CallHub Team 2020 Summary to Excom

(Global Phonebanking Program, August 7-November 21, 2020)

- 15 weeks

- Over 380,000 total calls w/ text, including at least one call to all phone-able DA members (campaigns listed in Appendix B)

- 179,001 members contacted by calling

- 206,914 texts associated with calls to members

- 119,454 SMS text blasts 

(listed in Appendix A, see attached SMS Broadcasting and Short URL Tracking Report)

- 17 scripts, plus regional variations, with various messages for register/request, FWAB, ballot return, fax return, local voter assistance, ballot-curing, and Georgia Runoff

- 86 campaigns created (numbers, script, survey, caller instructions), completed, and processed (data processed, members followed up, phonebankers supported)

-1,157 participating phonebankers during the 15-week period

The Callhub Team: 

Our team was assembled from representatives of IT, GOTV/VFA, and national Call Leaders to 

implement an efficient global phonebanking program for this election. Efficient calling optimized existing IT resources, available funding, volunteer calling capacity, and membership data, and it prioritized calls to our members to maximize our voting strength and member engagement. 

The Initial Plan:

DA Excom approved an initial plan on July 31, for operations beginning August 8. Using an assumption of 4,000 calls w/ texts/day @ $ 0.25 each for the 12+ weeks until Election Day, the plan was approved, and August/September/October funding of $22,632, $29,520, and $34,000 was included in the Outreach Budget Calculator. ($86,152 total)

Global Calling: 

August and early September register/request campaigns to all swing state or battleground voters, first to the mail-only return members with encouragement to send a FWAB now, and then to the electronic return members, were given the highest priority for the earliest engagement in the voting process, and these members were attempted 2x (1.7 calls) in the initial calling. 

Subsequent “mid-season” campaigns to non-swing voters with the opportunity to move the members to vote through conversation, OR a left message, OR a left text, were set for a 1x (1 call) attempt.  We successfully attempted to speak with all contactable DA members before their states’ registration deadlines, leaving voice and text messages with those who did not pick up. 

Narrowly targeted late season recalls to all unvoted swing voters, then to ”under-called” non-CC members, and a fax/swing campaign, followed. 

Global Country Calling: 

For the Dominican Republic, Callhub Team used our global ES-speaking call agents in a Spanish language campaign to our Florida voters. The script emphasized fax ballot return, and the campaign completed 93% of the contacts of DR’s 738 Florida voters before their registration deadline, and all of them before the ballot return deadline.   

Late season calls added a 6-country blitz for non-voted members. Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, UK and Germany contributed country-specific content to scripts and texts by global callers, and these calls showed a local-origin phone number (except 202 for Japan). These late season calls for the first time added an SMS text blasting component (10 cents each) prior to the calls, to preempt unnecessary 25 cent calls and to place the VFA or CC help link directly on mobile phones for members’ use. 

Post Election Calls:

Time being of the essence, calls for ballot-curing and the Georgia Runoff were preceded  

SMS text blasts. Members in 9 swing states that allow curing (IA MT OH AZ GA FL MS NV NC) were texted immediately, and, based on state deadlines, calls were made to voters in GA, AZ, NC, and NV.

Calling Capacity and Call Agents:

The turnout for phone banking was unprecedented. In the absence of in-person volunteer opportunities, and given the enthusiasm for regime change, 2,379 new call agents trained and activated in 2020. And individual agents, isolated at home, made more calls.  

We originally planned for 4,000 calls/ day, but DA volunteers averaged 4,500/ day over the election season. Call volumes exploded in the key week following the September 19 ballot drop. The Sept. 22-24 Call-a-thon event peaked with 8,543 calls on September 23, and daily average volumes of 5,000-6,000 continued until all useful pre-election calls were completed, a full week before the election.

Reaching all members earlier than planned gave our voters more time before their deadlines, and gave even our non-swing mail-only ballots an extra week. It also provided our volunteers,  7,000 calls/day strong in the final weeks, opportunities to call on other platforms. 

1,157 of DA’s 3300 activated call agents made at least one call during this election season, most made hundreds, many made thousands, and 4 made over 10,000 calls each.

We estimate that at 30 calls/hour, normal for a good caller, the 387,000 calls made represent almost 13,000 volunteer hours. 6.5 YEARS of full time work. Even at a low $15/hour, valuing these calls at close to $ 200,000 in donated labor is realistic. 

Truly, we can never thank them enough.

Costs:

In addition to the funding of $86,152 laid out in the plan, Excom approved additional funds of $6,000 and $15,000 to take advantage of extra capacity in late October, plus $3,600 in an E-mailed motion for the late AK/FL/TX calls, and $2,000 for a first Georgia Runoff campaign. 

$ 86,152     Initial funding through August/September/October

     6,000    Additional funding approved by Excom, October 9, 2020

     3,600    Additional funding approved by Excom, Oct 23, 2020

   15,000    Additional funding approved by Excom, October 29, 2020

     2,000    Excom approved one of two proposed GA Runoff campaigns

________

$ 112,752    Total budget

$ 99,840    cost of calls w/texts (387,381 calls x $ 0.258 )

   11,750    cost of text blasts (119,454 broadcast x $ 0.984, see SMS report attached)

_________

$ 111,590    Total costs

$    1,162     Callhub Team 2020 budget surplus

Calls w/text were originally estimated at $ 0.25 each, and the actual cost was $ 0.258, hence   3%, or $ 3,099, overspent using the original cost ($0.25 x 387,381 would have been $96,845) mostly due to longer scripts to more challenged/complicate voters calls later in the season. Short-conversation members who had no questions, no difficulty getting their ballots, and marked themselves as “voted,” were removed earlier from call lists.  

SMS text blasts were originally estimated at $ 0.10 each, and the actual cost was $ 0.984, a savings of $195. 

Operations: 

The Team’s operations and workload during the 15-week period were challenging for a group newly formed on the eve of the election season, and composed of team members with other significant responsibilities in DA. However, having a Callhub-dedicated multi-skilled team continuously coordinating the many aspects of the calling and texting campaigns was essential to the speed and size of the program DA executed on time and on budget.

There were 86 campaigns approved by Excom, each requiring from the Callhub Team decisions on the call list and settings, and the creation of a script, call survey, associated text(s), caller instructions, callout to agents, etc. 

Callhub Team members also handled one-to-one and group communications to and from leadership and to and from callers, regular written reports to Excom, budgeting, data-collection, continuous monitoring of volumes and strategic pauses and accelerations of calls to assure all members were reached by voting priority, not strength of the regional calling team. We provided sufficient calls for Call-a-thon, and avoided calling regions at specific times by anticipating the 2-day rest periods to clean and reload call numbers. (Examples: timing completion of the two Americas campaigns around Canadian Thanksgiving, or timing EMEA East campaigns to avoid Israeli national holidays.) 

The Global IT Team, with four of its members participating in the Callhub work, and especially the two volunteers assigned to full-time Callhub, did a heroic job of the actual work on the platform and in Nationbuilder, including data preparation and insertion, troubleshooting, helpdesk support for callers, individual quality-control emails to callers, voting assistance emails to members, referrals for follow-up, and member list-cleaning functions, while simultaneously building and launching the next series. 

Throughout the season, the Teams assembled post-election “to-do” or “to-do-better” lists. 

Future Plans and Suggestions: 

• A survey of all global callers is planned, including the completed EMEA survey plus the Callhub Team questions so that all global data are comparable. (EMEA volunteers will receive a supplemental questionnaire with the additional questions so that all global data are comparable.) Callers’ questions to the Team will be solicited. Data will be used to improve agent training, communications, activation and retention. We believe up to half of volunteers who start phonebanking training never make their first call.
  
  
• Team plans 2 global caller sessions to thank and celebrate all callers, answer questions, solicit feedback, encourage other DA volunteer roles in the many months without calls.

• Team plans to move training from static slides and slide lectures to dynamic video demonstrations showing the actual flow when using the platform, adding hands-on sandbox calls, and adding more explanatory advanced caller/ team leader training including, for example, how to read campaign and leaderboard numbers.
  
  
• Suggestion: IT can access a trove of data from Callhub.  What questions can we ask to improve future operations? 
  
  
• Suggestion: Work with IT team to train non-IT volunteers, possibly recruited from call agents, to do small, specific, subtasks for campaign creation. Engineers not required!  We could have used 4x the Callhub-specific IT hours we had available, but the missing Callhub skills are only necessary to DA for a small portion of election cycles, currently with no training opportunity.
  
  
• Suggestion: with sufficient volunteers, subdivide campaigns further, by voting state or country of residence, giving callers shorter and easier-to-navigate scripts. Script complexity was a top gripe of callers, but with inadequate IT time, and surplus caller hours, the burden was shifted to the callers.

• Suggestion: Include in the Callhub Team, a Communications Team representative and add a finance-focused team member.
  
  
• Consider other Callhub uses:
  - even-years (federal elections) spring/summer outreach/ballot request calls
  - odd-year experiments (2021: Regularly scheduled elections in KY, LA, MS, NJ, VA)
  - member verification, including SMS text blasts
  - Country Committee local purposes
  
  
• Suggestion: peer-to-peer texting is possible on the Callhub platform, and in specific populations can have the same personal impact as a voice call. More information is needed.

Conclusion: 

This was the first election cycle that DA used a Callhub-dedicated, multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary team to coordinate all aspects of phonebanking. Given the workload, time pressures and importance of this function, we recommend the continuation of the Callhub Team. 

To run a program of this magnitude requires the cooperation of a large, skilled, responsive, experienced, and committed Callhub Team working with its IT Team counterpart. The systems and processes developed, and the experience gained this year can serve as a basis for future phonebanking campaigns. 

We don’t have a prior-years baseline for assessing the Callhub Team’s performance, and have few DA-specific metrics for the value of the phonebanking and texting programs. But please read the attached report on SMS Blasts and Tracking Short URLs for what we DO know.

The 2020 election was unique in many ways, and Democrats Abroad’s phonebanking and texting outreach to our members was a key element in our success. The five of us on the Callhub Team are grateful to have worked together and to have contributed to that success.

The Callhub Team 

Heidi Burch and Stephanie Perry, Co-chairs

Susan Penrod

Stan Musgrave

Steve Johnson

Report on SMS Broadcast & Short URL Link Tracking

Report on SMS Broadcast & Short URL Link Tracking

CallHub Team and ExCom Report

– prepared by Merrill Oates

New SMS Features:  SMS integrated in CallHub Calling Campaigns and Trackable Short URLs 

For the 2020 Election cycle, DA was able to significantly improve on our direct member outreach with the newly integrated SMS delivery into our phone-banking calls.  We also implemented a new feature of trackable Short-URL links, both within our calling SMS messages and in our direct SMS messages, which were sent to our members towards the end of the election cycle.

The integrated SMS messaging feature was launched in February 2020, just as we began running our first Country Committee focused GPP turn-out calling campaigns.  This feature was implemented as a direct result of DA discussions with CallHub Engineering over 2018 and 2019.

The new SMS integration allows a caller to directly send a text to the recipient either during or immediately after a call, or call attempt.  This meant that our members can receive an SMS confirmation message with relevant voting information, both after a successful call—to immediately reinforce the caller’s instructions — and if they missed the call to be informed of who had called and why.

Custom Short URL & Link Tracking

In June 2020, building off of a test in our Canada Chapter calling campaigns, we added a new Short URL feature to CallHub SMS messaging that allowed us to:

• use fewer characters for each link to VoteAbroad.org, which then re-directs to the full VoteFromAbroad.org website
• collect real-time statistics on the the use of SMS links that are clicked on by our members
• track the click-through activity for each SMS campaign with UTM tracking codes associated with each Short URL, that are then reported in Google Analytics
• monitor actual FPCA completion goals originating from our SMS links using the Google Analytics Goals tool.

For example, sending an SMS with the link:  

    https://voteabroad.org/elec

as part of our Electronic Ballot Return calling campaigns, allows a member to directly click on the link in their incoming text message and be taken to the full VFA site at:    https://www.votefromabroad.org/

Our link tracking shows us that over 3500 recipients clicked on this particular link, and Google Analytics reveals that these visitors came to VFA as part of our CallHubSMS-Sept2020-ElecRtn campaign, and that for these visitors we achieved an exceptionally high 24% Completion Rate for the FPCA Complete Goal. 

In other words, this SMS message in a CallHub Campaign directly lead to nearly 1,000 members fully completing an FPCA on VFA.  In political campaigning, this is one of “Holy Grail” scenarios where we can actually demonstrate a causal link between the initial outreach and the action taken by the voter.

Overall, this ShortURL integration into our CallHub SMS messages, proved to be one of our most successful and traceable means of getting members to take action in requesting their ballots on VFA.

Google Analytics – FPCA Complete Conversion Rates

The following Table shows a condensed summary of Google Analytics “Conversion Rates” for different Link Sources coming in to VFA.  The CallHub SMS Short URLs come in 4th with an overall conversion rate percentage of 14% for FPCA Completions.  Links from our DA website and e-mails come in at the top, followed by manually typed in VFA “Direct Links”, and then visitors who arrived at VFA after a Search Engine query.  The conversion rate for these SMS links is well above the rate for Social Media links and our paid Cost-per-Click advertising – the other major sources of visitors.

Short URLs Driving Voter Action – Ballot Cure States

The ability to track these Short URL demonstrated its value even when our primary goal wasn’t to achieve FPCA Completions.  In the linked SMS Broadcast Campaigns summary Google-sheet:

  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BzrojnVZ65HvZHiDy3mTQSnFF82n3gdW13nceedFhoc/edit#gid=1824004292

you can see how our SMS messages directly motivated Voters to action when we sent State-specific ballot cure reminders with a Short URL.  The SMS recipients responded and used these links to take action to confirm their ballot status.  Our click-through rates were exceptionally high for these campaigns, ranging from 30% to 70% of recipients clicking on the Short URL we provided.

Direct SMS Broadcast Campaigns

From mid-October the CallHub Team supplemented our member calling efforts with a Direct SMS Broadcast strategy that first targeted members in Key States, and then reached out to all of our members for whom we did not have voting status information to provide a final reminder for members to complete and submit their ballots.

Topline Numbers on SMS Broadcast Campaigns

13 Direct SMS Campaigns – additional to Calling Campaigns

4 different SMS Campaign groups

15 Oct - 15 Nov, 2020 – time span of SMS Broadcast Campaigns 

119,454 Total number of members targeted

16,674 number of SMS replies received

609 SMS HELP replies received and forwarded to Voter Help teams

$11,750 total cost of SMS Broadcast Campaigns

$0.0984  average cost per targeted contact

Google Sheet with SMS Broadcast Campaigns Summary

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BzrojnVZ65HvZHiDy3mTQSnFF82n3gdW13nceedFhoc/edit#gid=1824004292

Keyword Auto-Responses, Voter Help member follow-up, & NB Tagging

These SMS Broadcast Campaigns offer some additional features over the Call + SMS campaigns that we typically ran this year.  First, is the obvious ability to reach a larger audience across all regions, in a shorter time period, but also to more narrowly target specific groups with less administrative setup work than a full Calling Campaign.  

Additionally, an SMS Broadcast can be set up with Keyword Auto-Responders, so if a member replies with a pre-defined keyword like “VOTED” or “HELP”, the system will automatically respond with an appropriate message and the setup team is notified by e-mail of the response, at the same time the membership account is tagged with a relevant Tag in NationBuilder, which is accessible to local CC admins.

So, for example, when a voter from Montana receives our SMS saying:

  DemsAbroad: MT voters check for rejected ballot signature https://voteabroad.org/MT Reply HELP to +12029604660 or info@democratsabroad.org or OK if all good.

If they reply with OK, they are automatically tagged in NB with: 2020 CHub Voted-Cured

If they reply with HELP, we get an e-mail with their response that is then forwarded on to CC or Global Voter Help teams for voter follow-up, and the member is tagged in NB with: 2020 CHubSMS Ballot-Cure Follow-up Needed 

4 Groups of SMS Broadcast Campaigns

Key-State Targeted SMS (AP-EMEA)

This SMS campaign aimed to reach members in 17 Key States and 18 Congressional Districts to confirm if they had already submitted their ballot, or if they needed some personalized help.  It was limited to distribution in AP and EMEA regions.  Each successful SMS reply of “VOTED” from a member also meant that we did not need to subsequently call that member with a more expensive Call Campaign phone call. 

20,700 members, $1,900 cost, 3,200 SMS replies, 710 Short URL clicks

All Not-Yet-Voted (ex. FR, DE)

The Not-Yet-Voted SMS campaign targeted members in all states for whom we did not yet have confirmation on their voting status. This was a high volume message addressed to more than one-third of our total membership.  (It still excluded a couple of large CCs who were conducting their own texting outreach.)

68,700 members, $6,700 cost, 11,500 SMS replies, 2700 Short URL clicks

AZ, FL, GA, IA, MS, MT, NC, NV, OH,  Election Day Ballot Cure Action

On Election Day and immediately thereafter, we sent out urgent Ballot-Cure notice SMS messages to all of our voters in the 9 Key States that offered a Ballot Cure process.  We provided them with an actionable direct link to a VFA.org page providing them with State-specific guidance on how they could confirm that their ballot had been accepted and counted.

22,500 members, $2,200 cost, 1,600 SMS replies, 7000 Short URL clicks

Georgia Follow-Up MVP and Senate Runoff

Given the narrow margin in the pending Georgia Recount and the subsequent Senate Runoff election, two additional special messages were sent to all Georgia voters asking them to confirm that their ballot was accepted on the Georgia State MyVoterPage site, and to make sure that they were due to receive ballots for the Senate runoff.

7,500 members, $900 cost, 400 SMS replies, 1000 Short URL clicks

Merrill Oates

Deputy Chair

Global IT Team

Appendix A: SMS Broadcast Summary Report Dec 2020

SMS Broadcast Summary Rpt. -Dec2020 -- link includes text of each blast

Appendix B:
CALLHUB CAMPAIGNS: Aug - Nov 2020

Callhub Team believes the $4,642 disparity between the $95,198.69 cost, as set out in the above chart by global campaign, and the reported $99,840 collected by operation dates, may reflect the one-week overlap that occurred on August 7-14 to finish the previously running CC-campaigns concurrent with the start of our budgeted global campaigns. Due to the difficulty of separating out CC campaign costs for that week, and for consistency with our weekly reports using call data by DATE, we have used the higher number in the summary report.