Over the last few years, Call-From-Home programs have become popular for presidential and large statewide campaigns because they allow volunteers to help their favorite candidates without having to drive to a campaign office. Today, this same technology and convenience is available to campaigns on a tighter budget thanks to Voter Gravity.
To start a call-from-home program based on your Voter Gravity account, there’s just a few quick steps to get going:
1. Add your volunteers
If someone is going to be making calls for your campaign, they’ll first need to be a user. In the Portal, go to Manage > Team and drop them in there. If they’ll only be making phone calls for you, you can give them the role “Phone Bank” but if they’ll be canvassing as well, you’ll want to go ahead and add them to the “Volunteer” role.
2. Create your lists
Voter Gravity makes it easy to slice and dice your data. Go to Phonebank > Create and select the filters you want to use to reach your target voters. Submit your selection and you’ll see a quick preview of voters who match your criteria. If this looks good, give your list a name and save it.
Then on the Phonebank > Manage screen, you have a ton of options to setup how your list will be used. You can assign the list to specific volunteers, select a specific survey (more about setting up surveys here), even select an audio file to play when your callers are sent to voicemail.
(Uploading a voicemail audio file is a great way to record a message from your candidate so voters hear their voice on the line when they check their voicemail.)
3. Select your calling options
Voter Gravity offers three modes for your volunteers to call voters. It’s up to you which you want to make available to your volunteers:
- Own Phone: The voter’s phone number appears on the Portal, and the volunteer dials that number directly from their own phone. Note that this can often work when the campaign is providing phones but is not recommended for a call-from-home program.
- Dial In: This is the most commonly used option for call-from-home programs. Using Dial In, Voter Gravity will call your volunteer’s phone, then keep them on the line while they switch from voter to voter. Dial In mode also allows volunteers to leave a recorded voicemail message. Note that there is a 5 cent per minute charge to use Dial In, but most campaigns find it very worthwhile to provide peace of mind to volunteers.
- Headset: If your volunteers have a laptop computer and strong Internet connection, they don’t even need a cell phone — they can just make calls right from their computer using a headset with microphone. Note that calling using your computer’s speakers instead of a headset is NOT recommended, unless your voters are into echo-y conversations.
You can enable / disable the Dial In and Headset options under Phonebank > Settings. Also, you can select a local phone number to appear on voters’ caller ID on this page. And upload voicemail MP3 files too.
And that’s it! You’ll have your volunteers on the phones in no time.