Phone banking for political campaigns

Phone banks are one of the few voter contact methods a campaign can scale with volunteers, and the research on them is encouraging when the calls are real conversations. The field experiments political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber collect in Get Out the Vote find that conversational calls from volunteer phone banks can raise turnout while prerecorded robocalls show little effect, and David Nickerson's experiments with volunteer calls reached a similar conclusion. This Impact Dialing guide covers the three ways to run the calls, the federal rules for each, and how to get a list and a shift ready.

Three ways to run the calls

Volunteer calls dialed by hand, or through click-to-call software where a person starts each call, are the simplest to run within the rules and the slowest per volunteer hour. Live calls through a power or predictive dialer keep volunteers talking for more of each shift and suit larger programs with paid callers or trained volunteers. Prerecorded calls, including AI-generated voices, reach the most households for the least labor, but the research above finds them the least effective at moving turnout, and they carry the most rules.

A workable mix is hand dialing for cell phones, a dialer for landline-heavy universes, and prerecorded messages only for short reminders to people who've agreed to receive them. Predictive, power, and preview dialing explains how the dialer modes differ.

The federal rules for political calls

Political calls aren't telemarketing, so the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule doesn't apply, and they aren't telephone solicitations, so neither the National Do Not Call Registry nor the FCC's 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. rule does. The TCPA's robocall rules do apply, and they turn on two questions. Is the call going to a cell phone, and does it use an autodialer or a prerecorded or artificial voice?

Calls and texts to cell phones

Political calls and texts to a cell phone made with an autodialer or a prerecorded or artificial voice need the called person's prior express consent (47 CFR 64.1200(a)(1)(iii)). Live calls dialed by a person don't, and according to the FCC's consumer guide on political robocalls, neither do texts sent manually. Since Facebook v. Duguid (2021), the federal autodialer definition covers only equipment that uses a random or sequential number generator, so many list-based dialers fall outside it, but a prerecorded or AI voice needs consent no matter how the number was dialed. State laws can be stricter, so have counsel look at any plan to run cell numbers through a dialer or texting platform.

Prerecorded calls to landlines

A campaign may place prerecorded calls to residential landlines without consent, up to three calls to the same line in any 30-day period, as long as it honors requests to opt out (64.1200(a)(3)(ii)). Each message has to meet the FCC's identification rules.

• State clearly at the start who is responsible for the call (64.1200(b)(1)).
• Give a phone number during or after the message, other than the dialer's own, where a person can make a do-not-call request during regular business hours (64.1200(b)(2)).
• Offer an automated key-press or voice opt-out within two seconds of the identification, which adds the number to the campaign's do-not-call list and ends the call. A message left on voicemail also needs a toll-free number that reaches the same opt-out (64.1200(b)(3)).

Opt-outs collected this way have to be honored within 10 business days and kept for five years, under the same company-specific list rules sales callers follow (64.1200(d)). AI-generated voices count as artificial voices for all of this, which the FCC confirmed in a February 2024 declaratory ruling (FCC 24-17).

Election-law disclaimers

Federal election rules add a separate layer. More than 500 substantially similar calls within 30 days is a "telephone bank" (11 CFR 100.28), and a telephone bank is a public communication that can require a paid-for-by disclaimer, for example when a political committee pays for it (11 CFR 110.11). State election laws may add their own disclaimer rules for calls about state and local races.

Getting the list ready

Most campaign call lists start from the state voter file, with phone numbers appended by a data vendor. Before any calling, flag each number as wireless or landline, since that decides which calling method you can use, and drop anyone who asked a previous program not to call. Then split the universe into persuasion and turnout targets so each gets the right script, and sort by time zone if the district crosses one. The article on automated telephony for grassroots campaigns goes further into targeting and voter scores.

Results should flow back into the voter file after every shift. Wrong numbers, refusals, commitments, and do-not-call requests all change who gets called next, and a list that isn't updated sends volunteers back to the same dead ends.

Planning shifts

Keep shifts short enough that volunteers will sign up for another, and start each one with a few minutes of training. Put the script, the survey codes, and the do-not-call procedure in front of every caller, and have a shift lead listen to early calls to catch problems before they repeat. The guide to writing outbound call scripts has a sample turnout script and the branches callers need for common answers.

Track contacts per volunteer hour and conversation outcomes by script and by list segment, using the definitions in the call center metrics guide. If a dialer is in use, watch abandonment too, even though political calls aren't held to the federal 3 percent cap, because every dropped call is a voter who answered and heard nothing. Abandonment rate and the 3 percent rule shows how to measure it.