For decades, campaigns have shuffled eager volunteers towards rows of phones to make calls to potential voters — to raise awareness, make their case, and turn people out to vote. Now, though, amid a mountain of robocalls, telephone pickup rates are in the gutter and campaigns are scrambling to replace this channel. According to a report by Ozy, in 2018 alone, 26.3 billion robocalls were placed to cellphones and landlines — approximately seven calls per month, per person. Source: The Atlantic, via YouMail’s Robocall index Peer-to-peer texting offers political campaigns a personalized, yet less invasive, way to connect with voters at a much lower cost than other traditional outreach methods such as canvassing, a higher read and response rate than emails, and significantly higher penetration rate than phone calls. In the 2018 cycle alone, Democratic campaigns and politically-adjacent organizations sent 350 million text messages through Hustle and GetThru (formerly Relay), the two largest peer-to-peer texting platforms in the Democratic market, 6x more than during 2016 and 2017. Source: Gartner for Marketers

However, because texting is such a new outreach tool for political campaigns, there’s very little data on if and what makes for an effective text messaging strategy - specifically one that will turn out voters. In 2018, Tech for Campaigns (TFC) was active in 20 states and ran 29 texting programs for Democratic campaigns and committees in 9 of those states, sending more than one million texts. TFC data scientists were able to compare voting records to our work and begin to assemble best practices from 2018.

The findings below are select learnings from our get-out-the-vote (GOTV) texting analyses. While we think of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the gold standard for analysis, RCTs are notoriously difficult to run in active, competitive political environments, so these analyses are correlational, not causal - though we controlled for as many variables as possible.

We have already started to incorporate these findings into our campaign work and hope it helps to bring a more data-driven mindset to this growing channel.