This is a big year for elections. Midterm primaries are being held throughout 2014 across the country. For Jim Diehl, it’s more important than ever to be able to contact volunteers, supporters and thousands of voters. That’s why Diehl and his team decided to use CallFire as their choice for Voice Broadcast and Cloud Call Center solutions.
Located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Diehl heads up a local political party’s efforts to “get out the vote,” or GOTV, in the days before an election. This entails assembling some 50 volunteers using CallFire’s Voice Broadcast tool. Additionally, Diehl says, “The voice broadcast feature allows one or two volunteers to contact thousands of our supporters to remind them of conventions and other events without the dull manual labor of making hand-dialed phone calls.”
Meanwhile, “The Cloud Call Center option allowed a few dozen volunteers to make several thousand GOTV calls in a period of just a few days,” Diehl says. “The SmartDrop feature of the Cloud Call Center is a very useful selling point for CallFire.”
“Both solutions have provided fantastic results. We've also had smaller campaigns for local issues with a half dozen or so callers,” says Diehl. Scalability is particularly important for political organizations and CallFire has delivered. “We are a non-profit organization, but we were able to spend under $700 to make several thousand GOTV calls that saved countless volunteer hours,” says Diehl.
Like many organizations, it’s easy to get stuck in the dark ages when operating under administrative norms. “We would use paper lists and large phone banks provided either by volunteers or organizations,” says Diehl. “With CallFire, we were able to operate with fewer volunteers in a smaller space and had no paper lists or manual dialing to deal with.” As for making announcements, Voice Broadcasts or RoboCalls opened the lines of communication that Diehl’s old email method couldn’t achieve.
Another important factor for non-profit organizations are the volunteers who range in age and experience using online platforms. When Diehl began using CallFire in 2012, he implemented a training process using a simple document explaining how to log into an account and navigate the various features and windows. “Once they learned and became comfortable with the system and our script, our volunteers were also able to make calls from home.” The flexibility of CallFire’s cloud-based system enables work to be done from anywhere at anytime. Scheduling becomes less of a concern so that more work can be done conveniently.
“I love your service and will use it again as well as continue to recommend it to other political organizations. It’s a wonderful product at a fair price.”
