Case Study: Committeeman Use P2P Texting To Grow Their Organization

At Surus, we want you to consider using Person to Person (P2P) Texting as a way for your Precinct Committeemen to engage with constituents in their precincts.  We’ve conducted a pilot program with one of our clients and have found some really exciting early results. 

 What is P2P texting?

 We are all familiar with email blasting, where you can send a pre-written email to several people at one time.  It is also possible to send a blast text message to several cell phone numbers at one time. The federal laws prohibit blast texting people who have not expressly opted-in.

 Person to Person or P2P texting is a legal workaround the federal laws against blast texting. With P2P Texting, the user sets up his or her text message, uploads the recipient list, and then sends the individual texts by repeatedly pushing a send button on his or her computer over and over until the list is exhausted. 

 The P2P Text sender can then continue texting within the P2P texting platform with those people who respond to the initial text.   

 Most campaigns and organizations view P2P texting as an efficient and relatively cost-effective way to send messages to thousands or tens of thousands of cell phone numbers. For example, one 2020 campaign in Illinois sent a Get Out the Vote P2P text message to 25,000 identified supporters reminding them to request their vote by mail ballot. 

 But for Precinct Committeemen looking to connect with constituents in their precincts, P2P Texting works more effectively at a smaller, more intimate, scale.

 How Surus’ P2P Program Helped Our Client’s Committeeman

In August 2021, Surus worked with our client to set up four of their Committeemen on CallHub’s P2P texting platform. Here is how we did it:

Step 1: For each region, we created a ‘list’ in Nationbuilder comprising modeled Republicans with cell phone numbers. 

Step 2: CallHub is integrated with Nationbuilder, so we accessed these text lists from within CallHub and assigned them the appropriate Ward P2P texting campaign.

Step 3: The Committeemen logged into the agent account on CallHub. From there, they were able to rapidly send their pre-written text messages to the people in their precinct on their list.

Step 4:  Many respondents replied with a request to be removed from the list. No problem! They are automatically converted to “Do Not Text” in Nationbuilder so that we do not waste time and money trying to text them in the future.

Step 5:  Several people responded positively to the text message.  The Committeeman continued texting these people from within CallHub endeavoring to schedule a time for them to connect over the telephone.  From there they were able to introduce them to the organization and invite them to future meetings and events. 

Step 6: Because the Surus – CallHub integration is two-way- not only can you pull into CallHub lists created in Nationbuilder, but also, all CallHub texting conversations are pulled back into Nationbuilder.  Importantly, for Surus organization clients looking to progress through their Bronze-Silver-Gold charts, every CallHub text message is logged as a ‘Contact’.

The CallHub Text Conversations Are Logged in Your Nationbuilder

The Results

There you have it – a quick, effective, and low-cost way for this Committeemen to identify 22 new recruits in his region.  If you’d like to learn how P2P texting could work for you, please contact your Surus account rep.

---