At grassroots solutions, we are always on the lookout for ways to utilize new technologies to advance meaningful grassroots engagement. Even in this digital age, phone programs remain a cornerstone of many campaigns. Far from being a dinosaur technology, phones are being utilized in new and creative ways – and our partners at Stones’ Phones are at the forefront of this field.
Stones’ Phones offers high-quality strategic campaign telephone solutions including live and automated phone programs, telephone town halls, persuasion, ID, GOTV calls, and many other customized services. Over the past six years, Stones’ Phones has consulted on phone programs to over 73 million voters across the country and in every state. In collaboration with Stones’ Phones, grassroots solutions has helped conceptualize and execute innovative phone programs for both our electoral and advocacy clients.
Our collaboration with the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in 2008 is a great example of how an innovative phone program can have an instrumental impact on the success of GOTV efforts as they are ramped up in the final stretch of an election sprint. In the last few weeks leading up to Election Day in Minnesota, grassroots solutions and Stones’ Phones created a phone program to contact thousands of potential volunteers throughout the state and ask them if they’d like to volunteer for the Obama and Al Franken for Senate campaigns. Using a sophisticated text-to-speech engine, the phone system automatically “read” the responses of the call recipients, judged whether they were potential volunteers and, if so, determined where and when the volunteer should go to meet his/her volunteer team. The phone program successfully identified and mobilized hundreds of Minnesotans willing to volunteer their time to get-out-the-vote for Obama and Franken, who were then immediately integrated into the campaigns’ final pushes in the field.
In 2009, grassroots solutions and Stones Phones collaborated again on an innovative legislative campaign in Kansas. The campaign, Clean Air Kansas, was created by the Kansas- based Sunflower Foundation to persuade the state legislature to pass a comprehensive clean indoor air policy. grassroots solutions developed an aggressive grassroots campaign plan with Clean Air Kansas, but a tight timeline, combined with the sheer geography of a large and sparsely populated state, made one-on-one contact with people on a mass scale very tough. In order to rapidly identify and recruit supporters to contact their elected officials and express their support for a statewide clean indoor air policy, grassroots solutions brought in Stones’ Phones to execute a robust phone outreach program to identify supporters and capture their messages as to why a clean indoor air policy was needed.
The phone program successfully identified over 11,000 supporters of a statewide clean indoor air policy, all individuals that Clean Air Kansas will be able to tap into for future mobilization efforts around this issue. Additionally, close to 3,000 useable constituent messages were recorded, burned onto CD’s, and sent to their corresponding elected officials, allowing them to hear directly from smoke free proponents living in their districts. On March 12, 2010, Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson signed into law a statewide public smoking bill.
grassroots solutions and Stones’ Phones were jointly honored at the AAPC Pollie Awards and Conference with an award for Most Innovative Use of Automated Technology for the DFL/Franken phone program in 2009 and the Campaign Excellence Award for Best Use of New Technology for the Clean Air Kansas campaign, along with collaborators Kansas Grassroots Consulting and Domain 51, in 2010.
grassroots solutions continues to work closely with Stones’ Phones and is proud to partner with them on a range of campaigns.