Feature in focus: Automated call lists

Phone calls are an extremely effective way for you and your volunteer leaders to engage supporters.

While email is great for day-to-day communications and bulk messages, and SMS enjoys a high open rate and pride of place when it comes to communicating succinct, time sensitive messages, a good old-fashioned phone call is going to give you a much better opportunity to build a personal connection with supporters. By taking the time to pick up the phone, you are also more likely to confirm someone’s attendance at an event, or find more meaningful and mutually beneficial ways for them to support your campaign.

Building a successful calling program is not without its challenges, however. You have to overcome a series of logistical challenges: creating well-targeted call lists, dividing work efficiently between leaders, reducing the barriers to volunteers making phone calls, ensuring you protect the data and privacy of those you intend to call, and developing an intuitive system of logging the results, to name a few.

How SupporterBase can help

SupporterBase is designed to empower your volunteers to make use of this powerful campaign tactic. Within the interface, volunteer leaders are able to make one-off phone calls to fellow supporters in their group, but they can also make use of our handy call lists feature. Using the call list feature, your organization’s staff and local leaders can:

• Create call lists and add people based on custom filters and tags, for effective targeting.
• Set up custom parameters to ensure supporters that have already been contacted within a defined period are not hassled with further calls.
• Split call lists into sub-lists, to share the workload between multiple leaders and maximise your reach.
• Be automatically patched into each phone call as they work their way down the list. No need for manual processes at each step, or to re-enter phone numbers each time!
• Save their own money and avoid any embarrassing data spills! The process is managed entirely through the SupporterBase interface, so volunteers will not see supporter phone numbers, and will not need to make calls using their own credit.
• View each supporter’s contact history ahead of calling, and log new contact notes based on the results of the call.
• RSVP supporters to events from within the call interface.

How the experts do it: Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC)

AYCC has been using SupporterBase since March 2020. According to Clodagh Schofield, Tech and Data Manager at AYCC,one on one calls are core to building the relationships we need for a strong movement. The AYCC has always had a strong culture of volunteer calling, but in the past it was harder to track, relying on people to do their own data entry, and sometimes excluded young people who didn’t have the credit to call. SupporterBase’s dialler allows the AYCC to make reaching out to new activists easier and more accessible - so that young leaders in communities have the tools they need to build the climate justice movement.