Washington is the third largest food exporter in the U.S. From apples to wine, the state boasts a $46 billion food and agriculture industry which contributes 13% to the state's economy.
Home to nearly 40,000 farms, the Evergreen State keeps these edible commodities in its crosshairs, which is why political groups like Yes on 522 have sprung up in an effort to make labeling genetically engineered food the law in Washington. Raising awareness and money to support the Yes on 522 campaign requires tireless work by volunteers calling an endless number of citizens daily. With such an important and critical campaign, Yes on 522 needed the best solution to handle its outbound calling needs, so it turned to CallFire.
Amanda Reykdal is the Yes on 522 field manager. She says, “We have hundreds of thousands of calls to make and very few resources and volunteers to make that happen.”
For the last three years, Reykdal and the Yes on 522 committee have been using CallFire’s Cloud Call Center solution for multiple campaigns in an effort to make the most of its small army of callers. Having used a VAN virtual phonebank, Yes on 522 needed more out of it’s outbound calling system.
CallFire’s Cloud Call Center multi-line powerdialer allows an individual agent or volunteer to triple productivity by skipping over busy signals, bad phone numbers and answering machines. Rather than dialing one phone number at a time by hand, a campaign manager can upload lists of phone numbers to be dialed into a database.
Another challenge was geography. “About half of our volunteers are out of state, so we had to find a system that volunteers could use from their home.”
Because all of the phone number lists and campaign data are stored in the cloud, agents can access this list from anywhere and begin calling, hands free. “This was pretty much our only option that made sense,” says Reykdal.
Ease of use is also incredibly important when dealing with people in remote locations. Amanda Reykdal tells us she conducted a conference call with volunteers to teach them the system. “We provided them with the demo, a how to video, and other necessary materials to get started on phone banking. The demo was most helpful.”
Additional features made CallFire’s Cloud Call Center solution the best choice. When a busy signal pops up, the autodialer automatically skips to the next number. Other features like MachineSkip and SmartDrop allows the agent to bypass answering machines or leave a pre-recorded voice message while they move on to the next call.
With the help of a little more than eleven agents, Yes on 522 successfully launched some nine campaigns, each campaign making upwards of 64 thousand calls.
Days before the election on November 5th, the Yes on I-522 Committee raised $6.3 million from thousands of individual donations through fundraising and with the help of CallFire’s efficient calling solution.