Your volunteers may be your best messengers. Let them run with Hustle.

Did you know that in addition to reaching your voters about the upcoming election and important community concerns, Hustle is also a great tool to engage and empower your volunteers?

Hustle is designed for a single organizer to be in contact with each individual voter or supporter, and that’s the beauty of peer-to-peer texting. From campaign kick off to event invites through out the duration of the campaign, your voters will be able to get to know a campaign spokesperson. This volunteer is able to build a genuine relationship with voters and become their trusted point of contact through the duration of the campaign.

This feature gives each volunteer an opportunity to be spokespeople in their communities for your candidate and the issues you most care about.

I was an organizer for Planned Parenthood last year, and I was notorious for handing off supporter communication to volunteers. Some of my volunteers handled one on one meetings and planned volunteer team events. Since the spokespeople were their friends, instead of an employee at Planned Parenthood, they were more likely to show up to the meeting and participate.

I also used Hustle as an organizer at Planned Parenthood in North Carolina last year which allowed me to build even deeper engagement in the community. I texted many volunteer leaders and supporters and quite a few people continued texting me with questions well after the campaign ended, feeling like they had an “in” with the advocacy events around the Raleigh community. I even got invites to other advocacy events that I was not aware of. It was surprising how that little bit of human contact over text message helped me build relationships in my community.

Many other constituents from campaigns across the country were delighted to get that personalized reminder to vote from candidates and campaign managers during the 2017 local elections. Voters across the country were getting texts like the one below:

If you can, encourage your volunteers to chat with voters in their own words about why they are voting. Then you’ll have a a team of volunteers who are committed to managing these community relationships.

So, how do we accomplish this? Through great volunteer training.

Your volunteer training is the first point of contact for the program, so plan it out well to ensure they are a part of the team! Here are some tips for planning your volunteer training so they are prepared to text for you:

• Ask early volunteers to hustle and recruit others to join your texting team!
• Make your volunteers a part of a team that would help create scripts and responses.
• Have super volunteers help plan text banks and bring friends. Order food, play music, and get them texting!
• Whether its based on relationships the’ve built in the past, caring about similar issues or just being local to the same area, it’s important to create relationships in Hustle. Make sure your Hustle volunteers understand that they are responsible for maintaining that relationship with the contact via text.
• Encourage your texts to have fun in conversations with their contacts. This can empower them to feel free to talk about issues that are important to them over text message.
• Of course, you can always enable additional response scripts for you volunteers so that your messaging is consistent, but allowing texters to customize these for authentic conversations will help them remain involved.
• Remind them that their text banking shift doesn’t necessarily end when they leave the office. Let your volunteers know that they may receive a few messages and responses after their text bank ends. Encourage them to continue responding to questions and concerns.
• Remember, this is their individual relationship to a larger campaign. It is new and exciting for voters and supporters to hear from real people just like them that care about similar issues.
• Of course, if your volunteer needs to leave the campaign for any reason, we can transfer their relationship to another volunteer or organizer.

Want more tips for your Hustle success? We created a toolkit just for you, complete with a training guide and text-bank deck to get you started.Check it out here.