In 2008, in the final four days before the U.S. presidential election, Barack Obama’s volunteers made more than 3 million phone calls to random residents of the states whose votes were most likely to affect the outcome.
Phone-based campaigning is very simple, inexpensive, and effective. A phone call cannot be blocked or censored; it is not really under anyone’s control at all. A phone call is live human communication; a phone call is a way to reach even the most remote and out-of-the-way places.
It seems like the perfect campaigning tool for Russia as well... but in Russia, volunteer-driven phone campaigning during elections is something completely undeveloped. No one has ever done it. That may seem strange, but the explanation is simple: Russian political forces have never had volunteers—or a culture of working with volunteers—and without volunteers, effective phone campaigning is impossible.
When the caller is genuinely engaged, when people like this are speaking to people like themselves, it works. But when the call comes from a paid canvasser mechanically droning through a memorized script, it can only push voters away. It is no accident that American volunteers begin conversations with a random person on the other end of the line with something like: “Hello, my name is Mike, I’m a doctor, and I’m calling from Dallas, Texas, to talk with you about Obama’s healthcare initiative...” In other words, they immediately make it clear that this is a real person calling about a specific issue.
We do have volunteers, and we have long wanted to test how phone campaigning works in Russian conditions—and now, finally, the perfect opportunity has come along. Through our volunteer sign-up form, several hundred people told us they were ready to help with our regional campaigns, including hundreds of Muscovites. Of course, many have already traveled to campaign street stands in Obninsk, Kaluga, and Kostroma (some more than once), but not everyone has that option. And some people simply want to try a new form of political volunteering. Our campaign call center is waiting for all of you!
For now, the call center is operating in test mode. At ACF (the Anti-Corruption Foundation), we have set up 10 workstations and built a system that automates calls as much as possible: if a call drops or does not go through, it immediately dials the next number; it lets us send an interested recipient an SMS with a link; and it can do a great deal more besides. You should come and try it! Our goal right now is to gather data and learn which conversation scripts are the most effective, so that by summer we can scale up the whole system. If we see that the calls are highly effective, setting up 100 stations will be easy. Right now we do not have many campaign tools that can reach any voter while bypassing the federal TV channels, and it would be great if the telephone became one of them.
Our excellent trainer, Andrei Matveev, has prepared several standard conversation scripts that we are currently testing, and he has also recorded a great training video, which we show to volunteers who come in to make calls for the first time. Come join us too, and help create a new campaigning tool!
The first numbers are highly encouraging. Last week, for example, volunteers testing the call center successfully reached Kaluga residents 587 times, and in those conversations 104 people agreed to receive an SMS with a link to the website so they could learn more about the Democratic Coalition and the primaries: a success rate of nearly 20%! Here is roughly what a successful conversation looks like:
Of course, not every call is successful, but that is not a big problem. Our goal is not to persuade every single person—and that is not always possible over the phone. What we need is to identify the undecided and catch their attention, spark their interest. If someone is not interested, that is fine: we say goodbye politely and move on to the next conversation. Here is what that looks like:
Even if the person you reach is not especially friendly, it will not hurt that much—it is only a phone call, after all. The worst-case conversation you are likely to encounter sounds something like this:
And of course, success comes with experience: spend a couple of days in the call center, and you will see the share of successful conversations start to rise.
Come make calls—sign up using this form and mark it “telephone.” We will teach you everything and show you how it all works.