parents or get waivers from a judge." (The Raw Story, article)  It was successful because it was one clear topic, and a familiar voice spoke to them directly.

2) Don’t annoy your audience.

Don’t call after 9pm and don’t send the same message repeatedly. It’s simple to touch upon new issues for each robocall campaign that is sent out. Change the voice, use multiple topics and space out your campaigns so your voters aren’t bothered by your voice broadcast. This technology gives you a great opportunity to reach all of your voters, but it’s also easy to abuse it and annoy them, rendering your campaign ineffective.

3) Use the right technology.

Make sure that your technology can handle the capacity, time sensitivity and the statistical needs of your campaign. Many systems available today won’t fully satisfy these needs. CallFire.com provides the following necessary features for your robocall campaigns:

1. Scheduling of your campaign
2. Live statistics as your campaign occurs
3. Huge capacity to target millions
4. Fully web based and complete control of campaigns through any browser
5. Managed campaigns – If needed, CallFire takes care of all logistics
6. Message Recording
7. For the advanced: Full programming interface to work with your systems

There is a second part to the right technology: not all messages are best handled by robocalls. Sometimes, you need to leverage a phone bank effort and talk to voters directly. Using a system like the distributed GoTV agent technology, your volunteers can connect to voters from anywhere. The system is designed to allow volunteers to automatically be connected to voters and to collect full statistics of each call, including a web based form for questions and notes.

4) Contact the right audience.

This is simple. Get the right list for your campaign. There are many technologies available that will filter your audience to the exact demographic you need. Things to look for in your list:

1. Geographically filtered to include areas that you want to target ( zip codes, city, longitude and latitude )
2. Filter by demographic – find lists with single family homes or children – find the right audience
3. Data that is new – old data has high amounts of disconnected and bad numbers

5) Follow the regulations.

Many states have added new regulations for political calls, often including a stipulation that each message immediately inform the listener of who is paying for the robocall.

In recent years, there have been drastic abuses in telecom for political advantages. For example, "Republican officials were convicted of campaign violations stemming from an effort in 2002 to jam phone lines used by the Democratic Party to get out the vote." (New York Times, article).

In May 2007, the New York Times also reported that candidates repeatedly sent calls for the opposing running mates in the middle of the night, in order to agitate voters.

Be careful not to abuse the technology. There can be great rewards in using robocalls effectively for a campaign.

References

1. New York Times, "Repeat calls spur a debate". link
2. The Agonist, "Why robocalls are here to stay". link
3. Stones’ Phones ‘Robocall’ Mania. link
4. New York Times, "Dirty Tricks by Phone". link
5. Political ‘robocalls’ generating controversy. link

The Problem: Lack of tools to mobilize a distributed workforce.

The Description: It is common for organizations to have volunteers or workers at varying locations – especially for political groups with people nationwide. Traditionally each group of people were given a list of phone numbers to call and a web site to input their results from each call. This works, but there are many problems in this scenario:

1. No guarantee that each number is being called
2. No ability to update the list once its out
3. No instant data collection methods
4. No administrative control and monitoring
5. Volunteers have to pay for telecom costs

In the end, the best way to avoid all these problems was to create an expensive call center or phone bank effort in each of the distributed locations.

A Solution: One of the primary technologies that CallFire.com offers is a solution to the distributed agent problem. The system allows a workforce to connect to the target list from any location, all they need is a phone line and a computer. Here is how it works:

1. User logs into a secure web site and receives a call on their phone so they can talk to people on the target list.
2. The system connects them to the people on the target list using a predictive algorithm to maximize efficiency and reduces fatigue.
3. When they connect, the user sees full details on their browser, including a form to collect data for each connection they make.

This solution is one of the best ways to mobilize a workforce that isn’t centrally located.

Example: A political organization had 800 volunteers nationwide that were helping from their homes to collect statistics for the upcoming senate elections. Using the CallFire.com distributed call center application, the organization was able to setup a campaign within 1 hour and email their volunteers with login credentials.

In a 3 day span, the volunteers logged in when they had time and connected to potential voters and asked them what concerns they had for the upcoming senate elections. Full statistics were collected after each call. In addition, the administrators were able to coach volunteers, see individual volunteer statistics and collect valuable data from each call that was connected.

Not only was this easy to setup, the organization increased their contact rate by 40%. Volunteers left amazing feedback, claiming it was the easiest system they ever used and the loved the fact that they could do it on their own time instead of gathering at phone bank parties. In addition to the amazing call results, the organization was now able to identify their star volunteers (ones that took the most calls and collected the most data), and gave them the recognition they deserved!

We just added the Call Center Direct Connect Campaign. This is a unique campaign type where you have full control over what connection goes to your agents. This feature lets you control which agents log in and what phone number they are connected to. You can barge in and listen on your agents, you can disconnect their calls, transfer the call they are on to a new number and much more.

We have done extensive testing on this feature with several hundred agents and it works great! Currently this is one of our most valuable political dialing options.

Do you want a demo or API information to connect your software? Give us a call and one of our representatives will give you all the information you need.