Wednesday, August 29, 2012

As Election Day Nears, Progressive Campaign Organizations Gain an Edge with Reliable, Affordable Voice Communications

CallFire (callfire.com), a leader in voice and text communication solutions that help companies and organizations grow, today announced it has been designated as the preferred provider of cloud broadcast voice and hosted IVR telephony services by NGP VAN (ngpvan.com), the technology provider which is used by virtually every Democratic candidate and progressive organization conducting a field campaign, including President Obama's reelection.

As the political season enters the home stretch, thousands of local, state and national candidates - and a vast number of issue campaigns - are expected to use the NGP VAN platform, now integrated with CallFire for reliable, affordable voice communications. These campaigns will conduct voter identification and persuasion, grassroots fundraising, rally crowd building, volunteer recruitment, get out the vote (GOTV), and other activities. "At this critical juncture for every campaign, when money is tight and every vote matters, the services we provide through our partnership with CallFire provide an affordable way for candidates and campaigns to connect with volunteers and voters," said Stuart Trevelyan, NGP VAN's CEO. "Campaigns benefit through lower cost-per-minute pricing and the ability to manage their outbound call and voter survey efforts without ever leaving NGP VAN's field software platform.

That means improved tracking of both volunteers and voters, and the money saved increases funds available for other campaign activities." "This partnership is a game-changer because it puts the same telephony tools available to the Obama campaign into the hands of thousands of other national, state and local campaigns," said Dinesh Ravishanker, CallFire's CEO and co-founder. "At a time when it takes more and more money to wage a successful campaign, CallFire provides any individual or group with the ability to participate in our democracy and express their viewpoint to the people they wish to reach. At the same time, CallFire technology puts more information in the hands of voters so they can make more informed choices." Campaign staff and volunteers who use NGP VAN's VoteBuilder platform to access the voter file can now use CallFire right from the website to deploy hosted Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to identify voters and collect polling and other information, and create and distribute calls to action - without leaving the VoteBuilder platform.

Navigable IVRs and automatic calling features allow campaigns to tailor messages to specific issues and enable voters to choose from a selection of issues of interest. In addition, the CallFire campaign dashboard helps keep track of progress, showing insightful statistics, including number of call transfers placed, average call duration and geographic distribution of calls. With CallFire, campaigns can create and distribute voice messages, simultaneously dial thousands of calls per minute and obtain near-instantaneous feedback from potential voters. CallFire is one example of new technologies that are revolutionizing the way political campaigns across the nation connect with targeted voters this election season.

To date, some 1,700 local and state candidate and issue-oriented political campaigns have used the CallFire platform since the company's founding in 2007. About NGP VAN NGP VAN (ngpvan.com) is the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations, offering clients an integrated platform of the best fundraising, field, and new media products. NGP VAN counts thousands of campaigns and organizations amongst its clients, including President Obama's reelection, all the national Democratic committees, thousands of Democratic campaigns, and hundreds of labor unions, progressive and non-partisan PACs, and other organizations.

About CallFire CallFire (callfire.com) simplifies telephony, making sophisticated, expensive carrier class telecom capabilities available through an affordable, easy-to-use GUI and API platform. Any business, from start-up to enterprise, can reach its customers on any device, over voice or text, using CallFire's massively scalable, cloud telecom platform. CallFire products include Voice APIs, Business Text Messaging, Voice Broadcast, Local Phone Numbers, Phone Trees, Call Tracking, Toll Free Numbers, IVR, Predictive Dialing for agents and more. Call analytics enable CallFire's 50,000 users to reach customers more often using text marketing, virtual numbers, auto dialers and mobile messaging.