Do-It-Yourself Texting on Action Network
Sending a short text message to your activists goes a long way in driving turnout to a rally, direct action, or webinar. Many progressives already know this, and you may have used a service like Hustle or Relay to build a texting program for your campaign. But I know that some organizations might not have the budget to take on another vendor.
That’s why I’ve laid out a step-by-step guide on creating a do-it-yourself texting program!
Before we jump in to the step-by-step guide, I want to give a huge shoutout to Melissa Byrne, New Hampshire Digital Director on the Bernie 2016 campaign, who first created this DIY method as Field Director for the Helen Gym for Philadelphia City Council race in 2015. Melissa is on twitter @mcbyrne, and you can also reach her at melissachristine@gmail.com.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to create your own do-it-yourself texting program:
- Create two questions: Log into your Action Network account, and on the top right, click “Start Organizing”. In the right-hand column, click on “Questions & Custom Fields”.
2. Click on the blue “Add a new question” button.
3. Create a field for cell phone number.
4. Create a field for people to opt in to receive text messages, with the Label “Would you like to receive text reminders about our events?”
5. Create an event. You should use the two pre-built fields on all events, forms, and other online actions you create.
6. We’re going to generate a report with all of our RSVPs. Go to the “Manage Event” page: From your group’s manage page (sometimes called “home page”), go to the white toolbar at the middle of your page. Click on the second tab, “Actions”. Then, click on the blue “Manage” button next to your event.
7. Now that you’re on the “Manage Event” page, go to the white toolbar at the middle of your page. Click on the second tab, “RSVPs”. Then, click on the blue “Manage” button next to your event.
8. Scroll down and click on the green “Generate” button.
9. Copy and paste the data in a Google sheet. You can use this template. Delete any people who did not opt-in to receive text messages.
10. Make sure you have a column for ‘Textbanker’.
Create a dropdown (data validation) with the textbankers’ names. This is important for keeping your data clean!
11. Make sure you have a column to track the responses to your text messages.
Create a dropdown. You can copy and paste this ‘List of items’ for your dropdown: Yes will attend,Maybe will attend,No will not attend, Disconnected,Do not text,Not a cell number. This is important for keeping your data clean!
12. Make sure you have a column for notes. I like to have one column for “Important Notes for Coordinator”, where textbankers can raise important flags for me, e.g. “This person can’t attend but wants to get involved.”
I like to have another column for “Notes for Self”, where textbankers can write things like, “This person is taking their dog to the dog park tonight. They can’t make it but wish us luck.” Some textbankers like taking these sort of notes, but you and I don’t need to read them.
13. Assign each textbanker to a chunk of phone numbers in the doc.
14. Email textbankers with a brief script and a list of phone numbers to text (copy from the sheet and paste without formatting in the email). Here’s a sample email.
15. Textbankers click on the script and copy it to the clipboard on their phone. Here’s a screenshot from my cell phone.
16. Click on the first phone number. It will be a little different on each phone. On my phone, I click on the blue “Phone” button.
Note on Motorola: Some Motorola phones do not allow you to click-to-text from an email. For Motorola phones, you may need to do this part manually.
17. Paste the script.
18. Hit send!
19. Click on the second number, paste the script, and send… and so on…
20. Don’t forget to track responses! As responses come in, textbankers log into the shared Google sheet and use Ctrl+F to search the last 4 digits of the phone numbers of the people who responded. Choose the response from the dropdown.
21. You can use a pivot table to pull quick analysis of how texting is going.
And that’s it! Using this DIY method while organizing at Global Trade Watch, we recruited at least 100 activists to each of our trade justice webinars.
Thank you to Melissa Byrne for sharing this method with me! We will be hosting a training on Thursday, February 21 at 2pm ET that takes a deeper dive into texting your activists and incorporating texting into your campaign. RSVP here!
