Hustle uses personalized outreach to encourage and empower supporters

Imagine two scenarios. The first, you are invited to a huge event from a distant acquaintance on Facebook, where you see that there are thousands of other people attending. The second, you recieve a personal text message invitation to the same event from a valued peer. Which would encourage you more to attend? Likely the latter — a personalized, one-to-one message inviting you personally.
This very idea of personal outreach to increase attendance and grassroots mobilization is the founding motivation behind Hustle — a personalized messaging platform that services campaigns and causes. The new, revolutionary platform is intended to encourage meaningful dialogue with supporters to empower them to engage with the campaign. It was founded in the heat of 2016, to support the Bernie Sanders campaign.
The platform itself is simple and easy to navigate. Candidates upload a file of phone numbers and names — or connect their preexisting CRM to Hustle — and begin outreach. Agents at the company manage thousands of contacts, negotiating personalized communications with each of them based on a script. Better yet, there are real people on the other side of the phone; they are not bots or generalized outreach all coming from one internal source.
When contacts receive messages, they don’t even know that they’re using Hustle. They simply recieve a text message from a member of the campaign inviting them to a nearby event, to donate, or to pledge their support. The idea is that the personalized contact encourages message recievers to act, opposed to opening and deleting an email that was clearly sent to thousands of others on the same email list. Hustle reports that they get responses to text messages from the same people that never opened emails from their clients.
At the end of May this year, Hustle released its newest update to the platform: a Legislative contact tool. Despite the name, the new capability is intended to influence all decision makers with grassroots outreach. Instead of using the text outreach to invite supporters to an event, Hustle would use this message to encourage them to contact superiority figures on a given piece of legislation to impact the outcome.
In an interview with Recode, Perry Rosenstein — a veteran of Obama’s 2008 campaign — explained his understanding of the platform as he experienced it before the Iowa caucus.
“They land in a city and use Hustle to reach out to every potential volunteer leader within a certain radius to get them to a huge organizing rally,” said Rosenstein. “Once there, they ask everyone in-person to commit to hosting a volunteer contact meeting in their community, and train them on the spot.”
Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Obviously it was due to a combination of efforts, but all relate back to his ability to incite a crowd and to mobilize support wherever he went. His campaign was based on this idea of a revolution from the ground up; an idea that reflects itself in the goals of Hustle.
As seen in the brand world, genuine, consistent messages are valued over more general, impersonal advertisements given to broad audiences. Hustle embraces this change, as their existence as a tech company hinges on personalized outreach to empower supporters from the lowest levels to participate in political movements.
