By default, Impactive's dialer technology is "predictive." That means that the dialer automatically makes a larger number of calls than volunteers active on the phone bank, using a sophisticated algorithm to predict the right number of calls to make in order to match active volunteers with contacts who answer the phone. This makes for an efficient phone banking experience, where volunteers move through the call list quickly.

However, the key requirement of predictive phone banks is that they must include a minimum of three concurrently-active volunteers for the sophisticated predictive algorithm to work. This typically means that phone banks must be pre-scheduled events with many volunteers attending - which is fine and common for many organizing use cases, but poses issues for other types of programs.

What's the "downside" of leaving on predictive dialing, even if you have less than three concurrently-active volunteers? A predictive phone bank under that size will increase the rate of dropped calls (calls that are placed to a contact, and they pick up the phone, but there is no user there on the other end to talk with them). Given the poor contact experience, minimizing dropped calls is desirable.

That's why we've introduced manual phone banking, an option that turns off predictive technology. Effectively, this means that a certain phone bank can have fewer than three concurrently-active volunteers, and/or it can be left open for days or weeks at a time and individual volunteers can pop in anytime to make as many calls as they want. The volunteer experience will be a bit less efficient, because each call is queued one at a time; volunteers might have to wait for a while to connect to a person (if Answering Machine Detection is left on), or might connect to quite a few voicemails before they reach a person (if Answering Machine Detection is turned off). Other than this slowdown, the volunteer experience will be identical in terms of indicating that they're ready for their next call, working through the script, filling a report, etc.