Phone Banking in Blocks

Brief

Blocks is a web platform for political advocacy organizations developed by Politech. We offer a suite of functionality to help organizers reach out to voters, maintain their data and manage the work involved with getting people to vote. We wanted to take the next step toward making it easy for organizers to reach voters, so we set out to build a way to run your own phone banks in Blocks. Our goal was to make something easier than any of the existing tools, which seemed outdated and lacking some of the features we desired.

The problem

Running phone banks, where volunteers or paid staff call voters to poll them, encourage them to vote and advocate for issues has always been an essential part of any grassroots operation. Since this is a long-standing tactic, we found that people were still going about it in an outdated way. Many organizations have to gather callers physically in a call center, provide phone lines and paper printouts of scripts for them to read.

We wanted to improve the experience of the callers and the people managing these phone banks.

Designing a solution

We came up with a solution for phone banking that allowed managers to schedule phone banks, add call lists easily either by importing or using the Blocks Lists Builder. Managers can then easily create dynamic scripts that include multiple options for items such as instructions, dialogue and multiple types of questions.

The finished product

It’s been a great pleasure to see our Phone Banking ideas come to life. Blocks users can now easily get phone banks started and have hundreds of callers join their sessions to conduct the phone banks. Users can switch between scripts offered in different languages, dial and speak to participants via our app and all the information collected is later available for a variety of use cases inside the Blocks platform.