Make Your Voice Heard, on Campaigns
5 Calls is expanding into modern campaign tools
We’re excited to announce we’ve been accepted into the Higher Ground Labs political technology accelerator, along with 12 other startups working on ways to improve progressive politics. Read more about the kind of work Higher Ground Labs is supporting in this Politico article. Here’s the 5 Calls bio from the announcement:
5 Calls is the easiest and most effective way for citizens to make an impact in local and national politics. With 5 Calls’ affordable, user-friendly platform and its strong base of activists, every progressive campaign from School Board to Senate has access to phone banks and advocacy tools that influence volunteers, voters, funders, and representatives.
You might notice this is a little bit different — a platform for progressive campaigns?
We’ve always looked for ways to grow the impact that citizens can make on political issues they care about. That’s why we expanded to state and local advocacy (did you call your state legislators to strengthen gun safety laws?), and why we helped our membership send more than 15,000 postcards into Alabama reminding citizens to make a plan to vote. For 5 Calls, 2017 was about making it easier to participate in the issue advocacy you care about.
We realized the next natural step for 5 Calls was to help more volunteers get involved in campaigns. Politics and elections are disdained by many citizens because it’s hard for people to understand, engage with and see their impact in the process. By making volunteer opportunities more accessible, giving people the social connections we’ve come to expect, and showing clear results for how you helped the candidates you believe in, we can include the next generation of campaign volunteers and activists in elections that effect their lives every day.
We’ll talk more about exactly what kinds of tools we’re building for campaigns in the near future and how you can help elect progressives near and far. But first, a 5 Calls history lesson.
Our Tools Before 5 Calls
Here’s the not-so-secret history of 5 Calls: before we launched 5 Calls, we built tools to help ourselves work more efficiently on campaigns.
One of our tools was designed to speed up a specific data entry process. We made a lot — a lot — of phone calls in 2016, and because of the current state of campaign tools, many of those calls were made from paper lists that look like this:
These are great for giving out to new volunteers; it’s not as complex as some of the phone banks or autodialer UI on computers and many of your most dedicated volunteers are not always computer savvy. But you end up with a ton of paper lists with results filled out in pen, which translates to late night data entry for those of us working in the field offices.
After a few nights entering these sheets, we figured the process could be improved with just a little bit of UI clarity and some smart keyboard shortcuts. We built a simple Chrome extension to quickly enter the data from the stacks of pages and estimated we could input data 10 times faster with this tool than we could manually. At this point you’re spending more time sorting papers than doing the input, making this as efficient as you’re going to acheive without being able to change the system itself.
Skip forward a few months to a very intense GOTV operation where we ran into another problem. Many volunteers from out of town were helping in the field office and trying to instruct voters on their early voting locations.
Volunteers could use an accordion pamphlet with lists of early voting locations (with daily location changes!), but these were confusing, cumbersome and hard to use if you didn’t know your way around.
We found a simple solution in customizable Google Maps. We whipped up an annotated map where volunteers could visually find the daily early voting locations and identify where to send a voter, either somewhere close to home by or by a specific location such as a workplace. We shared this with the staff and volunteers, eliminating the need to carry paper pamphlets.
A proven effective way to get people to turn out to the polls is creating a plan — when and where you’re going, who you’re going with, etc — and giving volunteers simple tools that help voters start making these plans reduces the cognitive effort that is required to actually get out and vote.
Helping progressive campaigns provide the right tools for volunteers and ultimately win more elections is something we’ve always wanted to get back to, so Rebecca and I are really excited that we’re getting the opportunity to work with the great folks at Higher Ground Labs to make this happen.
The 5 Calls you know and love is here to stay
You’ll still be able to find contact information for your reps and call them about the most important progressive issues of the week. We’ll still be working to roll out team pages for local groups that want to promote state and local advocacy, and experimenting with better ways that you can make an impact through postcards, voter registration and more.
We’ll continue to do the same kind of work we’ve done over the last 16 months with our incredible writing and editing team, supported by the enthusiasm of our users tirelessly making calls.
Connecting with Higher Ground Labs gives 5 Calls the freedom to spend more time building tools that amplify your impact on local and national politics. You should start seeing some great improvements soon!
5 Calls is also hiring our first full time engineer role! This is a hugely influencial role for an engineer, moving between frontend and backed work fluidly. We’re using great technologies like:
- React / Typescript for frontend web interfaces
- Go backends, with various AWS services
- Integrated with tools like Auth0 and Twilio
If this combination of mission and responsibily interests you, please shoot us an email at hello@5calls.org and we can talk further about the details.
— ☎️ Nick, Rebecca and the whole 5 Calls team
