Web-based phone banking

[yesthattom]

This is a pretty cool web application developed by the Dean campaign. You create an account for yourself, and are given a couple phone numbers. You call the people and poll them on if they support Dean, etc. When you are done, you fill out the web form to say how the call went, etc. http://commons.deanforamerica.com

Comments

[awfief.livejournal.com]

dude! that *does* rock!

web based phone bank

[cos]

The web based phone bank tool at washington.deanforamerica.com, WAlist, was much cooler. Although that one's probably offline by now, or at least won't give you any more call lists. The idea comes from MoveOn, who did the first web based phone bank for an Oregon Senate campaign in 2002 (or was it 2000?).

Both the Washington phone bank and the Michigan one on commons.deanforamerica.com share a couple of very frustrating flaws, in my opinion:

1. Neither of them lets you "give back" part of your list, or get more names without getting rid of all the ones you have. What if you get a list of 30, have time to call 20, and need to leave? You should be able to say oops, I ran out of time, take these names back. Or what if you call all 30 of them, and two people seem really interested but have no time to talk to you and ask you to call them later? If you want to still keep them on your list to mark down the results later, you can't ask for more names to call.

2. Neither of these web based phone bank tools really thought through all the possible results you might have. For example, the Michigan phone bank has no space to note that a number was bad, disconnected, or the person no longer lives there. You're supposed to just leave it at "did not call yet", but that'll be a waste of someone else's time if they get the same number. The Washington list was a bit better, but it had this really frustrating flaw: If you actually got to talk to someone, the only way to drop them off your list without giving misinformation, was to mark down which candidate they support, or "undecided". There are always people who will tell you they don't support Dean, or they've already chosen a candidate, but won't tell you who it is. When we did call lists in Iowa and New Hampshire, that was always one of the possibilities they talked about how to mark down, but WAlist seemed to not anticipate it.

I think the basic problem is that neither of these applications was tested with actual phone-banking volunteers ... and now that they have been "tested", there's no obvious way to get feedback to the people who developed them.

But yes, it's really cool, and much better than not having had them at all.