by Natalia Klishina

This past weekend was UCI’s homecoming, and the UCI Alumni Association already had a plan to get the message out. Same as last year, they recorded a message providing information on when and where the basketball game would take place, as well as urging alumni to reserve their tickets now by going to the alumni website. CallFire dialed 42,000 numbers at a rate of 400 calls per minute, each call ending with the message, “This call is powered by alumnus-owned CallFire.com, pay-as-you-go group messaging.” Later this spring, the Paul Merage School of Business will also be using CallFire. They’ll be sending out nearly 2,000 reminders for their 2011 Reunion with our voice broadcast technology. It’s a quick and simple solution to getting the word out to thousands of people at once, for one low cost. So if you are in some way involved with an educational institution — whether it’s a small kindergarden or a large university like UCI — check out these ways you could use CallFire cloud telephony services:

5 Ways Educational Institutions Should Use Cloud Telephony

1. EVENTS: Schools, colleges, and universities can use CallFire voice broadcasts or SMS blasts to send invitations and reminders about upcoming events. A great example is what UCI’s Alumni Association did with their homecoming reminders — or what the Merage business school will be doing with their 2011 reunion. No matter how small or big your institution and no matter what kind of event it is, with pay-as-you-go broadcasting services, CallFire can provide an easy, affordable way to notify any number of people. You can even get creative and automatically collect RSVP’s by inserting a simple phone tree (IVR). CallFire will then collect and report all that data right back to you so that you can plan your event for a specific number of people.
2. EMERGENCY NOTIFICATIONS: Use CallFire to notify everyone on and off campus about emergencies. Having an evacuation or lockdown? Send out simultaneous pre-recorded voice and sms broadcasts to all students, faculty, and even parents. Remember to have a few practice drills first (perhaps only including students and faculty)! Having a sudden snow day? We wouldn’t know anything about that here in LA, but we hear schools cancel classes on snow days. CallFire can provide you with an easy way to send out a last-minute reminder. (Just don’t do it like Prince George’s County School Board and call parents at the ungodly hour of 4:30am.) Please refer to one of our previous articles to read more about how CallFire is best used in emergency situations.
3. ALUMNI DONATIONS: Are you calling alumni to ask them for donations? I know you are, since I’m definitely receiving these calls. Make it easier for students to contact alumni for donations with CallFire’s power dialing technology. You can allow your agents to call from anywhere and monitor their activity from your account. CallFire can automatically hang up or drop messages on answering machines, connecting your agents to live people one after another and speeding up the process nearly two-fold.
4. CLASS UPDATES: Professors and teachers, take matters into your own hands. Make sure your messages always reach your students — even the ones who claim to not get your e-mails. Upload your students’ phone numbers into CallFire and send out SMS reminders about large assignments being due, schedule changes, classroom relocations, and special events you’d like them to attend. Leave no excuse for lateness or forgetfulness. You and I both know students check their text messages 24/7 (even when in class).
5. HIGH SCHOOL APPLICATIONS: Take a leap into the high-tech future (or present, rather) at your admissions office, and automate your correspondence with applicants. You can do this in a number of creative ways. For example, you could allow interested high school students to sign up for SMS reminders about scholarship opportunities or upcoming application deadlines. It’s something I would have certainly found useful in high school, and the number of schools an average high school student applies to is only going up, making it harder to keep track of all the different deadlines. Another useful application would be to upload lists of accepted and rejected applicants once final decisions are made, and to notify them by phone. You could do this with a pre-recorded message from your dean, or with a simple text message. Take all the waiting out of the process!

And don’t limit yourself with these 5! Get creative and come up with new ways to make voice and sms technology work for you. Give us a call at 877.897.FIRE to help put your ideas into action.

A common question we get at CallFire is how to add numbers to a campaign that’s already running. If the campaign has finished, you’ll want to create a subset campaign, and you can learn how to do that in this nifty video featuring our solutions guru Ryan.

If your campaign is still active, you can use the “Copy Campaign” functionality, which will save you a lot of time. All your settings, inputs, and sound files will be preserved so that you don’t have to recreate them.

The first step is to log into your Admin account and select the campaign that you’d like to duplicate. Put a check in the checkbox all the way over to the left.

Next, look up top at the Campaign Control drop-down menu. Choose the “Copy Campaign” selection and hit “go.”

Input a new campaign name in the New Campaign Name field.

Next you’ll be asked to add more numbers to your copied campaign. You can either choose a PhoneBook that’s maintained in your CallFire account, or you can upload a new list of numbers (.csv, .xls, or .xlsx formats). Renew your agreement to the legal terms, and hit “submit.”

Your copied campaign has saved all your original campaign settings, and is now ready to run.

Have questions? Email support@CallFire.com, or attend a weekly webinar.

by Kimberly Kohatsu

On Wednesday, January 12th, Aaron Titus was awakened at 4:33 AM.

His phone rang, with an automated message from the Prince George’s County School Board announcing that school would be delayed by two hours.

Titus was infuriated. He had already heard about the delayed opening the night before, and to be awakened at 4:30 was ridiculous in his mind.

Titus didn’t take the unwelcome call lying down. He found a robocall company online (we don’t know which one), recorded a message, and uploaded the numbers of nine Prince George’s County School Board members, its superintendent, and general counsel.

At 4:30 AM Thursday, their phones rang to Aaron’s message,

“This is a Prince George’s County School District parent, calling to thank you for the robocall yesterday at 4:30 in the morning. I decided to return the favor. While I know the school district wanted to ensure I drop my child off two hours late on a snow day, I already knew that before I went to bed. I hope this call demonstrates why a 4:30 a.m. call does more to annoy than to inform.”

By Friday, Titus’s story was picked up by the Washington Post, and he was interviewed on WashingtonPost.com, Fox, ABC, CBS, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Fox & Friends, and several local affiliates.

Clearly, his story has struck a nerve.

So how can you ensure that your CallFire Voice Broadcast campaigns don’t meet the same terrible fate?

1. Double- and triple-check your campaign settings. The school’s announcement was sent at the early morning hour by a simple human error. This can be avoided by checking over your work.
2. Maintain an internal Do-Not-Call list. Your internal DNC list in the CallFire interface should be kept up-to-date and used in every subsequent campaign you run.
3. Add yourself to your own campaigns. CallFire sends broadcasts at a rapid rate of at least 50 calls per minute. However, if your own phone number is among those called, and you accidentally set the time incorrectly, you can stop your campaign midway and hopefully save whoever’s left. You’ll still upset the people who have been called, but may be able to minimize the damage.
4. Follow best practices even better. Titus recalls he doesn’t know when he agreed to receive phone notifications. Assuming the PG County School Board followed best practices, he probably did agree at some point. It is essential that you clearly communicate the intent to use your contacts’ phone numbers for broadcast messages. (Also, for business communications, FTC rules require agreement. In a non-profit’s case, like a school district, they would not be subject to this requirement. Still, informing parents that they’ll be added is a good idea. Clayton, MO schools allow parents to opt out, but they must renew that opt out every year).
5. Include opt-out information in your broadcasts. End every message with opt-out instructions, such as “To discontinue receiving phone notifications, call xxx-xxx-xxxx.” You can also use Hosted IVR to add a press-1 capability to connect the called party to someone in your organization that can remove them from your list.
6. Consider SMS Broadcasts instead. For quick messages such as this 2-hour delay, a text message would have been less likely to awaken parents, would be received much more quickly, and have the same informative effect.

Follow these steps and your broadcasts, voice or text, will work to your benefit, and your contacts’.

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.

by Kimberly Kohatsu, Marketing

A series of tornadoes touched down recently in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. Homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, power went out, trees were downed, and unfortunately, several lives were lost.

People who have been affected by the storms have been staying with friends or family, in hotels, or in ad-hoc shelters. They likely don’t have regular access to the internet to read an email or check a website, but because they probably do have their cell phones by their side, CallFire’s Voice Broadcast is an effective way to relay critical information.

Firefighters and emergency responders would say the same. They use notification plans to keep people out of harm’s way during natural disasters, inform them about evacuations, or to send an all-clear. One dispatch manager described it as “the most valuable tool we’ve had since 911.”

Now businesses, schools, and organizations are following suit. Think about it:

Say, for instance, you are an insurance company. You know that after all these tornadoes, there will be a lot of property claims. You want to make people aware of the steps to take before filing them. So you upload a list of all your clients with homes in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. You give them helpful tips such as

• Make sure you photograph damaged items where you find them before moving them
• Make temporary repairs as needed to prevent additional damage
• Keep receipts for these repair expenses
• If you’re forced to leave your home due to evacuation or severe damage, keep receipts for your living expenses
• Then, you include the phone number to report a claim

With Hosted IVR, you can even add a press-1 capability to connect the person being called to a live representative.

But that’s just one example. January also brings snowstorms, and this season we’ve already seen blizzards across the Midwest, Northeast, and even snowstorms in parts of California. Inclement weather means cancellations, office closures or delays, and hazardous conditions.

When I was a kid, if there was snow on the ground, the morning ritual was to crank up the radio and obsessively watch the scrolling ticker on the local tv news hoping one or the other would announce your school was closed.

But that was then. Information travels a lot faster now, and nothing travels quite as fast as text messages. It’s not just about the speed of sending—what’s even more key in emergencies is how quickly texts are read. According to mobileSQUARED, 90% of texts are read within the first three minutes of being received. Imagine sending a near-instantaneous text to all your employees so that they know if they should work from home, if any roads are closed, or if your business is shuttering for the day.

In any emergency situation, speed is of the utmost. So here are a five ways to help make sure your CallFire emergency alerts can be sent at a moment’s notice:

1. Know the drill. Log into your CallFire account and familiarize yourself with the interface so you can act quickly. Make sure everyone that may need to send notifications does, too. If you need help setting up your alert system, remember that we hold webinars every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
2. Get the necessary opt-ins. Voice broadcasts or bulk texts can only be sent to people who have agreed to receive them. Get all the permissions you might need from your employees, clients, or other contacts. Tell them how you intend to use mass notifications, and get their agreement.
3. Organize your contacts. Keep your contacts well organized in an Excel spreadsheet or .CSV so that you can easily sort them by department, essential/non-essential status, geographic office, or any other designation that could potentially be helpful.
4. Send a test message. This will verify the accuracy of your contact list, make everyone in your organization aware the notification system is in place, and help you iron out any kinks along the way.
5. Run routine practice sessions. No one likes to think about emergency situations, but just like in Boy Scouts, you should always be prepared. Schedule a few run-throughs of various scenarios and continue to tweak and improve, so that if the need does arise, you’re the best you can be.

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.

What is Voice Broadcast?

Voice Broadcast messages serve an important purpose in the field of notifications. Voice Broadcasts, otherwise known as robo-calls, often have a negative connotation associated with them. They were widely used in marketing campaigns, sending pre-recorded messages to potential consumers/  However, this type of Voice Broadcast dialing has been illegal since September 1 2009. For more information on these laws, see our previous blog on the subject.

While this portion of Voice Broadcast is largely dead, there are many other applications of Voice Broadcast that may not be apparent. Emergency notification, Get-out-the-vote reminders, communication between local organizations, and more!

For customized appointment reminders or notifications, an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) can be used using text to speech.

Campaign control from your phone

CallFire Remote Control lets you start, stop, and create campaigns using only your telephone.  To learn about the feature, watch our short video:

Before you try remote control, there are a few items you should look up.

1) Find your ID and Password from the Sound Manager.  Click toolbox to get to the Sound Manager.

2) Look up campaign IDs, and Phone book IDs for any campaigns you will want to create.

Now you’re ready to use Remote Control!

1) Dial the remote control hotline: 213-221 3805

2) Type in user id and password. this is found under toolbox –> sound manager at the top of the page.

3) Listen to the recording- you will need to know the campaign id, phonebook id depending on what it is you are trying to do by remote control.NOTE: Keeping a sheet of all of your IDs may be a helpful tool when using remote control.

CallFire is pleased to announce the launch of its International Voice Broadcast service.  CallFire listened to client requests and developed arguably  the largest new feature since its founding.  Previously, CallFire campaigns only supported valid US and Canadian phone numbers.  Now, CallFire supports nearly anywhere in the world.

Here’s how to do it:

• Go to settings, then account settings and set the international  to “true” and submit
• All phone numbers in your spreadsheet must include country code (including the US and Canadian country code “1″) without any preceding zeros
• CallFire will dial the international Voice Broadcast campaign as if it were any normal campaign
• Check out the Voice Broadcast tutorial for details on setting up a Broadcast campaign from scratch.

Rates vary based on the destination of the calls, and begin at 3.5 cents per minute.  To find out the rate of a given country, go to the rate lookup page and click on the country, search by the country name, or type in an actual phone number.  To learn more about International Voice Broadcast, watch m0re from the project’s lead developer, Pete Shah: