Meet RumbleUp: Best-in-Class Peer-to-Peer
Written by Rachel Lourie.
Americans are constantly engaging with their cell phones, computers, and tablets, and politics and advocacy must adapt in order to take advantage of the hours people spend on mobile devices. RumbleUp’s peer-to-peer texting app makes it lightning-fast and extraordinarily easy to engage voters, members, or advocates via text — 90% of text messages are read within 5 minutes — and they’re helping organizations and candidates use that fact to their advantage.
We sat down with Thomas Peters, Founder and CEO of RumbleUp and uCampaign, to learn more about their innovative platform.
A Description of RumbleUp:
“RumbleUp is a peer-to-peer texting tool that we developed so that organizations can send people personalized text messages at great speed and at great scale, without losing the unique effectiveness of a one-to-one text from a real human being.
We work with a lot of political campaigns, as well as with trade associations and advocacy groups. At the end of the day, all our clients are trying to do the same thing — capture people’s attention, which is becoming more and more difficult. However, almost everyone reads all their text messages, making it the best way that organizations and candidates have right now to communicate with people they want to reach. Once they have that person’s attention, communication can be used for a variety of things — asking for donations, persuading that person on an issue position or candidate, educating that person on an issue or candidate, asking that person to events, asking that person to contact elected officials, or asking that person for an opinion. The power of peer-to-peer is getting authentic, two-way conversations jump started.”
The Idea Behind RumbleUp:
“Democrats invented peer-to-peer texting 2 years before we started RumbleUp. In the increasingly polarized technology landscape that we’re in, the first companies to invent peer-to-peer texting decided to stop working with candidates and organizations on the center right. Because we’d already built our platform uCampaign it made it easy for us to create apps, we decided to build RumbleUp as a peer-to-peer texting app that could serve this broader audience. We wanted to make sure people on all sides of the political spectrum have access to tools that are effective.
We built RumbleUp from the ground up with our own ideas of what we thought a good peer-to-peer texting experience would be. We focused very much on speed because time is the most precious resource that we have these days. One “agent” (those doing the texting) can send 2,500 messages an hour with our app. We’ve been also laser-focused on incorporating client feedback. Our clients are the ones who know what’s missing, what we need to add, and what they like. We try to build the things that they ask for. This has allowed us to build our app step-by-step without major product overhauls or miststeps.”
What Users Get:
“When a client signs up, they get access to a private client portal where they can upload cell phone numbers (which we can also help to identify). Within that portal, they can craft their message(s), and then they can invite agents to participate. From an agent’s perspective, they’ll receive an invite from the client via email, and get a private password to download the app on their smartphone or tablet. From there, they’re able to access the client’s private campaign and see the people they are being asked to send messages to one by one.
When people reply, they’re able to reply free form or use pre-written responses that the client sets up. The agents are able to tag responses using custom criteria — for example, you could tag someone as having already voted so that the campaign knows to stop reaching out.
Our clients have full access to all the back-and-forth conversations that agents are having. Clients can also filter that data based on the different tagged responses — for example, they can filter by positive responses or negative responses. In addition, the client can understand the nature of the responses. For example, if someone responds that they’re already a supporter of a candidate, your agent can reply asking if they want a yard sign, or make a donation, or become a volunteer, and the client is able to see and monitor all of this activity in real-time.”
Why RumbleUp is Unique:
“We’re unique because we have the knowledge and experience of having helped over 100 clients send millions and millions of peer-to-peer messages. We’ve learned from this how to use peer-to-peer as an effective channel to mobilize people, which is significant because more and more people are using text as their favored communication channel. Because of this knowledge base, clients can come to us at the literal last minute of a campaign and say ‘Hey, we want to text people!’ — we can close that knowledge gap and share best practices with them so they’re up-to-speed in minutes instead of months.
On the technology side, what sets us apart is how we build our software based on what our clients need. Most of our clients need similar features, and because we’ve had so many of them use the platform and contribute ideas, we have what essentially amounts to a knob or lever for just about everything. It’s pretty rare that we have to say ‘no’ to a client request, because someone else has likely already asked for us to build that feature. And if we don’t have it, we can try to build it. Clients often say ‘Wow, I didn’t realize you had all these features’ after signing up because it’s difficult to list and explain dozens and dozens of features until a client asks for that one feature that really matters to them.
We’re also unique in our understanding of how technology and mobile consumer habits are changing. Texting technology is moving very quickly — we used to primarily use SMS (simple texting — includes characters and letters) but now we are increasingly favoring MMS (which can include an embedded image, GIF or video). The next texting frontier is called RCS messaging, which will include the ability to embed forms or other small code snippets inside a text message. Text messaging is going to keep evolving and changing, so being prepared for what texting looks like next year and in the future makes us unique and especially ready to take advantage of emerging opportunities.”
How Thomas Got into Tech and Politics:
“I got into tech and politics because I was frustrated with other people doing it the wrong way, or doing it differently than I would do it — or both. In my previous role, I was trying to get very busy voters to do the kind of actions that organizations want people to do — call their senator, sign up for something, et cetera. I realized that people are very busy living their own lives and have their own priorities. The technology that we’re using should make it as easy and rewarding as possible for real people to do something of value, because the more people we have participating in democracy the better. Thus, the idea behind uCampaign and RumbleUp is to make grassroots activism easier and more fulfilling by using the right technologies and channels.”
How Tech is Shaping Politics, and the Coolest Thing in the Marketplace Today:
“Technology is absolutely shaping politics because technology is shaping our lives. Politics is responsible for making sure that we can flourish as citizens, and tech has a lot of opportunity to improve politics and the way the government provides services. There’s so much inefficiency in government services, and I believe that tech is overdue in helping those situations. I also think that politics and government have a role in preserving and ensuring that tech is being used well. In the peer-to-peer texting space, for example, there aren’t laws that prevent someone from spoofing the organization that’s sponsoring the texts. On some platforms (not ours), it’s easy for someone to send whatever they want without consequence, and Congress and regulators need to step in and crack down on bad practices and vendors that cut corners.
As far as new and cool technology, things that augment real-world experiences are really interesting and innovative. There’s a company called Cue Audio that specializes in creating interactive light shows for smartphones, and I could see that becoming a part of political rallies and gatherings sometime soon because it’s a great way to connect people to experiences, and we don’t have a lot of that in politics. So much of our lives is spent online, so it’s always cool when tech can make our real lives (and politics) more engaging and immersive.”
Want to learn more? Contact Rachel Lourie, Senior Advisor at Agency Advisors, at rachel.lourie@agencyadvisors.org
At Agency Advisors, we bring new and innovative tech to candidates, causes, and the agencies that work on their behalf. This series aims to shed light on the leading-edge technologies that are creating a resounding impact within politics and advocacy.
