Digital Volunteer Guide

  1. Volunteer Guidelines

  2. Phonebanking Resources

  3. How to Phonebank

  4. Textbanking Resources

  5. How to use Spoke

  6. Mel’s Platform

Volunteer Guidelines

This campaign couldn’t exist without the support of volunteers like you, so thank you! As you work with us to reach out to voters, make sure you’re on board with what we stand for:

We are a campaign of care. We want to build trust and respect in our community and between each other. We do not tolerate harassment of any kind. All of our campaign events are safe spaces for all, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age or religion.

We are a campaign for everyone. Every person has a voice and deserves to be heard. We could not do what we do without the help of our volunteers, and everyone’s input is equally important.

We are a campaign of people. We’re not perfect, but we work hard to provide the most for the people who have the least. If we mess up, we should be held accountable and get the help we need to fix it.

Phonebanking Resources

We may have several phonebanks running at any given time. Here are the current phone bank links as well as links to their related scripts. This will be updated as we update phonebanks.

Current Main Phonebank:

Now that we are in GOTV, we have switched over to Callhub for our phonebanks. Please use this link to signup! When you log in, you’ll see our active phonebanks, and the script is provided.

When leaving a message, once you hear the beep, use the “drop voicemail” option to leave a pre-recorded message from Mel.

How to Phone Bank!

When you go to the callhub registration link, you will see the following login:

Sign up here and you’ll be enrolled with callhub. When you log in at www.callhub.io, you will see the active campaigns.

Once you are logged in, you will see the main phonebank screen:

The script will walk you through everything you need to say. Get familiar with it before calling. You don’t need to stick to it word for word, use your own voice to get the same information across. It’s more important to have a conversation with the voter than it is to stick to the script. You may want to keep some links open for reference as you call, such as the poll site locator, and this volunteer guide.

Click “Join Campaign” to have the dialer activated. It will require access to your microphone, so make sure to allow it if it asks. Some people have said they get stuck in an endless connection loop. This support article can help.

Once you’re connected, you’ll see this:

When you are in a call, you will see the voter info appear on the left:

During the call, you will ask a few questions:

You will also need to set a Call Disposition before moving on. Typical answers are:

Once you’re done, you can log out! The link will work 24/7 for the length of the phonebank, not just the hours indicated on the event. Feel free to login and call whenever you have free time, or wait for an event window and call with the rest of the team! Please only call after 10am and before 9pm.

Phonebanks inherently have low response rates. You will encounter a lot of bad numbers, no answers, and voicemails. That’s okay! We are working with the best data available, but it’s always far from perfect!

Textbanking Resources

You can sign up to textbank here.

We will send out occasional textbank emails with a link to the latest one, as well as a pdf of instructions on how to use Spoke, our textbanking app.

When to send texts: 

What kind of conversations will I have?

We have access to all the texts sent on the backend of Spoke, so if any issues arise or you need us to look into something, don’t be afraid to reach out!

Just remember “ABEK”:

Always Be Emailing Kyle (with any questions you have)

How to use Spoke

If you haven’t signed up, use the link above in the Textbanking Resources!

When you visit the app you will see a screen like this:

Click the login link to sign in. Spoke uses Auth0 for authentication, so all passwords are stored off the app for security.

When you login, you should see your assigned text banks:

(If you have no assignments yet, you will see a message saying that)

Click on “Send First Texts” to start sending!

This is what a typical text screen looks like:

You will see the recipient’s name in the upper left corner. The message to be sent appears below. Some of the text will be populated with data from the textbank, typically just a recipient’s name, but possibly also yours (if you would like to use a different name than what you signed up with, email Kyle).

Clicking the “Send” button will send the text and take you to the next one. You can also hit the enter key. You can manually scroll through queued up texts by using the arrow buttons. This is helpful when replying and you want to leave a text unreplied for the time being.

After sending texts you may see the following on your home screen:

“Send Replies” means you have texts that need replies.

“Past Messages” means you have messages that you’ve sent after getting a reply from a recipient, but no new reply from them.

“Skipped Messages” are messages that have had replies from the recipient, but don’t need any reply from you.

To send a reply, hit the “Send Replies” button.

You’ll see this screen:

You can type your own reply in the message area and send it. If you want to skip the reply (if they say something like “Thanks!” or another message that doesn’t need anything in response), hit the “Skip Reply” button. “Other Responses” can be used if we set up canned responses, which we may going forward to keep information consistent.

If a recipient replies asking to be opted-out, typically with “STOP” or any variation of it, use the “Opt Out” button. You will see the following appear:

Because “STOP” is a universal signal to opt out of a text bank, you can delete the text shown and opt out without sending a reply (see below). If they reply with something like “Please stop sending me texts.” or something like that, you may want to include the response text so they know it succeeded.

That’s it!

Mel’s Platform

Feel free to refer to this list when talking to people! Occasionally, someone may ask a question about a topic not listed below, or something you’re unfamiliar with. That’s okay! Just be honest and say you don’t know or aren’t aware of Mel’s stance at the moment, but that you’ll find out and either get back in touch or even have Mel call them back himself. It’s better to be honest than misrepresent the campaign, and people are pretty understanding!