Phone Banking

How Does Phone Banking Work?

Organizer's Phone Banking tool can help connect your volunteer/staff callers to the people in your communities via phone calls, and it can help you determine how effective your callers have been. It can tell you how many call attempts have been made, how many calls have been completed, and other metrics that you can use to determine your success.

A phone calling campaign using Organizer is called a Phone Bank Effort. Within Outreach > Phone Banking, you can create, manage, and edit Phone Bank Efforts, and create personalized talking points and surveys via our Scripts or Forms functionality.

You have a lot of flexibility when you configure a Phone Banking Effort. For example, you can allow callers to leave a voicemail if the person being called does not answer. Your callers can also call via computer dialing through Organizer or make those calls with their own phones. Callers can schedule calls or initiate them instantly for a targeted segment or list of profiles, in which case Phone Banking Efforts will be logged to the respective profiles as activity data.

Getting Started

Before creating a Phone Banking Effort, you will need to create your Script or Form and Community. Please keep in mind that the Community size for a Phone Banking Effort cannot exceed 10,000 profiles.

A few attributes that you might find useful for creating a Community for Phone Banking are "has phone number," phone call usability, the Cellular Contactability Score and the Landline Contactability Score. You can find information about these and other attributes in our Data Dictionary. 

Phone banking efforts can have calls placed with Personal Phone or Computer Dial. Personal Phone bank efforts will include phone numbers for callers to call using their landline or cell phone. Computer Dial phone bank efforts place calls to phone numbers through the caller’s computer from a single phone number. 

To use Computer Dial, you will need to obtain a phone number in Organizer. There is a monthly charge for each active phone number provided by Organizer, as well as for Phone Banking with Computer Dial. See details in Billing Estimates.

You will need to be a Manager to obtain a phone number through Organizer. If you are not a Manager, please ask your Organization’s Admin for help. They can either promote you to the correct role or create a custom role for you. To purchase a phone number, follow these steps:

1. Navigate in Organizer to Account Management > Phone Numbers.
2. Click New Phone Number.
3. In the Area Code field, type your desired area code, then click Search to display all available numbers with that area code.
4. In the Select Phone Number field, choose your desired phone number and click Purchase.

If you choose to purchase a phone number, you’ll want to follow  Best Practices for Phone Banking Deliverability to maintain the reputation of the phone number.

Create a Phone Banking Effort

Once you've done everything required in Getting Started (see above), please follow these steps:

1. Go to Outreach in the left navigation panel.
2. Click Phone Banking.
3. Click Create New in the top right corner of the screen.
4. Fill out a Title and optional Description
5. Select to Activate Now or Schedule your Phone Bank for later
6. Select the Target Community to call
   •  When selecting a segment, Segments which contain unsupported data and would not contain profiles are marked with an alert symbol .  
7. Select the Phone Bank Script or Form
8. Click Next
9. Select Call Settings for Profiles that share a phone number
10. Select the Call Method Personal Phone or Computer Dial
11. Add optional voicemail instructions
12. Click Next and review your phone bank effort
13. While your phone bank is in draft mode, you can continue to edit the details for your phone bank such as the script or community. If you edit a phone bank that was "scheduled for later," you'll need to reselect your scheduled start time along with any other information you want to change. For phone banks "scheduled for later," you will also need to complete all the steps and select Finish to complete the set up. 
    • Should your community contain unsupported data which impacts the number of profiles in the segment, an alert symbol will appear next to the target community name. You can then replace the community with a different segment or list.
14. Click Finish to activate or schedule your Phone Bank.
    • Once you launch your Phone Bank, the community (list or segment) and it's profiles become static. So the profiles associated with a segment won't change through the effort.

Adding Phone Bank Callers

You will need to add users to Organizer and provide them an appropriate permission set in order for them to participate in an active Phone Banking effort. For users who will be participating in a variety of outreach efforts, you can use the Member role. If you’d like a more limited permission set, you can build a custom role with these permissions:

My Universe> All Profiles: View Profiles
Outreach> Scripts: View Script 
Outreach> Forms: View Forms (only necessary if you used a form for the phone bank)
Outreach> Phone Bank: Make Calls