Thrashertm
02-05-2008, 08:58 PM
Please reply to keep this on the main page.
Would you be willing to contribute some $$$ towards a new and improved system for calling voters in your precinct for voter identification?
Yesterday I spent about 2 hours manually calling voters in a few precincts in Chicago. Out of the hundreds of numbers I called, about 50% were not home, 40% were bad #s, 8% hung up on me after I read the script, and 2% participated in the survey. None were Ron Paul supporters. Granted this is in liberal Chicago, but still....frustrating. The worst part was that I spent 90% of my time not talking to voters, just waiting and waiting for them to pick up or getting a bad number.
I am a consultant in the Customer Relationship Management industry (call centers), and I can tell you that the industry does this much more efficiently using a professional phone banking system. There's no reason why the official campaign, or a well-connected grassroots effort cannot organize this.
Here's what I propose:
1. The campaign targets certain geographic areas for phone calling first, to allow volunteers to make a contribution to areas where Ron Paul is advertising and has some traction with the voter base.
2. Volunteers register online to assist with phone banking.
3. When they are ready to start calling they call into an official phone # and enter a PIN that corresponds to their precinct.
3. The ACD (automatic call distributor) calls voters and when someone picks up the phone it is routed to the volunteer.
4. Ideally, the caller's information would screen pop on the volunteer's computer during the call, allowing the volunteer to update it dynamically. This would require an additional layer of integration and complexity, which we could also achieve using a few manual tricks.
This would be far more efficient, and allow us to cover a lot more phone numbers. Those that are not home could automatically be cycled back into the queue to be called back a few hours later.
I know that this solution can be built using free open source software (Asterisk PBX), and inexpensive hardware. There are two major costs - development and long distance phone charges. We might be able to find volunteers to do the development work, but there's no real way around the long distance.
I intend to approach the official campaign about this as well, but I wanted to gauge if the grassroots will support this.
Would you be willing to contribute some $$$ towards a new and improved system for calling voters in your precinct for voter identification?
Yesterday I spent about 2 hours manually calling voters in a few precincts in Chicago. Out of the hundreds of numbers I called, about 50% were not home, 40% were bad #s, 8% hung up on me after I read the script, and 2% participated in the survey. None were Ron Paul supporters. Granted this is in liberal Chicago, but still....frustrating. The worst part was that I spent 90% of my time not talking to voters, just waiting and waiting for them to pick up or getting a bad number.
I am a consultant in the Customer Relationship Management industry (call centers), and I can tell you that the industry does this much more efficiently using a professional phone banking system. There's no reason why the official campaign, or a well-connected grassroots effort cannot organize this.
Here's what I propose:
1. The campaign targets certain geographic areas for phone calling first, to allow volunteers to make a contribution to areas where Ron Paul is advertising and has some traction with the voter base.
2. Volunteers register online to assist with phone banking.
3. When they are ready to start calling they call into an official phone # and enter a PIN that corresponds to their precinct.
3. The ACD (automatic call distributor) calls voters and when someone picks up the phone it is routed to the volunteer.
4. Ideally, the caller's information would screen pop on the volunteer's computer during the call, allowing the volunteer to update it dynamically. This would require an additional layer of integration and complexity, which we could also achieve using a few manual tricks.
This would be far more efficient, and allow us to cover a lot more phone numbers. Those that are not home could automatically be cycled back into the queue to be called back a few hours later.
I know that this solution can be built using free open source software (Asterisk PBX), and inexpensive hardware. There are two major costs - development and long distance phone charges. We might be able to find volunteers to do the development work, but there's no real way around the long distance.
I intend to approach the official campaign about this as well, but I wanted to gauge if the grassroots will support this.