Communicating with Volunteers

Creating a follow-up

Follow-ups can be created on a volunteer’s profile, by adding a note and checking the “follow-up required” box.

Of course, you don’t need to scroll through all the volunteers in the system to find open follow-ups. The “Follow-ups” navigation item lets you view all pending follow-ups in one place.

Follow-up calls

The “follow-ups” section lets you quickly view volunteers that require a follow-up call from your campaign.

Volunteers appear on this page if:

A follow-up note has been added and is due today or overdue (follow-ups with due dates in the future can be seen by following the “show all follow-ups” link)
They have an unconfirmed shift today or tomorrow
They are a new signup

On the follow-ups page, you can see which volunteers need a follow-up, as well as the staff member they are assigned to. Unassigned follow-ups have a “claim” link that lets you assign a volunteer (and, at the top, there is a link to claim all unassigned follow-ups). This allows multiple campaign staff to work through follow-ups without duplicating each others’ work.

Once you have finished choosing which volunteers to call, click the “start calling” button at the top and you’ll be taken to a call screen. At the top, it lists the reason for a call, and the volunteer’s profile is displayed below.

You can confirm/cancel shifts, add contact notes, and close follow-up reminders on the volunteer profile. Once the reason for the follow-up is addressed (ie, unconfirmed shift is confirmed, or follow-up note is closed) that volunteer will automatically be removed from the follow-ups list.

After the call, you can click “next volunteer” to move directly to the next person on your call list.

Note: once you add a volunteer to your follow-up list, they are assigned to you and can’t be added to anyone else’s call list. If you need to unassign a volunteer, you can do so on the volunteer profile page.

Call Lists

This system provides two automated call lists, which allow your campaign to quickly call through volunteers. Unlike the follow-ups section, calls in the Call Lists are not assigned to an individual staff member.

There are two call lists currently in the system:

Volunteer prospects: anyone with a “Prospect” status in the system
Unscheduled volunteers: volunteers who are marked as active, but with no upcoming volunteer shifts scheduled

Both call lists can be further filtered by tag.

The call lists track the last contact attempt, and sort based on attempts (so you will always call people with the least contact attempts first). Once an attempt is made, the volunteer is moved to the end of the queue before they are retried.

Once you click the “start calling” button, you’ll be taken to a call screen. At the top, you can enter information about your call. If the person didn’t answer, leave it all empty; the default call outcome is “no answer”.

If the person did answer, you can also update their volunteer status (active volunteer, or declined) as well as their support mark. You can also request a lawn sign, or leave a note and optional follow-up flag. For eager prospects, the volunteer profile below can also be used to schedule a volunteer shift immediately.

Once the call is complete, you can click the “save and continue” button to advance to the next prospect. The “save and exit” button will save your current call, but won’t give you a new prospect to call next.

If you change the volunteer’s status to “New Signup” or “Active”, they will automatically be removed from the Prospects Call List. Likewise, for Unscheduled Volunteers, scheduling a new shift will automatically remove them from the list.

Note: multiple people can call prospects at the same time; the system will manage the list so you aren’t calling the same person. Once a prospect is called (even if they didn’t answer), they are removed from the list for the next three hours, so we don’t repeatedly call the same person.

SMS Inbox

Every volunteer (that has a phone number) also has an SMS Inbox on the volunteer profile page. This is a hidden “tray” to the right of the screen; clicking on the “SMS” tab will expand the tray and show your campaign’s SMS conversation history with the volunteer.

You can send and receive centralized text messages from here, allowing all your campaign staff to stay up to date. Automatic SMS reminders sent by the system will also show up here, to provide additional context.

SMS messages come from a centrally managed number, and cannot be changed by your campaign (this is required in order to allow for two-way text messages). Central numbers with different area codes are possible upon request.

The “Inbox” page in the top navigation bar also takes you to a page with all active text message campaigns in your campaign.

Automatic notices

This system contains a number of automatic reminder and scheduling notices, meant to streamline your campaign. This section gives you an overview of what they are, and how they work.

The content of these automatic notices can be customized, under Campaign Settings.

You can also completely disable automatic reminders, automatic scheduling, or both, under Campaign Settings. Or, if specific volunteers don’t want to receive these notices, you can disable them for individual volunteers on the volunteer's profile.

Shift reminders

Volunteers receive an automatic reminder 24 hours before each confirmed shift. The reminder includes information about the shift, as well as a link to confirm their attendance. If the volunteer clicks the link, they are marked as confirmed and will be taken off the follow-up call list.

Rescheduling notices

If a volunteer completes their shift and has no future shifts scheduled, the system also sends them an automatic reminder to sign up for their next shift.

The volunteer will receive an email and/or text message with a link to a custom signup page, where upcoming shifts are listed and the volunteer can sign up.

Notes:

The upcoming shifts are filtered, so only relevant shifts are listed. The volunteer’s past shifts are used to determine which shift types get displayed -- ie, a canvass volunteer will only see upcoming canvasses.
If you don’t want a specific volunteer shift to be displayed in this list, mark the shift as private.
If there are no relevant, public upcoming shifts for a volunteer, the notice won’t be sent.

Email or Text message?

The volunteer’s preferred contact method determines whether they receive an email, a text message, or both.

If no preferred contact method is set, the system will send both an email and text message.
If the preferred contact method is “email” or “phone call”, the system will send an email only (we don’t do voice robocalls, those are creepy! 😅)
If the preferred contact method is “text message”, the system will send a text message only.

Disabling automatic notices

Automatic notices can be disabled under Campaign Settings if you would prefer not to use them.