Contents
Article Description: In this article we will walk you through how to create and manage a phone banking action via the Admin Dashboard.
This article will review:
Phone banking
Creating and Managing Phone Banking Actions
Viewing and Exporting Results
Frequently Asked Questions
Overview of Phone Banking with Impactive
Phone banking on Impactive allows campaigns to make phone calls using interactive scripts to guide volunteers through their conversations with contacts. The phone banking action is accessible for volunteers from both the mobile and web app. Impactive uses a predictive dialer which automatically dials a targeted list of contacts and optimizes your time by only connecting volunteers to available people, and skipping calls that reach voicemail.
Creating and Managing Phone Banking Actions
In this section we will walk you through how to create and manage a phone banking action via the Admin Dashboard.
Basic Information
First, navigate to your admin dashboard, click on ‘ACTIONS’ and select Phone Bank from the side navigation. Then choose ‘+ Create Action’.
Select a contact list for your team to dial under ‘Select a List to Target’.
Note: The list selected here can be changed until the phone bank starts, but once the phone bank has begun no changes can be made to the selected contact list.
Add a title to your action and write a description that will tell your users what the action is about. Enter the area codes you would prefer to use for your phone banking action. Impactive will use the preferred area code if numbers are available. Then select the start button you’d like to use.
Pro-Tip: Select a folder to save your action into to help keep all of your actions organized.
Campaign Dates
Under the heading CAMPAIGN DATES, add phone bank start times.
Admins cannot start the phone bank until the date/time window entered starts.
Phone banking actions do not begin automatically. To start the phone bank, an admin must launch the action by hitting the “Start Phone Bank” button on the phone bank's View Results page.
Volunteers can only make calls when the admin clicks the start button on the dashboard. Once the admin hits stop, dialing will stop.
The end date/time set here will not automatically stop the phone bank. Once the phone bank has been started, it needs to be manually stopped by an admin. To prevent volunteers from continuing to make calls, the admin must hit the “Stop Phone Bank” button from the action dashboard page.
This is to handle the case where a phone bank runs over and the admin wants to keep going. Even after the end date/time has passed, a volunteer can join the phone bank. The only thing that will prevent that volunteer from making calls is if the phone bank is stopped by hitting the stop button in the admin.
You will want to stop phone banks for security reasons to prevent volunteers from calling during inappropriate or unscheduled hours.
You can't "restart" a phone banking action that you've previously stopped.
Predictive Calling and Answering Machine Detection
Next, choose your settings for predictive calling and answering machine detection.
Read more about the difference between predictive and manual phone banking here - but in short, if you're running a "normal" phone bank scheduled at a certain time for multiple volunteers, you'll want to leave predictive dialing on.
Answering machine detection, a setting that can only be toggled after the action is saved, designates whether you want volunteers to be connected to calls that go straight to voicemail or not.
Reporting
There are two ways to gather data from your callers' phone banking conversations:
Custom fields gathered via the script itself. Script questions can be linked to custom fields, which will then store contacts' response data as those custom field values (which can then be used for contact filtering/segmentation in Impactive, and/or synced to VAN/EveryAction). See the next section, Script Creation, for more on creating script questions and responses.
Additional tags and custom fields gathered during or after the call. Use the Report Settings section on the phone banking edit page to input additional tags and custom fields to gather during this action. These will appear to volunteers as the call report, which is both available during the call (in a separate tab on mobile, or open on the right-hand side on web) and appears after the call. This report is a good place to gather any data that can't be gathered via script questions - for example, script questions cannot gather tags or text-based custom fields.
Next, select ‘Next: Script Creation’
Script Creation
The Step 2: Scripts tab is broken down into Script Blocks. Each script block includes a prompt or question and corresponding responses.
Within each script block or question, you'll first add what the caller should say, and then the possible responses that the contact can answer with. To add additional responses select ‘Add Response’. If you don’t need a response, click the ‘X Delete’ button to the right of the response to remove it.
You can create branched scripts by sending the caller to a new script block depending on the contact's response to a question. To the right of each response within a script block, you can use the drop-down menu to map that response to its appropriate next script block.
There is no limit on the number of script blocks you can add.
Within the body of each script you can insert dynamic fields including Contact Info, User Info, Campaign Info.
Pro-Tip: Start by writing out all of your script blocks before adding in responses and creating branching. If there is only one script block written out, the only option for response triggers will be “No Next Script”.
When you have finished writing and mapping out your script select ‘Save and Exit’.
Publishing the Phone Bank
At this point, you can choose to make the action Public or send it to a User List.
Public: when an action is visible to all users. Once an action is made public, it cannot be made private. To publicly publish the phone bank select ‘Make Public’.
Private: when an action is only visible to a list or select users.
To send the phone bank to a user list: select “Send to User List”, select the list you want to send it to, and click “Send”.
After sending, the action will be listed as “published” and “private”.
The phone bank will become visible to all or select volunteers on the web and mobile app the moment that you select “Publish”. Volunteers will be able to view and join the action, as well as review the scripts prior to the start date selected. However, volunteers will not be able to make calls until the admin STARTS the phone banking action (via the admin's "View Results" page for the action). If the admin has not started the phone bank, the volunteers will receive this message if they attempt to start before the start date/time:
Starting the Phone Bank
When you are ready to start the phone bank, navigate back to the ACTIONS > Phonebank tab. Find the action and click ‘View Dashboard’.
From your phone bank's dashboard, click ‘Start Phone Bank’.
At this point your users will be able to view and start making calls from the web and/or mobile app.
Once you have selected the ‘Start Phone Bank’ button, you will be able to view live stats including:
Live Session Activity
Calls remaining on current list: This is the number of contacts on the list for this phone bank that we have yet to attempt to dial. This is the contacts remaining. Once we place a call (or attempt) to a contact, this number reduces.
Calls made this session: This is the number of calls we’ve placed (or attempted), regardless of outcome. This includes calls that went to voicemail, calls that were answered, calls that failed (due to a disconnected number or something else), and calls that were forwarded to a volunteer. This is the aggregate of all calls we’ve placed.
Calls assigned to volunteer: This is the number of calls that were forwarded to a volunteer, regardless of outcome. This will include when a voter picked up as well as when Twilio’s AMD incorrectly identified an answering machine as a human.
Calls completed: This metric is only updated when volunteers select the specific ‘Completed’ outcome at the end of their call. No other calls are included in this count.
Contacts made - How many contacts have been spoken too (this is the raw number not a percentage)
Average Wait Time Between Connections - Average time it takes for a volunteer to be connected to a contact
Average Call Wait Time: This is the average amount of time it takes after a volunteer hits “Queue Next Call” to actually be connected to a voter.
Dropped calls: This is the number of voters who answered their call, waited to be connected to a volunteer, and hung up.
Live Volunteer Performance
Volunteers On: This is the number of volunteers who are currently connected to a phone bank, regardless of whether they are sitting idle in the waiting room, actively waiting for a voter, or actively speaking with a voter.
Volunteers Active: This is the number of volunteers who are either actively waiting for a voter, or actively speaking with a voter.
Volunteers Idle: This is the number of volunteers that are currently connected, but just sitting in the waiting room. Once they hit “queue next call” they will become active again.
Volunteers in-call: This is the number of volunteers actively speaking with a voter.
User Engagement
Last active: a readable timestamp of the last time a volunteer spoke or waited to speak with a contact
Disposition: a volunteer’s status during a Phone Banking session:
Idle: the volunteer is connected but not waiting for voter or speaking with a voter.
Waiting for voter: The volunteer has hit “queue next call” and is actively waiting for a voter
Busy: The volunteer is connected to and speaking with a voter.
Disconnected: The volunteer has disconnected from the phone bank.
Not Dialed In: The volunteer haven’t dialed into the phone bank yet/hasn’t answered the call to get into the phone bank
Total Call Time: total time a volunteer has been connected to a voter.
Total Active Time: total cumulative time a volunteer spent speaking or waiting to speak with a contact
Total Calls Made (soon to be renamed to “Assigned to volunteer”: total number of times a volunteer has been connected to a voter (regardless of outcome).
IMPORTANT NOTE: The system won’t call anyone without users on the app who have marked themselves as available.
Ending the Phone Bank
In order to stop the phone bank, click on the “Stop Phone Bank” button. Reminder: Once a phone bank has been stopped it can’t be restarted.
Once you select “Stop Phone Bank” every user currently on the phone bank will be disconnected and a message telling users that the Phone Bank has ended will display on the volunteer app.
Viewing and Exporting Results
To view the results of your action, go to the ACTIONS > Phone Bank tab and click on “View Results”. Alternatively, you can click on the name of the action and select the “View Results” button.
Overview Section
At the top of the results page is the Overview Section. This section is a summary of user actions taken, not conversation metrics. Here's what each box means:
Sent to: The number of volunteers the action was sent to.
Seen: The number of users that have seen the action
Started: The number of users that started the action
Completed: Users that completed the action
Performs: Number of times that a user completed an action
Reports: How many reports were filed.
User Engagement Section
Use the User Engagement section to track your volunteers’ work.
Filters
Use filtering to narrow your campaign's users down to a custom list. You can use this feature to track users' work based on whatever filters you've chosen.
Click on “Filters" dropdown menu. Note: "Activities Received" filter will automatically have the P2P action filtered
Click on any of the toggle filters to turn those fields "on".
Click on any of the dropdown or text filters.
Select the "Apply Filters" button to see the users who match the selected filters in the table below. The number of users matching the filters is displayed at top of the filter menu.
You can contact your filtered user list in the following ways:
Send Push Notification: You can send a push notification to anyone on the filtered list.
Send Email: You can send an email to anyone on the filtered list. NOTE: The reply-to address is [email protected]. This means that you will not be able to see any responses that users are attempting to email you in response.
Send Message: You can send a Direct Message to your users' Impactive inbox.
Send Action: You can send a new action to your users.
Exporting
After your action has been completed, you can export all of the data into a spreadsheet. At the bottom of the View Results page is a list of export formats that you can choose from.