Target different groups with tailored messages and QR Codes shared across social media, emails and flyers to improve response rates.
How can this be done quickly and cheaply with few technical skills? How can you build up opt-in contact lists in the process and direct them to an organizing app like Outreach Circle?
This was the challenge posed by Center For Common Ground. The nonprofit groups educates and empowers under-represented voters in voter suppression states to engage in elections and advocate for their right to vote.
Improve the response rate to your outreach
Experiment with different messages to see which works best. This could be as simple as different graphics, wording, colors and offers. Test which message is most effective with A/B testing. Think of it like “survival of the fittest social media message." Learn more.
Use QR Codes to make it easy for people to respond. QR Codes are digital symbols that are understood by your camera phone. Once scanned, they can automatically generate an action like directing the user to a restaurant menu. Organizers can also use it create a call to action which will fire off a text message with a keyword to a specific phone number. Use the free QR Code Generator App to make your own QR Codes.
Use chatbots to build opt-in contact lists. When a user scans the QR Code, it generates a text message to the number you have specified. A chatbot receives their text message, responds to it and save their phone number. Make sure to inform the user that they will be added to your list, how you will use that information and how they can opt out.
Chatbots work independent of how your shared the message - Facebook, WhatsApp, email, flyer, billboard... You can use chatbots to collect more details from respondents, to provide helpful information or offer them mobile coupons. Chatbots are affordable and can be set up in a day for about $100. You can use the information they collect for other outreach. Learn more about chatbots here:
Service helps mothers released from jail using text bots to first survey their needs
Infobots help the needy find food banks and clinics while building contact lists at the same time
Juneteenth! Celebrate with community outreach and power building.
Outreach Circle for relational organizing. Have the people who respond to your campaign, become your champions in their community by sharing the messages that you send them with their friends. Center For Common Ground has different 'circles' of volunteers in Outreach Circle so it can target messages to specific areas and interests. This prototype encourages respondents to sign up to a circle at this link.
Center For Common Ground
"Center for Common Ground is a non-partisan voting rights organization led by people of color. Our mission is to empower under-represented voters to fully participate in democracy.
People want to know what they can do to create the change they want to see in their communities. They need expertise, training, technology and tools that will empower them. Democracy Centers are organized in partnership with well-established community-based organizations and will educate and promote opportunities to take action in support of issues important to the community, such as voting rights, fair and secure elections, energy democracy and resiliency, economic opportunity and community wealth building as well as community resiliency and power building."
A Democracy Center is a local resource that supports ongoing, year-round, civic engagement to achieve meaningful progress on issues of importance in underserved communities of color where the ill effects of historic systemic racism are deeply entrenched and oppressive. These communities are often rural and identifiable by certain common characteristics, such as high levels of race-based concentrated poverty, lower social mobility, higher rates of environmental pollution and restrictive voter suppression laws.