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I got the call from the dialer, but my phone marked it as "Spam Risk." What's up with that?
When created, phone bank actions go through a process on the backend with Twilio called provisioning. During the provisioning process, Twilio chooses phone numbers that will be used to call your contact list from a vast list of unused/unclaimed numbers and attempts to match an area code close to your campaign. Impactive asks Twilio to do this provisioning process for each new phone bank in order to reduce potential carrier filtering of your campaign’s calls and to reduce the likelihood of calls marked as spam appear on your contacts phones.
Unfortunately, there is a chance that the randomly provisioned phone number from Twilio has previously been used by another company with less responsible activity and has been marked as spam by phone carriers. Action administrators could create a new phone bank action, which would provision new numbers, but this is not always possible in the midst of programming. If a phone bank volunteer is having trouble receiving the call from the dialer, their phone carrier may be filtering the call or their phone’s software may suspect it is spam.
We recommend the following steps for volunteers encountering this issue (note that external links may change). Users should try to contact their phone carrier if they are still experiencing connection trouble:
Turn off spam filtering by the phone operating system
Go to Settings > Phone > Call Block and Identification = Off
iPhone
Android
Why am I only reaching voicemails?
If your phone bank action is connecting to more answering machines than expected or the completion rate of calls is low, please check to see if anyone on your team has modified the AMD Settings in your dialer action’s settings page. Changing the AMD Settings can remove the predictive dialer features and will negatively affect the performance of your action. Additionally, double check that a valid area code is entered into ”Preferred Area Codes” setting box.
Default settings for AMD are:
Answering Machine Detection: On
Default Pickup Chance: 0.15
Call Estimate Scaling Factor: 10.0
Can I add additional contact information to my scripts (such as polling or voting location)?
The Impactive phone banking feature has been updated to allow volunteers to view additional details for the contact they are speaking to. This can be used to show any information about the contact you wish to display, from age to early vote details to polling place location. There are no limitations to the information available to display for the contact, any data that you populate into a pre-existing Tag or Custom Field can then be displayed in the script.
List Upload Instructions:
To populate data that you want to display for contacts, the contact list must be uploaded using the Impactive list upload feature. You can read more about the upload process here.
Prior to uploading, rename the relevant columns to display the following required column headers in the CSV- first_name, last_name, phone and van_id or pdi_id. Impactive will not upload people if these columns are not explicitly named with the headers above.
Then, for each additional contact detail you wish to display in the predictive dialer you must rename the relevant data column header to match the Slug from the relevant Custom Field or Tag. Below is a picture of where to find the Slug for each Custom Field.
After updating relevant columns you can upload the CSV into Impactive using the Import List feature in Contact Lists.
Displaying Additional Contact Details in the Predictive Dialer:
When building your Impactive dialer action on the dialer set-up page prior to the script you will now see an option titled “Additional Contact Details” There you can select the tags and custom fields you populated data into through your list upload as well as any other contact detail you wish to display (such as first or last name). The new field is displayed below.
When you click the box below “Select additional contact details” you will then see a populated list drop down of all the Tags and Custom Fields for you to select which you want to display. You can select as many as you want to display for your volunteers and when a Tag or Custom Field is selected you will see it displaying as a field in the Additional Contact Details box such as First Name and Last Name in the image above as well as a blue highlight and checkmark next to those fields in the populated list (pictured below).
Volunteer View
When a volunteer has been connected to a contact on either the app or web calling they will see an option for a blue contact card that says “Additional contact details” below is a screenshot of that view from web calling.
When the additional contact details card or text is clicked by the volunteer, the screen will display all Custom Fields, Tags and contact details populated in the field on the administrator side when constructing the dialer action. Below is an example of what that would look like.
What contact rates should we expect?
It depends on how you define "contact rate"! :) Different organizations/programs define this metric differently.
If you define "contact rate" in the simplest way, as the rate of outbound dials that result in a conversation with a human - i.e. a volunteer actually speaks to someone (not counting invalid numbers, answering machines, etc.), we see average contact rates of around 13%.
If you define "contact rate" more specifically as the rate of outbound dials that result in a conversation with a canvassing result, i.e. the volunteer actually had a full conversation with the correct person and gathered data from that conversation (not counting people who refuse to talk, who are not the correct person, don't live in the right district anymore, etc.), we see average contact rates of around 7%.
Where can you find the results of a phone bank?
You find the results of a phone bank in the dashboard section of the phone bank under Phone bank > Details “View dashboard”.
If you are looking for call specific results of the phonebank, you can export the “Tags and Custom Fields” export and specifically filter by Contact List:: “##{{the contact list used in your phone bank}}” and Custom Field: “Call Outcome”.
A report with a call outcome custom field for each contact along with their contact information will appear within the CSV.
How do I call people who weren’t contacted in yesterday’s phone bank?
A new list will need to be created to retarget uncontacted voters.
To accomplish this:
Visit your action under Phone banks > Action.
Locate the name of the Target List.
Visit the Data tab and run a Tags and Custom Fields export using “Contact List”: “[[the target list in #2]]”, and also select “Custom field”: “Last called at”.
On the export CSV, filter by “Last Called At” and remove any contacts who were not contacted on the previous day.
Using these filtered contacts, import into Impactive > Contacts. Make sure they are formatted with first_name, last_name, phone, and van_id, if necessary.
Customizing reports on a phone bank
File reports on conversations with voters by enabling reports on a phone bank. These can be enabled on the settings of the phone bank activity. Select custom fields and tags you would like your volunteers to fill.
They will display as a reportable option for your volunteer at the end of their phone call.
The volunteer is not receiving the incoming call to connect to the phone bank.
Cell phone carriers may be filtering the call from Impactive. Confirm with the volunteer’s cell provider that spam filtering is disabled.
"The campaign has not started the phone bank" error
Confirm the start and end times for the campaign.